Age verification for everyone, everywhere, all at once.

I’m writing from Australia where the federal government introduced a ban on under 16 year olds accessing social media platforms, which include:

• Facebook, Instagram, and Threads (Meta)
• TikTok (and its companion app Lemon8)
• Snapchat
• YouTube
• X (formerly Twitter)
• Reddit
• Twitch and Kick (streaming platforms)
• Bluesky

It’s important to note that this had the effect of introducing age verification requirements for everyone using those sites.

The obligation lies on the platforms to develop and implement their own age verification systems and many appear to be inferring age from platform usage patterns. This is effectively invisible to users who pass these verification checks, but it will impose friction and more invasive checking on users who don’t fit statistical norms for social media consumption and production.

Now the Australian government has gone a step further by proposing to restrict six types of content for users under 16 years of age on all Internet sites accessible in Australia.*

The restrictions include:

• Content promoting disordered eating: Material that promotes, encourages, or accelerates eating disorders.
• Misogynistic content: Material that promotes hostile ideas about women and gender equality.
• Pornography: Any sexually explicit material.
• Glorification of crime: Material that promotes or glorifies criminal activity.
• Life-endangering stunts: Content that glorifies or promotes dangerous, risky, or life-threatening physical behavior.
• Serious mental health distress: Severe online abuse, harassment, and cyberbullying. [1, 2, 3]

Only one restriction applies to users over 16 years of age:

• Illegal content

We can have a conversation about whether those restrictions make sense for people under 16 years of age. At a bare minimum they are going to restrict adolescents’ access to information about sex and drugs, and you better believe that will affect beneficial public health campaigns and resources aimed at this vulnerable age bracket.

But what I want to highlight is the way that restricting some types of content for some users (under 16 years of age) required age verification for all users on all sites anywhere on the web.

This is a huge regulatory burden that has to fall on someone’s shoulders.

• Are websites going to implement that? What kind of industry in age verification services are we creating if they are?
• Are internet service providers going to implement it? How will they be able to detect if content requested by a user falls into one of the six categories if so?

Australia is a tiny market for social media and search, but it can experiment with policy models that can readily diffuse to much larger jurisdictions like the United Kingdom, where they may cause more serious harm to the markets and profits of the multinational mega-corporations controlled by the ‘broligarchy.’

I personally don’t hate that we can exert that kind of leverage and achieve influence disproportionate to our population and market scale.

But if the obligation for age verification falls on all sites and the regulatory burden lands on sites themselves, much smaller operators will find they have no choice but to block Australian visitors altogether.

This will only affect users who are honest or technically incapable — everyone else will just use a VPN to access geoblocked content — and the whole point of the scheme will be moot.