Still, even the most libertarian among us generally won't oppose restricting youth access to tobacco, or restricting recreational access to hard drugs.
Targeting platforms is like only banning one brand of cigarette. People will just find another. We should instead attack the "seller" here, being the algorithms optimized for selling and not for the enrichment of society.
That kind of binary framing doesn’t really move the discussion forward.
A more constructive approach is case-by-case. Different things sit at different levels of harm, and "ban everything" vs. "ban nothing" isn’t a workable model for society.
"In 2015, 9.3% of high school students reported smoking cigarettes in the last 30 days, down 74% from 36.4% in 1997 when rates peaked after increasing throughout the first half of the 1990s"
Tobacco and porn have been more strongly regulated lately. In my teenage years, they were easily available to anyone with coins in their hands. Turns out: that didn't destroy us either.
The first beer, the first pack of strong tobacco (Rothändle, the dirtiest, hardest stuff), the first tiddie magazine from the railway station kiosk, those were rites of passages. It was a way for teenagers to push the envelope, realise alcohol makes you wobbly, tobacco causes diarrea (believe me, that Rothändle stuff was more chemical weapon than 'smooth'), and ultimately, all women look about the same undressed, so it is pointless to keep buying. They were small, recoverable mistakes that taught teenagers where their limits were.
Now we have banned all that away - but the teenage urge to self-realization and rebellion found a new way to social media. And: social media is safer: no-one got lung cancer from TikTok. No-one woke up in a hospital for facebook poisoning.
Ultimately, it is the rebellion the fascists dislike, not the fact that people earn money with it. So we ban that, driving teenagers to ever-more-destructive behaviour.
Teenagers need an outlet to be teenagers without living in a state sanctioned panopticum. If society pathologizes every form of adolescent experimentation, if you let control freaks raise your children, do not be surprised if they turn out to be either actual rebels, or something much, much darker.
That said smoking and Instagram are probably best avoided by kids
https://blog.google/products/google-pay/google-wallet-age-id...
Or do you expect the government to understand there are other operating systems out there?
IOW, this problem is as "unsolved" as the problem of deciding who's allowed to drive a car, or travel to another country.
ID verification is a universal hammer, to which all problems look like nails, but we shouldn't be so quick to reach for it. Not all of its downsides can be solved with cryptography.
As it stands, the government in the US uses an identity verification vendor that forces you to upload videos of multiple angles of your face, enough data for facial recognition and to build 3D models, along with pictures of your ID.
I use Tor, so I get to see how age verification is implemented all over the world. By large, the process almost always includes using your government issued ID and live pictures/videos of your face.
There are zero incentives to implement zero knowledge proofs like this, and billions of dollars of incentives to use age verification as an opportunity to collect population-wide datasets of people's faces in high resolution and 3D. That data is valuable, especially for governments and companies that want to implement accurate facial recognition and who have AI models to train.
The important point is that such invasive approaches are not required; clearly, however people already authenticate with government agencies for getting a driver's licence or passport would suffice. I think it's the responsibility of knowledgeable tech people to advocate for this.
You might want to double-check your definition of "hard drugs", "libertarian" or both.