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How is that a bad argument? Do you just mean that the people supporting the law are sincere in believing it will be effective? Because yes they're presumably sincere, the vast majority of political campaigns are, but Reddit seems like a pretty good example of why it will be so ineffective.
Either the law doesn't include general-purpose user-generated sites like Reddit/4chan/Imgur/Twitter and it does nothing to prevent access to pornography, or it does and ends up requiring blocking most of the internet when they don't implement an account system and ID verification just to view their sites. I don't know the statistics but I wouldn't be surprised if general-purpose sites were more popular sources of porn than dedicated porn sites. Further complications include how to treat sites that ban porn but still have plenty of it, like post-2023 Imgur - some sort of bureaucracy to judge their moderation practices? And piracy sites like thepiratebay or nhentai are even less likely to implement such a system, so you have to block them and their mirrors, something institutions have been pretty bad at doing even when focusing specifically on piracy.
They're sincere, yes, and also it will have an effect beyond just theater. I'll take Reddit as an example, let's say that the lawmakers decide to require ID verification to view NSFW content. There will still be tons of porn on Reddit, but they'd have to search for something not tagged NSFW, which would eliminate the majority of mainstream porn subreddits.
If you want to say that that's not going to be terribly effective, I agree with you. People will definitely still be able to find pornography if they want it. There's more than enough untagged porn on reddit, and kids (really, we're talking about male teens and preteens here, right, so I suppose saying "kids" is a little misleading) asking for porn could get themselves into trouble, and there definitely would be teenagers asking for porn or where to find porn in this hypothetical. But it would dissuade a good amount because the low hanging fruit would be eliminated. And call it misguided if you want, but these aren't the actions of fascist dictators or people who just want control for control's sake. They just don't want kids watching this crap.
Yeah, I'm pretty much always frustrated by "the law can't stop all [x]" arguments against a given law, because it's a fully-general argument against laws in general. No society has ever caught all murderers (indeed, in the current US, only about half get solved). No law will ever stop all thefts. And speed limits certainly don't keep huge numbers of drivers from speeding. Yet, few people if any ever use this to argue for doing away with laws against murder or theft. (I have seen a few libertarians use it to argue for doing away with speed limits, though.)
What matters is whether or not it deters enough people, not some unachievable ideal of total deterrence.
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Eh... I'm skeptical that this is the extent of the social conservative movement on this topic. Minors getting exposed to adult content is the most immediate driver (and for some things, like the problem of minors getting bullied by people flashing porn at them, I can pretty strongly agree with), but there are definitely social conservatives that think adults having reduced access to porn is a "good thing".
If ID laws intended for minors also incidentally reduce adult porn usage, of course most conservatives will be completely fine with that, if not celebrating it. I'm sure some of them would want to implement more restrictions that also affect adults explicitly, but that's not the majority, and I don't think you'll see legislation doing that any time soon barring some religious revival.
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