Sure, thank you for not being a prick in your approach like everyone else. A few reasons: First, your private info is already out there. Either it’s hanging out on Spokeo (and you should go there, look yourself up, and request that they delete it.) or one of Google/Meta/Whatever’s servers. Thanks to the video disclosure in the Guthrie case, we know definitively that all of those cameras you have in your home and around your neighborhood are recording you and feeding the information to the government without a warrant for permanent storage. Further, providing ID is something we do for a lot of things that are appropriately age-gated already. Secondly, and I think this is the bigger point, is the mounting evidence of detrimental effects social media is having on kids’ cognitive abilities. It affects adults too, but to a lesser extent, likely because our brains have already matured. I know schoolteachers who can’t get their kids to answer a question correctly when the answer is literally written on the dry erase board in front of them, to give one example. The other problem here is the effects on self esteem and mental health, as algorithmically-elevated content is designed to isolate, anger, and cause mental health problems. Happy people aren’t buying every piece of shit they’re fed in their feed’s ads. I would prefer to see the companies themselves held accountable and these algorithms made illegal, but I don’t think that will realistically happen, so age-gating via ID is, to me, the best that can be done right now, and I think it’s essential.