B.

I love how basically every study shows that students do better with less homework and workers perform better with more vacation days and shorter shifts, yet we do the exact opposite because of outdated, guilt-driven “work is suffering” values and toxic hustle culture.

EU & UK both planning to ban VPNs for under 16s, which will inevitably require age verification / digital ID. This is exactly why I oppose the location dox feature btw, one more step toward total deanonymization. It puts EU posters at risk; ~25% of all X users are European.

🇬🇧 The first major assessment of the UK's Online Safety Act is out. Turns out kids are fooling the age checks by drawing moustaches on their faces. "I did catch my son using an eyebrow pencil to draw a moustache on his face, and it verified him as 15 years old." Mum of a 12-year-old, in a new report from Internet Matters, the UK's leading online-safety NGO. That single line tells you almost everything you need to know about how the UK's Online Safety Act is going. This is the law that: 🔴 Forced UK platforms to demand government IDs, facial scans, and credit-card checks from adults to access ordinary websites 🔴 Drove a 1,800%+ spike in VPN downloads the week the porn-site age checks went live in July 2025 🔴 Pushed millions of users into handing biometric data to private third-party verification vendors 🔴 Sits at the front of a global wave: Greece's anonymity ban, France's "VPNs are next" comments, Utah's VPN crackdown, and the EU's 27-state rollout deadline of December 2026 The headline numbers from the assessment: 🔴 46% of children say age checks are easy to bypass. Only 17% say they are difficult. 🔴 32% of children have already bypassed them in the past two months 🔴 49% of children still report experiencing harm online in the past month The bypass methods kids reported, in their own words: 🔴 Drawing on facial hair with eyebrow pencil to fool facial age estimation 🔴 Holding up a video game character's head turning during the face-scan 🔴 Submitting a video of a different person's face entirely 🔴 Using a parent's ID (often with parental consent) 🔴 Entering a fake birthday (still works on most platforms) 🔴 Using someone else's login or device 🔴 In a small minority of cases, VPNs One 12-year-old girl explained the system to researchers: "Every time I go live on TikTok, it tells me I have to be 18, but when the AI detects that I'm not 18 they ban me. But they only ban me for 10 minutes and then I can go live again." That is the entire enforcement model. A 14-year-old summed up the broader picture: "It's not practical because the more you restrict it, the more people are going to want to get past that age restriction." A 16-year-old, more bluntly: "I think it's a great idea in theory and I applaud its intentions, but I don't see how that's feasible, because kids will always find a way." Even when verification works, it works against the children. A 12-year-old boy on Roblox: "I put my face in and I got 15 when I'm 12, so I'm chatting with people older than me when I shouldn't be." A 13-year-old non-binary child: "Adults can very easily use a face they searched on the internet to trick it into thinking you're someone you're not, so there might be adults in kids' age groups trying to groom them." Recent reporting confirms exactly that. Underage Roblox accounts are now being sold online to predators precisely because they bypass the new "safety" measures. One detail in the report stops you cold. Multiple children described being unintentionally exposed through their feeds to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. A 14-year-old: "I saw it on Snapchat. I broke down into tears and then told my mum immediately." Violent content, racist content, content promoting unrealistic body types: all explicitly prohibited under the Children's Safety Codes. All still landing in feeds at scale. Parents told researchers about the day-to-day reality of trying to enforce the rules at home. A father of a 14-year-old: "What you'll find now is that the kids know more than we know in terms of how to disable [parental controls]. We've got the parental controls on, but they probably unlock them." A mother of a 13-year-old: "We do what we can, but our kids are all clever and savvy and they can get around stuff." A mother of a 12-year-old: "I can put all the checks and measures in, and I can be keeping an eye open on what she's watching, listening to, who she's chatting to. And then she could go to a house down the road and visit somebody whose parents don't care, and they've got zero checks and measures." Both children and parents expressed real concerns about handing over biometric data to verification platforms they do not trust. One father warned: "Kids don't know the difference between a genuine website and a website that isn't genuine. If all websites have facial verifications and they go on a website that is not genuine, their face and their documents could be used to do illegal stuff." The father is right. The Discord vendor breach in October 2025 already exposed roughly 70,000 government IDs uploaded purely for age verification. The EU's own age verification app was reportedly hacked within minutes of launch. The report's most uncomfortable finding sits inside the parental data. 26% of parents are not just aware their kids bypass age checks, they are actively complicit. Some logged into their child's account with their own ID to "go live" on TikTok. Others approved circumvention so their child could play a specific game. The reasoning is rarely malicious. Parents told researchers they only help when they personally judged the activity safe. But the structural problem is fatal: a verification system that treats parents as the last line of defence collapses the moment parents themselves become the bypass. Even children who follow the rules end up disadvantaged by them. A 15-year-old: "There are websites that are support websites to help with things such as eating disorders and suicide, and they've all been censored." A 12-year-old: "Before you could talk to anybody, but they added age group limits so you can only talk to people in your age group. So if my friends are younger or older than me I wouldn't be able to talk to them." The blunt instrument of age-gating breaks legitimate connection and support without measurably reducing harm.

methods used btw: drawing on facial hair with eyebrow pencil using a parents ID parents just willingly bypassing it for the kids cuz they trust them and are willing to actually parent (based) others ive seen include: video game characters for face scans drawing a face on a thumb for face scans that k-ID bypass that existed where you send fake metadata and it verifies you AI generated photo IDs probably have been used, though im not sure and obviously just using a VPN this also does show that restricting VPNs is infact useless when its actually only a minority using VPNs to bypass the OSA, and even if a VPN provider added age checks, it isnt difficult to bypass