{"id":196305,"date":"2025-10-13T04:29:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-13T04:29:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/196305\/"},"modified":"2025-10-13T04:29:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-13T04:29:12","slug":"welcome-to-the-papers-please-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/196305\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to the \u2018papers, please\u2019 internet"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is The Stepback<\/a>, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the downward spiral of the internet, follow Adi Robertson<\/a>. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers\u2019 inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Back in 2018, two years after the UK government decided to implement mandatory hard age gates<\/a> on adult websites, it floated an idea called the \u201cporn pass.\u201d The porn pass was a physical card you\u2019d buy by handing over your ID to a brick-and-mortar shop attendant. It would contain authentication information that would act as a low-tech anonymization system, letting you verify you were over 18 years old online without entering personal details.<\/p>\n

The idea of having to get internet porn by visiting a corner shop was largely considered funny. It revealed the tortured lengths regulators had stretched to balance their plan with the inevitable risks to privacy, inadvertently demonstrating how difficult that balance was in the process. Few were surprised when the whole verification project was scrapped in 2019<\/a>, seemingly for good.<\/p>\n

But the age verification wars were just beginning, and this year proponents have been chalking up win after win. The UK\u2019s Online Safety Act<\/a> now mandates age-gating on much of social media in addition to porn sites. The EU<\/a> and Australia<\/a> are currently trialing age verification measures and they\u2019re hotly debated in other countries, including Canada<\/a>. The US Supreme Court has overturned a decades-old precedent by greenlighting adult content age verification<\/a> and at least temporarily allowing such requirements<\/a> for social media. Critics who warned of threats to privacy and free speech have had their fears largely disregarded. Companies that once objected have started to comply.<\/p>\n

What happened between 2019 and 2025? Arguably, a major factor is simply that the internet has taken over more and more of our lives and lots of people are souring on it. Critics of age verification long emphasized that even if you didn\u2019t care about pure \u201cknow it when I see it\u201d smut, you should worry that age verification laws would prevent children from reaching valuable educational resources while making adults hesitant to access meaningful speech on the internet. But a growing constituency across the political spectrum seems dubious there\u2019s much of value online at all.<\/p>\n

Early age verification launches are vindicating many of those critics\u2019 warnings, at least in the short term. The UK\u2019s splashy OSA rollout created a rapid demonstration of nearly every problem<\/a> age verification poses. There was a thicket of different services to give an ID or facial scan to, each one creating a fresh security risk if a breach occurred. There were trivially simple circumvention methods, like video game photo modes<\/a>. There was a flood of VPN usage followed by ominous (though so far denied<\/a>) questions about VPN bans. And there were social networks blocking content many people believed was appropriate and worthwhile for minors, plus a number of small sites that chose to leave the country.<\/p>\n

The US has seen much spottier rollouts, and many states were already age-gating porn while awaiting the Supreme Court\u2019s ruling on it. But there are still clear indicators of the risks. The social network Bluesky began blocking users from Mississippi<\/a> after the Supreme Court allowed that state\u2019s social media age-gating law to take effect, saying some provisions, like keeping ongoing track of which users are children, would be too difficult to comply with. So on both sides of the Atlantic, there\u2019s evidence that \u2014 as prophesied \u2014 age verification laws disproportionately burden smaller services.<\/p>\n

About the only thing missing at this point is a large-scale exposure of personal information submitted specifically under a verification law. But we\u2019re getting close. Earlier this month, a third-party customer service provider for Discord was breached, leaking user data that included potentially 70,000 users\u2019 government IDs<\/a>. Before that, a catastrophic hack of the dating advice app Tea<\/a> offered a preview of how dangerous having your ID leaked online could be.<\/p>\n

Any benefits that do result from age-gating will probably take time to emerge, so it\u2019s hard to even have an argument about whether they\u2019re worth the tradeoffs. Some of the alleged harms that justify age-gating are fairly easy to discount, like US conservatives\u2019 unsubstantiated claims that porn impairs brain development<\/a>. Others are complicated and unsettled questions, like whether social media overall harms teens\u2019 mental health<\/a>. And still others are obvious individual tragedies, like instances of harassment and sextortion \u2014 the question is whether there are other, less drastic ways to prevent them.<\/p>\n

The OSA, which includes other provisions, like requiring sites to submit risk assessments, has become a political wedge. In July, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he felt<\/a> \u201cvery strongly that we should protect our young teenagers,\u201d and a government response to a petition<\/a> said there were \u201cno plans to repeal the Online Safety Act.\u201d But the law has antagonized American-owned sites like 4chan<\/a> that are loosely aligned with Donald Trump, and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has promised he\u2019d repeal it<\/a> over free speech concerns.<\/p>\n

Other countries are still moving forward with their plans, too. The EU\u2019s age verification measures are currently in testing, and Australia\u2019s are scheduled to start taking effect in December<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Age verification on porn sites seems here to stay in the US, but blanket social media verification is on shakier ground. Despite allowing Mississippi\u2019s state law to proceed for now, the only commentary the Supreme Court offered says it\u2019s probably unconstitutional. The most complicated gray area may be sites that don\u2019t ban porn but also host huge volumes of other material, like Reddit and Bluesky.<\/p>\n

Companies are busy trying to pass the buck. Meta, Google, and Apple are in a US lobbying war<\/a> over laws that put the responsibility for verifying ages<\/a> onto app store operators instead of individual services \u2014 Meta unsurprisingly likes that idea, while Apple and Google unsurprisingly don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

But regardless of how the laws turn out, many platforms \u2014 including Roblox<\/a> and YouTube<\/a> \u2014 are beefing up verification measures on their own. The measures sometimes involve analyzing account creation dates and usage patterns rather than requiring IDs or facial scans. But if that analysis gets a user\u2019s age wrong, they\u2019ll often have to upload\u2026 you guessed it, a photo ID.<\/p>\n

Europe and North America aren\u2019t remotely the pioneers of online ID checks. South Korea started requiring internet users to submit their real names as early as 2004, and China has regulated children\u2019s internet use right down to the hours they can play video games<\/a>. That said, South Korea\u2019s rules have been repeatedly modified and in some cases overturned by courts<\/a> due to practical problems and speech concerns, while China\u2019s rules are part of a surveillance and censorship regime that\u2019s now punishing people for being sad online<\/a>.There are many child safety proposals that aren\u2019t explicitly age verification mandates, but that may amount to backdoor gating \u2014 nearly any rule that adds special requirements for underage users logically implies that sites have to identify these users somehow.However, lawmakers do have meaningful alternatives. They include more funding for agencies that investigate online child exploitation and laws that target specific harmful behaviors like invasive ads and lax privacy standards for all ages. The EU and UK already have all-around digital privacy frameworks. The US very much does not.The US is overall in a spectacularly bad position<\/a> to start limiting online anonymity \u2014 we\u2019ve got much bigger problems that current child safety proposals will only make worse.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Adi RobertsonClose\"AdiAdi Robertson<\/p>\n

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