The unlikely upside to age-gating

In an attempt to address the harms caused by algorithmic social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, governments around the world are scrambling to put barriers up to stop youngsters from being led astray, instead of, you know, regulating the companies peddling these harms. What seems laudable on the surface, the idea behind age gating certain parts of the internet is flawed for a number of reasons, mainly the one where you hand over your precious data to a barely-regulated third party and hope they don’t leave it on the bus. However, today I’m not going to talk about that. I told you I was going to stay positive and gosh darn-it I am sticking to that. Anyway, I’ve found an upside. Where there are no walls These big platforms, with all their billions are going to have to stop people from coming in if they have no ID. Many of them already do, particularly the ones in the Meta universe. This is actually great news. I would have preferred it if they were regulated out of existence,…