My theory is that age verification is just another way to push human verification. These large tech companies need a way to verify a user is a real person and not an AI bot. Both for displaying ads to real users and cutting down on spam.
Nobody would support a "give away my anonymity online so I can be shown an ad for Coca Cola" bill. But it's easier to sell a law to boomers and lawmakers if you use the disguise of "It's for the children ." As if any of these companies care about the well being of children. See Meta confirming their platforms affect the mental health of children and doing nothing about it. Also platforms like TikTok and YouTube optimizing their algorithms for stealing user's attention spans.
It might be a nice stock boost in the short term, but the goal for a majority of these companies is to sell ads. If advertisers see a drop in conversions, I doubt the platforms could keep the fake user ruse going for long.
I just heard about that. Won't work in the long term. Either the spammers will create a tool to bypass it, or they will continue to run services in third world countries where people complete captchas for pennies.
Indeed a lot of social media platforms are used by foreign powers to create discord. Human psychology is much more attentive to negative messages and this is too easy to weaponize. A solution against that would probably be world changing. It would have to preserve anonymity still of course.
You are right that foreign powers abuse these platforms, but I don't personally believe that the platforms care. They just want to sell ads. Controversy will likely drive more traffic and more ad conversions.
Nobody would support a "give away my anonymity online so I can be shown an ad for Coca Cola" bill. But it's easier to sell a law to boomers and lawmakers if you use the disguise of "It's for the children ." As if any of these companies care about the well being of children. See Meta confirming their platforms affect the mental health of children and doing nothing about it. Also platforms like TikTok and YouTube optimizing their algorithms for stealing user's attention spans.