I am speculating, of course, but absolutely everybody who has a clue — adults, kids, whomever — is circumventing the age verification controls with a VPN because it’s a one-step fix to a better life, and the wonks who didn’t understand that this would happen, because they were too busy projecting their erroneous presumption of how the internet works, are on the warpath because their vision of a better society is not coming to pass.

Thus: “the people” don’t measure up to their expectation.

It takes humility to not do things in the name of the people:

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You can’t go around building a better world for people.
Only people can build a better world for people.
Otherwise it’s just a cage. [1]

People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so [they] were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up. [2]

• Witches Abroad: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/402833-you-can-t-go-around-building-a-better-world-for-people
• Night Watch: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/373774-there-were-plotters-there-was-no-doubt-about-it-some