Some people who are utterly tech ignorant and unwilling to actively parent their children might feel better about handing their kid a device so they don’t have to deal with them.
However, this is primarily the end game of both targeted advertising and those who want wholesale surveillance of the population (who are often the same people). Tying the whole of your online presence to your unique offline identity.
Zugzwang strategy. You have to make move, there’s not even an option not to play.
It’s not just about capturing the mobile phone market and punishing alternate ROM developers, it’s also pushing people into the market that might otherwise choose to have a dumb phone, no phone, do things in person, via mail, etc. No android/iPhone? Good luck with online shopping, communicating with medical providers, checking your kid’s grades online, paying utility bills, taxes, etc. etc.
As the boomers die off, and fewer people do things the pre-internet way, there’s no incentive for governments, businesses, and so forth to maintain those processes and systems. Why would we have a receptionist take appointments by phone if she’s just typing them into the same web interface? Why print report cards when we can post them online? Why maintain a storefront and not just warehouses like Amazon?
Opt-in to surveillance or opt out of necessary parts of life, all under the guise of “convenience”.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If you’re lonely and hurting, don’t fall in love with anything that doesn’t have a pulse. It’s only going to fuck you up worse in the end.
We already have that, and it has solved absolutely nothing while potentially making online surveillance and privacy issues worse.
The answer isn’t age-gating or ID verification, it’s changing how the sites themselves operate. Get rid of the idea of “driving engagement”, no more stealth ads, and no corpo, media, political party, or lobbyist accounts. Hold influencers and podcasters to the same kind of standards we used to hold journalists to, where they’re required to tell you when the’re shilling for some kind of shady supplement company or political huckster.
You know, the kind of shit any sane species would do with this sort of tech, but when have we ever been sane?
What if, instead of trying and failing to kick kids off social media, we focused our attention on the reasons why being online is so often detrimental in the first place?
Pre-fucking-cisely.
Ah, sweet! Man made horrors beyond comprehension.