It seems their strategy is to externalize their responsibility to verify age themselves, and thus reduce their exposure to liabilities when child protection acts like COPPA are violated.
It abso-fucking-lutely should not be at the OS level though, for so many reasons. Even the implementation alone would be a nightmare. Do I need to input my ID to use a fridge or toaster oven? Ridiculous.
Why?
We don't externalize age verification when buying alcohol or visiting the strip club. It's on the responsibility of those establishments to verify age.
As there has been a market failure for decades at this point, it would be reasonable to give this a legislative nudge - spelling out the specific labels, requiring large websites to publish the appropriate labels, and requiring large device manufacturers to include parental controls functionality. The labels would be defined such that a website not declaring labels (small, foreign, configuration mistake, etc) would simply not be shown by software configured with parental controls, preserving the basic permissionless nature of the Internet we take for granted.
But as it stands, this mandate being pushed is horribly broken - both for subjecting all users to the age verification regime, and also for being highly inflexible for parents who have opinions about what their kids should be seeing that differ from corporate attorneys!
I think this is a reasonable balance without being invasive as there's now a defined path to do reasonable parenting without being a sysadmin and operators cannot claim ignorance because the user input a random birthday. The information leaked is also fairly minimal so even assuming ads are using that as signal, it doesn't add too many bits to tracking compared to everything else. I think the California bill needs a bit of work to clarify what exactly this applies to (e.g. exclude servers) but I also think this is a reasonable framework to satisfy this debate.
I've seen the argument that this could lead to actual age verification but I think that's a line that's clearly definable and could be fought separately.
I pay the company to verify me, I am their customer. They take on the liability of the OS makers and app makers of age verification.
If you have a valid token signed by a licensed IDS that verified your age in your OS, that's all anyone needs to know.
So we have to pay some 3rd party service to hoard information about Children? Why we want to set that up? Why would we want to take that power from the parents and give it to some company?
So, they want to profit off children, but do nothing to protect them?
> but there should be a trusted 3rd party service that does that
Gee, if only Facebook would use their incredible might to create this, rather than trying to rob our representative government from underneath us.
> It abso-fucking-lutely should not be at the OS level though
It's not my problem. It shouldn't involve me at all. I don't use social media and I think if you let your kids on there unsupervised you have a screw loose.
We were completely fine 30 years ago without any phone. They will survive. They will probably thrive because now they have to learn how to hack the system.
Instead, we just give them everything they need and all the thinking they do is scrolling.
No, there shouldn't be any such thing; everyone pushing for any shape of this should just bugger off.
At some level I don't blame him. It is also a bit strange how in that act alone he showed more accountability than most of the politicians that were questioning him, never mind most executives. I suppose Josh Hawley wants to be liable for personal lawsuits for his acts of Congress too... people cringe at his "robotic" demeanor but I can't remember the last time someone turned and faced people and apologized like this. Most people asked to do the same (even in front of the same body) never do.
For the record, I'm against age verification laws. But I think companies are pushing for them because of liabilities they face under other laws, not because they would actually like to have the data.
Nothing less, nothing more.
Most things that are not suitable for children were recognized so long ago that it was decades, centuries, or millennia before anybody living was ever born.
Like porn, when it got on the web it has always been instinctively gatekept as traditionally as possible, and complaints which do arise over the decades are addressed by the websites in ways that measure up to how you expect a company to act. Consistent with the way they truly don't want underage visitors to their websites at all.
Those complaints are now dwarfed by what parents are saying about Facebook in particular.
Facebook, and now Meta, is just not something that previous generations had to deal with, so it didn't get handled in a very adult way as it should have been from the beginning. And it only got worse as it got bigger.
If it wasn't worse for their kids than porn, parents wouldn't be screaming so much louder than ever.
I guess it turns out the combination of fundamentally devaluing privacy across-the-board including minors is the main problem, and then the idea of hooking them early, like cigarette companies would do with as much habit-forming reinforcement as possible, is what leverages the lack of overall privacy through the roof.
What's really needed is bold gatekeeping on Meta's digressions alone, they should be the ones to aggressively keep everyone underage off their site. Like they really mean it, which has not existed before. That's what's been wrong the whole time, the internet was so much better before Facebook came along with their anti-privacy mission, and it got put on steroids.
Reining in Meta alone should be big enough to be noticeable, no-one else has a shred of responsibility by comparison.
Facebook has invested $billions in these underage crowds and they want to know exactly when everyone else on the internet turns a certain age even if they are not on Facebook.
Don't give it to them no matter how much they pay.
It would be the complete opposite of an advanced thinker who wants to respond by compromising more people's privacy across the regular internet, when Meta is the primary source of the problem, and they're who stand to benefit the more privacy is compromised in any way, child or adult.
Like my 19th century grandmother would say, "what's wrong with some people?"
There have been numerous cases in history where governments have attempted to legislate the outcome they want without regard to how that might be done or if it was possible in the first place. Obviously it can never deliver the results they want.
It would be like passing a law to say every company must operate an office on the moon, and then saying that companies lobbying for an advanced NASA space program is them externalising their responsibility.
It would be a mess, but solve the problem. It’s not that we don’t have the technology, we just don’t want to because the friction would decimate user numbers and engagement; it would be much simpler to regulate (e.g. usage limits on minors); and minors are less monetizable, which would lead to lower CPM on ads.
Then there’s the legal liability if you know someone is a minor and they’re sending nudes, for example. And the privacy concerns of tying that back to de-anonymized individuals.
But obviously I wouldn’t believe that social media companies care about user privacy on behalf of people.
It's not about protecting children. It's about increasing adtech intrusion, protecting revenue from liability, pushing against anonymity, and for all the various apparatus of power, it's about increasing leverage and control over speech.
It's better for them if this "responsibility" rests with another organisation, they don't get blamed as much when the information leaks and it is replaceable.
Millennials had their hippie era in their 20s (same stuff their parents did rebranded as "hipster" instead of "hippie," where instead of building a lifestyle of free love and bong hits in the Haight-Ashbury, they built a lifestyle of free love and bong hits in Williamsburg Brooklyn).
Now in their 30s-40s they've moved to the suburbs, they're voting Reagan, and are falling for hysterical media-driven moral panics about "what kids these days are up to" just like their Boomer parents did in the 80s-90s.
What's even more funny about all these "social media is evil" legislative proposals, they're motivated by the idea of what social media used to be when millennials were in college...which doesn't even exist anymore.
The classic narrative that teens are depressed because they're seeing what parties they didn't get invited to is wildly outdated now. Social media isn't social anymore (see Tiktok), it's just algorithmic short form TV. Nobody is seeing content from their peers anymore.
In reality, most modern research on social media finds little to no affect on teen mental health. But of course, if you have ulterior motives to undermine privacy or shirk corporate responsibility under the cover of "saving the kids," this moral panic is an already burning flame waiting to be stoked.
More modern version: my experiences don’t look like the Instagram shots, my body doesn’t look like theirs, etc.
> modern research on social media finds little to no affect on teen mental health
Sounds like you know what you’re talking about, but if you have references I would read them.
How about research on the effects of social media on academic performance?
No disagreement at all that this is another power and surveillance grab.
It legally mandates the existence of a required "age" field in user account records, a user interface to populate it during account setup, a mechanism for service providers to read this field, and that providers act as if it has been populated accurately.
As someone who has been the de facto "system administrator" for my family's computer systems since kindergarten, this has to be one of the stupidest policies I've ever seen gain traction.
If you connect it with a permission system where you can choose whether to provide this information (e.g. >13 as a bool or age as an integer or the birthday as a date) that can't be too bad I guess?
I haven't read the whole thing of course.
Not to mention that computing is a global thing, and in order for this to be useful it would definitely have to be providing more specific information than just a bool. Maybe chats require 13+, but pornography requires 18+. Maybe those ages are different based on location. All advertisers would need to do is ping the various different checks to get your actual or at least very approximate age.
This kind of thing is a slippery slope, and its ripe for abuse by doxxers, advertisers and big brother himself. Burn this with fire. I'm totally in agreement with the others that suggest stuff like this should b just get banned from getting introduced and reintroduced constantly trying to sneak it in as a rider or hidden provision. The people DON'T want it.
Argumentation 101: “it’s stupid” isn’t a reason.
1. Creates a protocol with desired signals (country and a variable list of whatever others i.e. age,state) that clients (including browsers) CAN choose to use and forward.
2. Create an api OSs CAN implement to inform clients of those signals and if they can be overidden in the client. (Possibly even create an OS or service to run on OSs that implements it, parents can choose to install specific OS or service)
3. A open source server for governments to specify common classes of content and what to do when a specific SIGNAL (from the protocol in 1) is recieved (Serve content to SIGNAL group/serve content to everyone/never serve content). And what to do if content isn't in a class it recognizes(Serve content/not serve content). Association could also be extend it's duties to coordinate a list of types of content.
4. Maintain an authoritative list of servers by country so that those hosting services can reach the servers hosted in 3. So that webservers can visit those servers to find what they can serve if they wish to apply the law for that jurisdiction.
Horrible because it does codify less freedom and censorship. The advantages are that for a jurisdiction liability can fall on the right actor.
If you run a website/app you worry only if your in a jurisdiction that mandates you use the protocol and can easily geoblock crazy countries by using that signal and choose if a jurisdiction you want to deal with is worth the effort of coding for or whether you want to ignore that countries laws.
If you are a user you can choose to install the API or use an OS that implements it or an OS that spoofs it with only the liability of your jurisdiction. If you are a parent you can use an OS(or install a service) to implement it on your kids accounts.
If your an OS developer you can add functionality if desired/appropriate.
If you are a country you can specify what signals you use/require and can specify required signals (i.e. US may request the State signal so it can decide if it needs other signals to evaluate whether to serve "Social Media" content (i.e. age in the case of state=california)).
Not perfect but actually keeps punishment/enforcement to appropriate jurisdiction and means you can actually gracefully avoid liability for sites in broken jurisdictions rather than either kowtowing or being in breach. Also means it can be implemented in client if you don't want it on your OS or want the convenience of not being asked age without the ridiculous other stuff.
Accordingly, it is never too late to lobby against these things.
Second, there's no certainty about how courts might interpret compliance. If the intent of the law is to positively identify minors, a user editable field may not be interpreted as sufficient to comply. We don't know what the safe level of identification will be outside of trying the law in court. Who wants to be on the bad side of that?
One way is that you log in under a guest account and the guest account requires you to indicate your age. After your session is over, guest account logs out.
Another way is that the library has two sets of computers, ones set for adults, ones set for minors. You need access card to use computer and the librarian will give you the age-appropriate access card.
Another way is computers are set for restrictive (child) account by default. If you need adult access you have to ask librarian to unlock it.
What I expected was that we'd end up with the OS vendors actually being mandated to really do age verification, and then submitting that using Web Credentials and Secure Attestation so that the far end could trust the whole thing, locking open-source OS's out of the mix and creating more of a walled garden online than we already have. I was guessing it would become a simple checkbox on e.g. Cloudflare - "[ ] allow adult users only" or whatever - and that it would end up with vast swathes of the internet going off limits for anyone not on closed-source systems.
Now, it looks like this is just a way for parents to tell the OS "this is a kid account" and have it flow through to websites so they can easily proactively block kids from connecting without having to implement any of that crap. Yes, it's much potentially easier for a child to circumvent; but any kid who can get around that sort of thing from within an OS could probably just wipe/reinstall anyway, so who cares?
As a parent whose kids are continually trying to see what trouble they can get into, I appreciate that I will get one more potential weapon in the fight.
Can someone tell me whether I am being a fool by actually being a bit relieved it's going this way?
You're being a fool by actually being a bit relieved it's going this way.
These bills are meant to nudge the overton window[0] of digital politics in the direction of mandating realtime identity verification for all forms of computing. Advertisers want it, governments want it, _bad people and bad governments want it_. By pushing a very small and "weak" legally-required form of user identification on everything under the guise of "saving the kids", all involved parties can point at those who disagree and say "Look, if you disagree you must want to hurt children!" And so the bills pass, and a weak form of identity verification passes and is enforced. Then it'll be shown it doesn't work, and the proposed solution will be to make these identity verification laws more intrusive and more restrictive. Repeat ad-nauseum.
Time to start throwing up hobby BBS sites... and I think in this case text mode interfaces over web might be an advantage.
There is no verification beyond that in these sorts of bills (CA, CO, IL). It's the parent's responsibility to watch their kids when they set up an account.
> Legitimate adult websites will not show the content.
This is a big problem (that won't necessarily be solved by this particular legislation, granted). There are already voluntary rating HTML tags websites can add to indicate parental control software should block them, but they're voluntary and non-standardized. Websites can choose not to comply with no real-world consequences. And I don't think platforms like Reddit or X, which are ostensibly all-ages social media but also have an abundance of adult content, are properly set up to serve tags like that on NSFW posts but not other ones.
It's a tricky problem to solve, and, imo, it's one the tech industry has demonstrated it doesn't have any desire to solve itself, hence legislation starting to get involved.
> Websites can send down a single header indicating adult content.
It sounds at first glance like a no-brainer that websites shouldn't have access to any information and the enforcement should be done at a local level (like the current voluntary HTML tags that locally installed parental control software can sometimes read). But some websites might want to display alternate content to minors-- e.g. a Wikipedia article with some images withheld, or Reddit sending a user back to an all-ages subreddit instead of just fully breaking or failing to load when the user stumbles upon something 18+. For anything like that, the website will need to know in some form that the user isn't able to see 18+ content.
Detractors will say parents should just install existing parental control software, even though it's existed in its current form for decades and is obviously not effective. And they'll say it should be the parents' responsibility to enforce what their kids are doing with computers, while ignoring the fact that these laws provide tools allowing parents to do just that (the parents are the ones responsible for supervising their kids when they create accounts to ensure they're not lying about their age-- if the kids lie during setup, it's on the parents).
Anyone with kids will probably acknowledge that it's much easier supervising your kid once when they first set up an account on a new device than it would be to supervise them 24/7 when they're using the internet. But for some reason, lots of people without kids are in a panic about having to type in any date older than 18 years ago. The arguments I've heard against it are almost all slippery-slope (e.g. "they're gonna do this first, and then add ID requirements next year, because that's what I fear will happen.")
Because that's exactly what will happen. This is battlespace preparation for the destruction of anonymity on the internet, because politicians find this inconvenient.
Except what about my OS which doesn't have parental controls and can't reasonably be expected to provide them because who's gonna do it and be responsible for it?
And the arguments for it don't promise to fight tooth and nail not to make sure it's not slippery. If the slope does turn out to be slippery, today's proponents will be tomorrow's Hindsight Harrys (e.g. "the cat's already out of the bag, if you cared so much you should have fought this back when we all saw it coming").
These tools are called "parental controls" and already exist - we don't need laws to compel their production.
...unless, of course, the true aim is to use this as a beachhead for further expansion of privacy-violating requirements.
You write this off as a "slippery-slope" argument, but given that there are already quite a few tools that do what this law aims for, what's the point?
> if the kids lie during setup, it's on the parents
Pretty much a "Yes, and?" scenario. See above.
> The arguments I've heard against it are almost all slippery-slope (e.g. "they're gonna do this first, and then add ID requirements next year, because that's what I fear will happen.")
I get where you're going, but precisely this. These things always start slow... then fast. The old adage "first they came for x, then y" is not a joke or an exaggeration. It is pretty much historic observation. I've lived long enough to know that whenever someone invokes the "think of the children" defense, there's always a catch.
This is not a theory. Laws requiring this are going through the state and federal level right now.
> (b) An operator shall request a signal with respect to a particular user from an operating system provider or a covered application store when the application is downloaded and launched.
Unlike the California law I do not see anything that restricts this to child accounts only.
So let say I have a program:
print("Hello, World!")
import ageBracket
ageBracket.get()
print("Hello, World!")
Does the hidden Minix installation on every Intel CPU with the Intel Management Engine count?
The root cause is a corrupt government doing the bidding of a few rich people and other countries. Fixing that will be very difficult but is nonetheless necessary and possible to largely thwart legislators from working against their own ostensible constituency.
>"Operating system provider" means a person or entity that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.
I.e Linux will most likely to be immune, since its not tied to a particular computer.
Which just means Linux stay winning. It already made big headway in the video game space, so its prime to take over personal computing too.
That's a really weird and nonsensical reading of "operating system software on a computer".
i'm from illinois, worked in california, and no longer live in either. from afar, it seems that whatever california bureaucrats propose, after a short delay, gets proposed by their little sibling bureaucrats in illinois.
Surely I'm missing something? Is the backlash due to fear of a slippery slope?
Linux distros always have a "root" user. Does that user have to be asked its age before being usable? What about docker containers, which often come with a non-root user? What about installation media, which is often a perfectly usable OS? It would either have to be so easy to get around this law that most kids could do it easily, or so overzealously enforced as to disrupt the entire cloud industry.
what is the solution then to age gating apps that the public feels should be age gated? (TikTok, Instagram, etc). it seems like every app implementing its own guessing system would have even more holes, right?
this is one where I am sympathetic. the moment when someone, with their parent, is setting up a device seems like the best point to check age. right?
am I missing something?
My guess reading the law as linked is that it's much closer to the former than the latter. That being said, you're right that it does bring a bunch of headache alongside with it for little-to-no benefits.
The slippery slope isn't a fallacy in this case as we've seen the pot slowly come to a boil after 9/11 with various laws like the Patriot Act, FISA, etc. and classified programs within the NSA (and I'm sure all the three letters) which violate the rights of Americans everyday. Now it's a coordinated effort across multiple western countries all of a sudden to introduce laws around verifying your age. It's clear where this is going.
There are so many ways for this to go badly or simply be annoying.
I’m a guy in my 40s with no kids. I shouldn’t need to deal with all of this. Let the parents turn on parental controls for their kids; don’t force it on everyone.
If Meta needs to find a way to verify age, then that is also their problem. They are trying to make it the world’s problem. I don’t use any Meta products, so again I would question why I need to care about this… why will it become my problem?
The slippery slope then comes in addition to all of this.
It seems Apple already implemented their age verification API. I got prompted for it when opening the MyChart app a few weeks ago. The API used in that case only sends a Boolean if the user is over 18 or not, this is the best of the bad options. However, they have other APIs to get other data from a digital ID. The user is at the whim of the API the developer chooses to use. They can say no, but then they can’t use the app. I’m not sure how Apple validated my age, as I hadn’t loaded an ID into my wallet, but my Apple account is nearly 18 years old, so that might be good enough? If I were to get a Mac and just want to use a local account, then what happens? Can I not verify my age? Will I be able to use the computer or be locked out of the browser? These are some of the fears I have if they take this too far. Maybe some of them are unfounded, but I guess time will tell.
Meta and TikTok (and YouTube shorts to an extent) are the new Sackler family and Purdue pharma. They will hold on to these profit and power engines as long and hard as possible. They will not stop causing the harm unless forced to with regulation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_United_...
Do you mind expanding on why that is? Is it because it allows them to say "well the API told us they're adults so we're all good"?
Umm isn’t that what we want? Or are you suggesting there should be some other legislation in place?
The bill itself sort of goes against its "purpose". If the purpose is to make a convenient API for stores to know their user, and avoid showing them certain content then why did the bill state: "If an operator has internal clear and convincing information that a user's age is different than the age indicated by a signal received in accordance with this Section, the operator shall use that information as the primary indicator of the user's age."
because many people lie in those forms. Many people on steam will select they were born in 1900, including myself. So how will this API help? the only way for it to be useful is if they later require full verification.
That being said, I don't think this bill was that well thought out as the implication are far reaching (will I need to enter an age when provisioning a VM?).
I mostly see it as a clumsy attempt to provide a mechanism for age-category attestation in a way that is more privacy-friendly than Texas's "upload-your-id" law.
What that means is that we will have to amp it up, if we want to achieve it's purpose. So, that's not a slippery slope, that's a prophecy.
When we get cryptographically backed identity verification on all computing, that will legitimately be the end of computing as we know it.
Or, in contrary, when it is very reliable, so it can map a very specific real person to a reliable and true birth date, then f off binding myself to a randome computer account that gives it out to whomever is asking it!
There is no good in this story.
Yes, this is just the beginning of a huge swath of innocent APIs to identify people on the internet. Meta isn’t going to stop, and neither will governments.
Edit: also, before the same jackass from the last few discussions on this mentions “muh ADA” again, the ADA has never been shown to apply to an OS in court nor does it mention anything about operating systems.
They want to abolish anonymous use of internet services, because anonymous publishing at scale is powerful and dangerous to incumbents when they can’t retaliate with malicious prosecution, police harassment, or assassination.
Don’t say this too loud please, I don’t honestly think we’re too far from this reality, at least from an “Overton Window” point of view.
Unless your specifically calling out accounts that require online registration for the OS. I'm vehemently against that requirement.
> the Children's Social Media Safety Act
>
> provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both
> provide an operator who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user a signal that identifies the user's age by category
Answer: they don't want to be liable and get fined $400 Million, like Meta got fined, for letting kids on social media. (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/05/business/meta-children-da...)
This is why Meta is forcing this legislation through nation-wide. They are forcing Google/Apple to take the liability, despite it not actually being Google or Apple that's providing the "harmful" social media. Meta are doing this state-by-state so nobody can track that it's them. Easier than pushing at a federal level, and raises fewer red flags from news media.
Since Google and Apple won't want to accept this liability either, the next step is requiring digital IDs and third-party verification to prove the user is of age. This will enable tracking of all users, whatever app or website they go to. Bills requiring this are already being passed at state and federal level.
Is the government going to require some sort of automated checks that verify every person who connects to the internet has this API on their OS and go after individuals that aren't in compliance?
Haiku could just run an automatic dialog asking you if you are minor, in Illinois or California and write a text file with the corresponding age category of said person.
These bills do not mandate that the user cannot modify that information AFAIK.
None but them corporations sure do. And with a little cash in the right place I'm sure they can push recourse onto people of power. We really need to end political lobbying one of these days
2. Plenty of websites make their own apps, and then you're back to just having every website under the sun trying to verify everyone's age to know who to show explicit content to.
Because there's no remotely compelling evidence for this and it'd be thrown out by a judge as a huge parental rights violation.
https://le.utah.gov/~2025/bills/static/SB0142.html
https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/89R/billtext/html/SB02420S...
Those are all specifically targeted at mobile app stores—which already verify age—and have nothing to do with general purpose operating systems or their account creation.
Try moving the goalposts more carefully next time.
Richard Stallman advised us about it long ago.
Thank god Plan9 got relicensed into GPL. 9front might not totally free, but it's a step in case GNU+Linux gets utterly broken.
And, yes, please, go try Trisquel (novice users), GUIX (experts) and Hyperbola (experts and protocol purists).
Avoid every Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Netflix service with nonfree JS.
Today his blog is filled with weird rants against voter ID, the Iran conflict, and a list of other countries he dislikes because they have national ID cards and this is a bad thing apparently.
For someone who is a renowned world traveler, you would think he has heard of passports by now.
Not a peep about these bills that could have a very real impact on an operating system he invented (gah-noo).
Then again, since he's never installed it himself*, account creation is not something he would have to deal with or care about.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umQL37AC_YM
Maybe the solution is as simple as having an adult create your account for you.
Like paying a homeless guy to buy you booze or cigarettes, not that anyone would ever do that.
That's what has me down about US politics big time. Even the most extreme voices in politics (warren, sanders, aoc,etc..) don't even come close to holding these people accountable. I don't care about taxing them, I care about prison time for interfering with a democracy like this (not retroactively of course). No one is even entertaining properly criminalizing such behavior. Even they made it illegal, they'll just make it a fine a billionaire can pay like an oopsie parking ticket.
These ruling class types have always been there, and human nature is such that they will always be there. But you have to understand, this isn't feudal era England, the government and society isn't built to tolerate them. Their behavior as such is parasitical and only leads to destruction of society. In their parasitism, they've fooled themselves into believing their wealth can shield them. But the nature of the parasite is such that it can't live without a viable host.
Whatever you believe about billionaires controlling politicians, it's much much worse than you think.
1 10 0000
or even better
1 10 -2000
This will turn into most useless set of laws ever
Red states: paternalism over your body, liberty for your property
Meta's lobbying spending is cited for states not doing that kind of bill, but that's their total lobbying spending in that state.
These new bills in the style of the California one do not require any actual age verification and don't give any information to sites or apps other than the age range that whoever made the user account on the device entered.
It is essentially just requiring a simple parental control mechanism be provided by the OS which provides a way for parents to set age ranges for the accounts of their children and an API that apps that need to check age can query.
On a Unix or Unix like system this could be as simple as having the command to create a user account ask for age or birthdate and store that somewhere (maybe a new field in /etc/passwd) and then adding a getage() function to the standard library that apps can call to get the age range for the current user.
From the "we want to slurp up everything we can about you" point of view usually associated with Meta it is not obvious why Meta would support this approach.
Age checks can broadly be divided into 3 categories.
1. Done entirely on the local system, with only the result being revealed to the app/site that is asking. Age information comes from the owner/administrator of the system. I.e., the parental control approach.
2. Done using the local system and some external source of age information like your government. Only the result is revealed to the app/site that is asking.
3. Verification is done directly with the site that is asking, or through a third party. You have to supply sensitive documents like your government ID to the site or the third party.
#3 is terrible for privacy and anonymity. The red state laws tend to be in this category.
#2 depends on the details. There may be ways using the timing of the communications between your system and your ID supplier (e.g., your government) and the communications between your system and the site you are proving ID to that could allow the site and the government to get more information that you want them to. There are cryptographic ways to prevent that, especially if the device has a hardware security module. It thus comes down to with #2 that you really need to look at the details.
I'm not sure if any US state is taking this approach. The EU is, with cryptography to make it GDPR compatible and allow anonymous verification. Google and Apple are also working on such systems.
#1 is basically equivalent to the "Are you 18+" dialogs on many adult web sites, except moves to the device and the admin can if they wish prevent non-admin users from lying.
It is not really surprising that blue states are tending more toward #1, especially considering that several of them are among the states that have the strongest state privacy and data protection laws.