The solution is education. The most well adjusted kids I've seen are told flat out about the risks they'll face and, in general, helped to understand there are break points where things get too serious for them to try to deal with on their own.

I think that if you block all porn, social media, etc. all that does is create an opportunity for kids to be shifted to platforms controlled by bad actors. Adults fall victim to pig butchering schemes where they're given 100% fake investment apps that look completely real and they don't realize they're getting scammed until they try to get their money out of the system. There was a story in Canada about a guy and his daughter that thought they had $1 million in savings and it was a pig butchering scam with a fake app.

Are kids today equipped to deal with that? What happens when someone tells a kid to get app XYZ because it's un-moderated, but that app is controlled by a bad actor? Imagine a Snapchat like platform promising ephemeral messaging with simple username / password on-boarding so parents don't see account creation emails, but the app is run by organized crime.

I don't even know how you handle it if they manage to normalize the idea of children sending ID to random platforms. In addition to getting platform shifted and exploited, kids will be vulnerable to sending their real ID to bad actors.

The whole thing seems insane to me. Spend some money on education. That's the only long-term option.

> Many of the worst present on the internet is not age gated at all, you have millions of porn websites without even a "are you over 18" popup. There are plethora of toxic forums...

This is what I find most insane about the UK's age verification law. It's literally so easy to find adult content without proving your age... You can literally just type in "naked women" into a search engine and get porn...

To call it ineffective would be an understatement. Finding adult content on the web almost just as easy as it's always been. The only thing it's made harder is accessing adult content from the normie-web – you can't access porn on places like Reddit anymore, but you can access porn on 4chan and other dodgy adult sites.

If the argument is "think about the kids" there are more effective ways to do it... Requiring device-level filtering for example would likely be more effective because it could just blacklist domains with hosting adult content unless unrestricted. It would also put more power in the parents hands about what is and what isn't restrict.