I don’t want age verification for social media — I’d rather parents of young kids (who likely grew up online in 2025) be responsible for it — but if they do force this, it should be part of the operating system. Sort of like Apple Pay and Google Pay where sites can essentially put some boilerplate code that’s easy to implement and all they get back is a yes/no answer. Users only have to go through the process once. It protects privacy way more than every “social media” site that comes along.

It’s not ideal but it’d be way more workable than having to provide ID to every site that has social media functions. I mean, you could classify any random forum or site with a comment section as “social media” if the definition is too broad. Things like Fediverse instances wouldn’t have to each write their own implementation. (Eventually, there would be trusted, mature libraries, obviously, but that could take awhile.)