Technology

Who under the age of 18 will have money to buy these

Anyone with at least $0.25-$1, and access to any method of digital payments. (Gift Cards for most retailers, PayPal, Cash App, Zelle, prepaid or non-prepaid debit cards, any cryptocurrency, etc)

and who would be willing to sell them for the pittance teenagers would be willing to spend?

Primarily bad actors that obtain the credentials any number of ways, then either directly sell them, or sell them indirectly through third-party storefronts that buy from the bad actors in bulk. Believe me, I've watched hundreds of kids in Discord servers publicly sharing and using sites on the clearweb where they cashapp in a dollar then buy a stolen set of bank credentials and try withdrawing money back to their Cash App account.

I've monitored so many of these sites, and seen how easy it is for anybody, even teens with limited financial payment options, to buy stolen credentials with infinitely more importance and personal security measures taken to keep them safe than something specifically for accessing an NSFW site.

Some of these site owners operate for months before eventually shutting down and re-opening separate storefronts for anonymity, and I know of one who was selling stolen SSNs, IDs, Gift Cards, and assorted accounts, and made, by my estimates, at least a million dollars in revenue every month off items that were almost all within the price range of any child or teenager.

Especially if these get rotated out regularly via a system wide program.

Rotation can help, but doesn't cut off these services from operating. They just sell stuff in smaller, more quickly refilled batches instead of buying large batches and reselling them over longer time periods. It can make prices slightly higher, but in the end it doesn't prevent kids from accessing this content.

But what it does end up doing is creating perverse incentives.

It drives people to even less regulated, more harmful porn sites. It leads to the further stealing of credentials and personal information. It creates databases and online footprints that can be used to blackmail people, and it normalizes giving sensitive personal information to random websites online.

The last thing you want when you're trying to prevent people from getting scammed is to monetarily encourage scamming people out of their credentials and biometric data, while simultaneously making it easier for people to unknowingly hand over credentials and biometrics by normalizing the process.

This is something practically every digital rights organization argues against, and for good reason. It's a generally unsafe system that creates bad incentives and drives people to even more unsafe options.

The best mechanisms by far to prevent kids from being exposed to harmful material, or at the very least prevent them from experiencing much harm from such material is often proper parental controls and general internet monitoring by those parents, good sex education, and parents actually talking with their kids instead of fostering the us vs them mentality that drives many kids to rebel against these restrictions, even when they are to benefit the kid.

That's why news like this is always so upsetting to me. It's a mom who is understandably upset, but instead of taking accountability for leaving a unsecured laptop with access to the internet easily accessible to her kid while not monitoring it at all, she simply puts the blame on the platforms her child decided to access, even though we know she could have done many things herself to prevent this from happening without risking anybody's privacy or safety, unlike what age-gating regulations do in practice.