[23195] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Script of my national radio report yesterday on
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lauren Weinstein)
Tue Feb 24 10:48:45 2026
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2026 07:39:43 -0800
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
To: privacy-dist@vortex.com
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This is the script of my national radio report yesterday on the
worsening mess around age verification for social media. As always,
there may have been minor wording variations from this script as I
presented this report live on air.
- - -
Well, the technical term for the situation regarding social media age
restrictions is "utter train wreck." Indeed as more countries and U.S.
states work to enact attempts at social media age restrictions (that
now apparently includes California by the way) pretty much all of the
problems that critics of this entire concept predicted have been
coming true, but politicians on a bipartisan basis just keep plowing
on pushing this stuff, as if they're living on some another planet and
can't see what's happening here on Earth.
Some of the laws are in litigation, some are already in force, but
everywhere you look it's an escalating mess. It's important to note
that by and large, I think it's fair to say that most persons pushing
for these age restrictions have laudable motives and are frustrated by
bad social media content that their kids may interact with. This is
completely understandable. But pushing concepts that do not actually
solve this problem -- and in fact can make the situation even worse,
is not good policy to say the least. It can result in terrible privacy
problems for everyone -- including adults and children -- and
potentially drives children to disreputable sites on the Net that are
of far more concern than the mainstream social media sites.
Australia has been considered to be the big test case with their under
16 years old ban, and most independent observers are saying it's not
going well there. Many parents are helping their children evade the
ban (it may be as high as 1 in 3 parents or more) because they feel
the ban is too restrictive and cutting their children off from useful
and educational content -- because indeed not EVERYTHING on social
media is bad. In some ways a universal ban for social media use is
like banning children from entering libraries because there are SOME
books in there that could be inappropriate for them.
And of course by saying "you can't do this" the bans turn social media
into a "forbidden fruit" that makes them even more attractive to kids,
many of whom are far more Internet skilled than the adults around
them. So, kids are using VPNs to bypass the ban, they're using AI and
other methods to fool various systems that are supposed to verify ages
based on video selfies. They're using the accounts of their parents
(as I mentioned, often with their parents approval), or the accounts
of older siblings or friends.
We've discussed before the major risks associated with the provision
of government credentials for ID purposes that may be required for
some of these age verification systems at various times. Remember,
adult users have to be verified as well to prove that they aren't
children! And we know there have already been major breaches of
security of some of these systems, despite assurances that their
specific designs only held the IDs for a brief time.
In fact, the social media site Discord is currently embroiled in a
major controversy involving their age verification plans, age
verification tests, which third parties were involved in all this, how
secure the ID data was and is, and more complicating factors -- the
bottom line is that many of their users are absolutely livid over
Discord's apparent behavior in this regard, especially since there had
reportedly previously been a breach that exposed many Discord users'
government ID information!
Most observers feel that all of this is a harbinger of worse
situations to come. And then of course there are all the concerns
about how various governments could use age verification ID data for
tracking exactly how individuals use the broader Internet, by
expanding age verification requirements beyond social media, creating
a vast Internet surveillance regime such as is present in China.
We all want to protect the children, but so far, age verification does
not appear to be the right tool for that job, and instead may be
dragging us in a direction that may actually do more harm.
- - -
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Signal: By request on need to know basis
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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