Yeah someone has to be paying for the phones and internet access, both mobile internet and or home internet or if they don’t have a phone yet, the tablet , desktop or laptop with internet access. It’s usually the parents paying for this stuff.

There are parental controls built into the Android builds of all the various mainstream manufacturers. The main exception might be for example small companies selling phones with custom Android OS distributions or people who install their own where parental controls are not built in, but that isn’t what the vast vast majority of people are using let alone installing on their child’s phone.

There are parental control options built into IOS too. They allow parents to setup a variety of controls.

https://families.google/familylink/

https://support.apple.com/en-us/105121

The following article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation cites various research about how a majority of social media use even by people under 13 is often done with parents knowledge and even direct help.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/congress-wants-hand-your-parenting-big-tech

Most Social Media Use By Younger Kids Is Family-Mediated

If lawmakers picture under-13 social media use as a bunch of kids lying about their age and sneaking onto apps behind their parents’ backs, they’ve got it wrong. Serious studies that have looked at this all find the opposite: most under-13 use is out in the open, with parents’ knowledge, and often with their direct help.

A large national study published last year in Academic Pediatrics found that 63.8% of under-13s have a social media account, but only 5.4% of them said they were keeping one secret from their parents. That means roughly 90% of kids under 13 who are on social media aren’t hiding it at all. Their parents know. (For kids aged thirteen and over, the “secret account” number is almost as low, at 6.9%.)

Earlier research in the U.S. found the same pattern. In a well-known study of Facebook use by 10-to-14-year-olds, researchers found that about 70% of parents said they actually helped create their child’s account, and between 82% and 95% knew the account existed. Again, this wasn’t kids sneaking around. It was families making a decision together.

A 2022 study by the UK’s media regulator Ofcom points in the same direction, finding that up to two-thirds of social media users below the age of thirteen had direct help from a parent or guardian getting onto the platform.

The typical under-13 social media user is not a sneaky kid. It’s a family making a decision together.

Respectfully, this is a bit more nuanced than that. There are free VPNs ran by non profits supported fully by donations. Yes somebody is paying for it but it’s people donating to the services.

For example there is an open source application called Bitmask that has 2 VPN providers by default, Riseup VPN and the Calyx Institute.

You can download the Bitmask app itself or download the RiseupVPN app which is based on Bitmask but just pre configured to only use that single Riseup provider.

https://bitmask.net/

https://riseup.net/en/vpn

I just installed Windows 11 not too long ago (maybe 4 months ago) on a computer and it worked without even using the command to bypass it I am pretty sure. I didn’t use Rufus or any special option prior to writing it to the flash drive. All I did was disconnect an ethernet cable and install and at some point it just gave me the option to bypass the creation of a Microsoft account. I remember there used to be a special username and password you could use that would bypass it too but I didn’t use that as far as I can remember. I may have possibly tried entering random info until it failed enough times that it allowed me to do it but I’m not sure.

Idk why my experience is different from what some others are reporting. I am pretty sure I didn’t have to put the command in or do anything too special other than disconnecting from the internet and maybe possibly trying a couple of times to login till it failed multiple times but I don’t remember if I did that. Obviously since it would have been disconnected from the internet logins to a Microsoft account would not work anyway but it might have still asked me but I just remember at some point it just gave me the option to create a local only account.

I used Windows 11 Pro.

I didn’t put in a product key when I installed idk if that would have made a difference but that’s one aspect I can think of that might be possibly different from some people’s installs so I figured I would at least mention that even if it probably makes no difference. I know Windows can read the product key from the motherboard but in my case I installed it one of my computers that was bought from a linux hardware vendor so it would not have come with anything like that. (I know blasphemy hehe but I needed Windows for something Windows specific that has anti virtual machine detection too and many of the computers in my house are from linux hardware companies to support the linux ecosystem).

Edit : So someone I know said that if you use Windows 11 Pro there is a way to use an option for setting up for work and a domain that it will prompt you to create a local account. Maybe that is what I ended up doing that made the difference that made it so easy to bypass the Microsoft account.

I have never used a Windows machine with a Microsoft account for my own personal use, only if it was somebody else’s PC that already had it. I just keep it disconnected from the internet during setup and it eventually gives me the option to not use it with a Microsoft account.

There is a command to disable the account setup too but I have only used that once. The disconnecting from the internet trick works for me.

I mostly use GNU/Linux for my own use but on the rare occasion I setup Windows for someone else or need to use it, I just disconnect it / don’t connect it to the internet before setup.

Edit:

The reason bypassing the forced account with up to date Windows 11 was still so easy for me is likely because I used the Pro edition and possibly may have used the setup for work feature when I installed it recently.

It’s interesting you mention the Baby Shark thing. In Oklahoma there were some prison guards who forced multiple people at various times to stand handcuffed in a stress position for hours listening to Baby Shark for the purpose of torturing them. There was also other forms of physical abuse that happened.

The guards were arrested but were given 2 years of probation. But you as an average citizen get caught up in some war on drugs bullshit where you didn’t even victimize anyone and your unlikely to get the same treatment in many cases, especially in some harsher states.

Former Oklahoma jail officers sued over ‘Baby Shark’ torture tactic are placed on probation

Christian Charles Miles and Gregory Cornell Butler Jr. pleaded no contest to misdemeanor cruelty to a prisoner

A federal civil rights lawsuit four inmates filed in 2021 accused Miles and Butler of using excessive force and discipline tactics described as “torture events.”

Joseph Mitchell, said he was pulled from his cell in November 2019 and placed in a room where he was forced into a “standing stress position” for three to four hours while he was handcuffed behind his back, according to the lawsuit. Officers then played “Baby Shark” on repeat so loud “that it was reverberating down the hallways,” it said.

Ja’Lee Foreman Jr., another inmate, said in the suit that he was not forced to listen to the song but was placed in a stress position and then kneed in the back and slammed into a wall by Miles. Foreman alleged that Miles spat on him as Butler laughed.

In addition to probation, Miles and Butler must complete 40 hours of community service, and they were fined $200 and ordered to pay $300 in victims’ compensation. They are also no longer allowed to work in law enforcement, the court records state.

Butler’s attorney, Lance Phillips, said his client is “happy this matter is behind him.” If Butler remains out of trouble while on probation, he will not have a misdemeanor conviction on his record, Phillips said Wednesday.

I have been saving up for a router and wanted to support a company that sells devices that are compatible with as much open source software as possible.

This really sucks. If I had known this was going to happen randomly I would have prioritised saving up faster and just not spent it on other things. I had no idea I needed to prioritise this.

But like I say frequently about the US. It is a very prohibitionist country. You never know when the next thing you do or use will be criminalized or prohibited. Then you will be at risk of being arrested and in some cases even sent to a literal for profit private prison ran by a place like CoreCivic. It is fucked up.

Even if I were to get a router from a foreign manufacturer now, it likely won’t be legal for me to actually use it. The FCC could at the very least fine somebody depending on how this order will be enforced.

There is also possibly going to be a risk of it being seized at the border.

Who knows how this will even be enforced since the vast vast majority of consumer routers are not even made in the US. I don’t even know of one truly made in the US. But a router from a foreign open source focused company will likely be considered even more of a “foreign manufacturer”.

It only takes a single determined kid really as long as they can explain to their friends how to do it and their friends are capable of or able to install some software or boot into a live USB OS for example.

A lot of the various censorship circumvention software is designed to be fairly easy to use. I first learned about Tails when I was like 14 or so because I was being abused for being suspected of being LGBT by my parents and also for various other things such as being autistic and having other disabilities and they were abusing me for things I could not help. So I needed a way to ensure that I would stay protected from their potential digital snooping so I could get support online, talk to my online friends because I had nearly no irl friends and the very few I did kinda have just took advantage of me and bullied me most of the time.

I also needed to be able to rapidly destroy everything I was doing by pulling out the flash drive wiping the RAM and shutting down the PC. One of the somewhat common use cases for Tails is people under domestic abuse situations they are unable to escape from.

There is a reason why the Trevor Project, a mental health support site for LGBT people has an emergency mechanism for quickly leaving the site while your in the middle of a conversation with a counselor or just browsing the resources too.

https://www.thetrevorproject.org/research-briefs/mental-health-among-autistic-lgbtq-youth-apr-2022/

But regardless after I learned about stuff like that I also helped an online friend from another school access content using bridges as well. I helped another friend at some point too though in that case basic web proxies were enough. Though the latter person I guess was not really a great friend since he only really wanted to talk to me when he needed help with things like that.

Psiphon, another censorship circumvention tool is also fairly easy to use and works on mobile and desktop style OSs.

On my phone I used the Shelter app to create a work profile with a separate password from my devices regular password.

I used various apps like Tor Browser, Orbot, and other free and open source apps such as Bitmask that come with 2 free VPN providers.

In some cases Tor may not even be blocked or if it is you can try obfs4, Snowflake proxies, Meek, and Webtunnel bridges to access it for example.

Also a friend could run a private bridge for you from their home if they are tech savvy and want to help you. For obfs4 for example, out of a lot of services someone could self host, that is relatively easy without as much knowlege required as self hosting something more complex.

Wireguard is relatively easy to self host once you become accustomed to how to configure it. SSH is even easier than Wireguard IMO though Wireguard tries to be as easy as SSH there are a few issues that can happen with Wireguard that need more troubleshooting sometimes compared to SSH. SSH can be used for tunneling traffic and you can set your web browser to use it’s SOCKS port.

So if you can find a friend with an ISP that isn’t doing the filtering who can self host something or if a person can access Tor, Psiphon or a VPN particularly one with a variety of anti censorship options this type of network censorship isn’t going to be trivial.

There is also DNS tunneling and a variety of other methods.

Edit: The last thing I will likely say in this particular comment is that people should really consider who they will be condemning to a much worse situation than they are already in by supporting stuff like this and these privacy invasive age verification tools.

Here is additional info about who these types of bills will impact harshly.

"Age-verification mandates most harshly affect people with disabilities. Facial recognition systems routinely fail to recognize faces with physical differences, affecting an estimated 100 million people worldwide who live with facial differences, and “liveness detection” can exclude folks with limited mobility. As these technologies become gatekeepers to online spaces, people with disabilities find themselves increasingly blocked from essential services and platforms with no specified appeals processes that account for disability.

Document-based systems also don’t solve this problem—as mentioned earlier, people with disabilities are also less likely to possess current driver’s licenses, so document-based age-gating technologies are equally exclusionary."

“For many LGBTQ+ young people, especially those with unsupportive or abusive families, the internet can be a lifeline. For young people facing family rejection or violence due to their sexuality or gender identity, social media platforms often provide crucial access to support networks, mental health resources, and communities that affirm their identities.”

"According to a groundbreaking study by Chapin Hall of the University of Chicago, LGBTQ+ youth are 120% more likely to experience homelessness than their peers. And, while LGBTQ+ youth make up only 7% of the total U.S. youth population, they comprise an astounding 40% of all young people experiencing homelessness in the country.

Often times, youth who make their way to Covenant House do so bearing complex histories of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. LGBTQ+ youth are further traumatized by rejection in their families, schools, and communities due to their gender identity or sexual orientation. This abandonment leads to no support system, putting LGBTQ+ youth at greater risk of exploitation, human trafficking, physical violence, and suicide"

“Platforms that rely on AI-based age-estimation systems often use a webcam selfie to guess users’ ages. But these algorithms don’t work equally well for everyone. Research has consistently shown that they are less accurate for people with Black, Asian, Indigenous, and Southeast Asian backgrounds; that they often misclassify those adults as being under 18; and sometimes take longer to process, creating unequal access to online spaces. This mirrors the well-documented racial bias in facial recognition technologies. The result is that technology’s inherent biases can block people from speaking online or accessing others’ speech.”

“Age-verification systems are, at their core, surveillance systems. By requiring identity verification to access basic online services, we risk creating an internet where anonymity is a thing of the past. For people who rely on anonymity for safety, this is a serious issue. Domestic abuse survivors need to stay anonymous to hide from abusers who could track them through their online activities. Journalists, activists, and whistleblowers regularly use anonymity to protect sources and organize without facing retaliation or government surveillance. And in countries under authoritarian rule, anonymity is often the only way to access banned resources or share information without being silenced. Age-verification systems that demand government IDs or biometric data would strip away these protections, leaving the most vulnerable exposed”

Also the perspectives of young people are almost never considered in these conversations which is why I am glad the Electronic Frontier Foundation actually took the time to ask when KOSA was being considered but these comments in the following link apply to a lot of these other forms of legislation too.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/thousands-young-people-told-us-why-kids-online-safety-act-will-be-harmful-minors