I'm not sure why I need to debate against obvious illogical positions, but here we go:

> Well that's not much of a solution is it now? More like an attempt that we all can see will fail.

Some entities not wanting to implement a perfectly fine technical solution is not the same as "that's not a solution". If schools not bothering is your issue, just like the state can mandate a "age verification", it can also mandate schools add such parental control locks to the devices they give to kids.

>Harm reduction is not the same as a solution.

It absolutely is, and that's what any solution will be anyway.

There's no perfect solution short of throwing kids in some kind of restricted area without access to any devices. And even in prison prisoners get ahold of startphones.

Age verification can be beaten even more easily, getting access from some older kid for example, borrowing or buying verified accounts, getting an older/hacked OS that doesn't check, and countless other holes.

The difference is that the parent controls case directly affects the device the kids have, let's the parents set the policy based on their beliefs and the child's mental maturity (not authoritarian one-size-fits-all approach), and doesn't add OS mandated id and age tracking to everybody regardless if they're kids or not.

> There's no perfect solution

A solution—ie, solving a problem—does in fact imply perfection.

Only in mathematics or in some rigid aspie conception of the term "solution". But we're not debating about solutions in cartoon land.

If real-world solution implied "perfect" there would be no debate regarding better and worse solutions concerning their results - which is what social and political and team and inter-personal and even ...spousal debates are all about.

And that's about merely inherent issues, before we even come to how a proposed solution interplays with other things (e.g. mandatory age verification vs privacy, or policing vs personal freedom, or censorship vs innovation and authoritarianism).

In real life practical solutions always have tradeoffs and weak spots, but can nonetheless make the problem much smaller as to effectively be irrelevant or at an acceptable level.

But it is an argument against age restrictions since you could just as easily pass a law that instead required schools to enable various filters. You could even require mainstream devices from major manufacturers to support certain filtering standards. And you could require websites to send self categorization headers.

There is no valid argument for why ID checks are necessary if the goal is simply to get filtering implemented in places such as schools.

If instead the goal is to entirely prohibit all children from using social networks regardless of parental consent then it makes sense. It also makes sense if the goal is actually to violate privacy or something similarly sinister.

I don't really give a damn about the freedom to say stuff on the internet, so you're trying to convince the wrong person.

You just want censorship and state control. So perhaps you have the wrong ideas. Your "solutions" are worse than the problems.

That's unfortunate, but what I said had nothing to do with that. I merely refuted the basis of your prior objection.