Three years ago I made a video warning about the dangers of a law that was about to be passed here in California: the “Age-Appropriate Design Code Act” would force most, if not all websites on the internet to verify the age of users with a “reasonable level of certainty” in order to protect children from seeing potentially harmful things, like any kind of “bro” podcast, I assume.
Protecting children sounds all well and good until you realize that forcing everyone to verify their identity to access the internet presents major privacy problems, as we would likely end up needing to hand over our identifying information to a porn monopoly since the biggest proponent of laws like this is MindGeek, the company that owns PornHub, RedTube, YouPorn, and AgeID, one of the biggest age verification companies in existence.
My video somehow did not convince Gavin Newsom to veto the bill, and so he signed it into law in September of 2022. Luckily, our technocratic overlords stepped in to help. Netchoice, a trade group representing Google, Meta, and dozens of other online corporations, got an injunction preventing the law from taking effect on the grounds that it might violate the First Amendment. Another injunction upheld parts of the first one, and a third one earlier this year seems to have put the final nail in the law’s coffin, which is great news for those of us who enjoy free speech, privacy, and parents minding their own children so that the rest of us can freely adult like adults.
Unfortunately, other countries have fewer clear free speech protections, and so the original law that the “Age-Appropriate Design Code Act” was modeled on, the UK’s Online Safety Act, partially goes into effect later this month. The EU has introduced similar recommendations and is launching an age verification app for five test countries.
Now, even sites that have a solid history of valuing privacy and free speech like BlueSky are forced to introduce age verification for everyone in those countries, explaining that users will either have to make due with a sanitized version of their BlueSky timeline or else hand over their personal information to Kids Web Services, a product made by Epic Games, a company that had 808,000 accounts hacked in 2016 and had another vulnerability lead to hacking of accounts in 2019.
While people seem to understand that BlueSky is simply following the law, they’re pretty annoyed that management is parroting the politicians who pass these awful laws, asserting that this new ID verification will happen as they continue to “balance safety with privacy, and free expression with civility.”
As pointed out by Eric Goldman, Associate Dean for Research & Professor, Santa Clara Law, “It is a false dichotomy to characterize mandatory age authentication as a tradeoff between free expression and children’s safety/privacy. Age authentication hurts both.” And he should know, because in April he published a massive 60-page paper in Stanford Technology Law Review arguing precisely that.
In “The “Segregate-and-Suppress” Approach to Regulating Child Safety Online,” Goldman points out that while offline age verification is pretty simple, once you move it online it becomes incredibly complicated and dangerous in ways that many people find counterintuitive. He patiently goes through the most popular options and explains why there is no option that is more or less bad–they’re all bad in unique ways. For instance, establishing a governmental “digital ID” gives a State unimaginable power to surveil citizens online, which has extremely negative effects if, for example, your country gets taken over by fascists who want to strip the citizenship of people who criticize them on social media.
Visual inspections, where you turn on your camera and an algorithm decides how old you are, have high error rates that will lead to unfair treatment of people, especially those who are close to the age of 18 (or whatever age is being “protected”), and discriminates against people without access to good cameras or those with visual impairments. Also, how do you know the person the camera is pointing at is the same one planning to access the website?
Goldman also mentions an interesting possible consequence: with more hoops to jump through to access certain publications online, more people will simply give up and traffic to the publication, and therefore that publication’s revenue, will drop. At the same time, that publication now has a whole bunch of data on their remaining users, which it could theoretically collect and sell to data miners, an incentive that puts everyone more at risk.
All of that (and I’ve just listed a small sample–as always, links to everything I discuss are in the transcript at patreon.com/rebecca or skepchick.org) is just a problem with the “segregate” part of Segregate-and-Suppress laws–those are issues regarding how corporations pick and choose who gets access to information. Goldman also goes into the problems with the “suppression,” meaning WHAT content is put behind the age check, and HOW it is kept secret from children. Vague language in the written law combine with an inability for “one-size-fits-all” regulations to NOT discriminate against some populations to create a big mess.
Obviously I find the privacy issues under an authoritarian government to be the worst outcome of these laws, but there are still at least two major negative impacts to children. First is the idea that the government or even a child’s parent always knows what’s best for that child: access to the internet has helped kids escape abusive situations in their home, or supported them in homophobic, misogynistic, or theocratic environments where they otherwise have no way to learn about the outside world.
And perhaps just as bad, suppressing all “adult” content until a person hits some random age, like 16 or 18, at which point you just let them have everything, denies a child the ability to develop important online skills that people NEED today, like skeptically evaluating the things they see. Goldman quotes social media researcher danah boyd, who said ““to raise
children who can function in our complex world, we need to teach them how
to cross the digital street safely.” Imagine keeping a kid inside a house until they’re 18 and then shoving them out the door next to a highway.
Goldman concludes with proof that the flaws he brings up, and the warnings for where this all can lead, aren’t just fantasyland: “some segregate-and-suppress proponents are intentionally using segregate-and-suppress laws to push their censorship agendas. For example,
Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025 and President Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, admitted that age authentication mandates would intentionally serve as a “back door” way to censor pornography.”
And you already know by now, if you’ve seen my past videos: they will not stop with porn. Trans care. Women’s health services. Resources for kids in abusive homes. These “protect the children” laws do nothing of the sort. They only enable a surveillance state that has the ability to censor wrongthink, hurting children and adults alike.
