To be clear, I'm talking about sites for adults that are doing their best right now, but have no idea who is 18 and who is 8. If they have communication between users, it's not set up to be filtered and moderated in a way that protects an 8 year old. If they could cut out a big majority of 8 year olds with the flip of a switch, that would be a good thing.

That's a lot of risk that exists right now and could be reduced.

> This smells strongly of I just made it harder for those that do the right thing and did nothing to solve any problem.

There is no meaningful difficulty in storing two bytes of extra data on the OS account and turning it into a two bit flag that programs can access and pass on to websites. And for most websites that let users communicate it makes their job a lot easier, even if the flag isn't always right.