California's Assembly voted 68 to 1 to exempt open source Linux from its age verification law, then extended age-gating to browsers and websites in the same bill

I'll keep this in mind. I am not a lawyer either. My interpretation was that these provisions removed liability as defined by the law at hand, the fines that were introduced. However, I kinda have doubts that this removes other liabilities which previously existed in the scenario that Meta knows or should have known that user X is a child and is accessing content or features deemed inappropriate for their age. I suppose they could argue in court that this is a higher standard than the checkbox usually present on, say, free porn sites where you just have to pinky promise you're over 18, such that they couldn't have known. But those worked fine before, at least for porn sites, otherwise why allow them to operate at all? Maybe it's different because Facebook allows mingling between different age groups, but it's still up to people who set up groups and pages to label their content accordingly, otherwise it all ends up being a moderation problem on Meta's end. Meta still needs to ban accounts used by underage individuals under false pretenses, assuming they have knowledge of it. Meta still needs to ban groups which expose minors to inappropriate content. They just don't pay a fine if something circumvents these new provisions. Under this interpretation, Meta may have pushed a particular variant of law just to dodge a bigger bullet, perhaps. Like ID checks which would not scale and incur huge costs. And while Meta isn't necessarily acting in good faith, we might still conclude that they're not interested in actually enforcing age checks per se. They only want to keep doing business as before and preserving the status quo while reassuring lawmakers with a thin veneer of age checks. The previous "I'm over 18” checkbox on websites had a similar function and nobody went out of their way to actually verify stuff. There was no benefit to doing extra checks, just like there's no benefit in doing user agent checks now. Using the mechanism mentioned in the law already is a good faith effort, even if it can be circumvented.