Age-Verification Laws Are Threatening Free Speech

The United Kingdom recently launched a broad system of age verification that requires any platforms that host pornography or other “harmful” content to ensure their users are 18 or older.

Around the world, large swathes of the open web are being replaced by walled gardens. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Texas’s age restriction law. Twenty-one other states have similar laws in place, and more have been proposed.

Australia restricts young people’s access not just to specific websites, but to all social media, and it will soon extend this to search engines.

In Canada, Bill S-209, which would require age verification for adult websites, could soon become law. It is at the reporting stage in Parliament, the final stage before it comes to a vote.

The spread of these age-gating laws is a disaster for free speech, privacy and the future of the internet itself. It is not too late to take a stand against them.

Think about the children

The basic purpose of these laws is admirable enough. We all want to protect children from harm. But we need to ask two questions. First, do they actually accomplish their goal? And second, do the benefits of these laws outweigh the costs?

We should be clear on one thing at the outset. Proponents of the laws sometimes talk about protecting children from exploitation. But age-gating does nothing to address the problem of child pornography. It restricts access based on the age of the user, not the age of the person depicted. And almost all child-abuse material is already on the dark web or on other sites that do not adhere to any laws.

When it comes to restricting young people’s access, the reality is that age gates are easily bypassed by a determined user. A recent Australian survey showed that almost a quarter of teens routinely get around age barriers.

The simplest circumvention method is through the use of a virtual private network to hide a user’s location. These are easy to set up and many are free. However, young people can also, depending on the verification technology being used, upload an adult’s credentials or use simple tricks to fool facial recognition systems.

A massive cost

Even if some young people are circumventing the blocks, many are not, and so age verification will reduce the exposure some young people have to banned material. But this modest victory comes at a massive cost.

First of all, these laws place the burden on adults who are trying to access material they have a right to see. We are, in the name of protecting children, sleepwalking into a dystopian vision of the internet where every user must flash their papers before being allowed to go online.

To verify their age, people have to upload photos of their government-issued identification without knowing if their data is secure. Often, it won’t be.

One major age-verification service left users’ data, including their legal identification, exposed for more than a year.

Second, these laws define harmful material so vaguely that it is impossible for content producers to predict when they will fall afoul of them. This affects not just the producers of explicit content, but the internet as a whole. Smaller websites in particular cannot afford to hire lawyers to vet all of their content, or to fight for their rights if they’re charged.

It’s easier just to block access to everyone in an age-gated jurisdiction, which many sites have already started doing, or to shut down entirely.

Third, the laws make the state the arbiter of what young people can read and see. But what is appropriate to a particular user is highly individual. It depends on their age and their emotional maturity. And inevitably, censorship gives governments the power to impose their own moral agendas.

Not surprisingly, some American states have used their age-gate laws to censor material related to abortion, sexual health and LGBTQ identity.

Russell Vought, at the time the vice president of a conservative lobbying organization and currently the head of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, was caught last year on a hidden camera admitting that age-verification laws were meant as a move towards banning pornography altogether.

In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court found an early age-restriction law, the Communications Decency Act, unconstitutional. Explaining the court’s unanimous decision, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the law “threaten[ed] to torch a large segment of the internet community” and declared that “the interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship.”

Though a more conservative Supreme Court has set aside this precedent, Stevens’ prescient words remain as true today as ever.

Parental involvement

There is a better alternative to age-gating, one that places the power where it belongs: in the hands of parents. Many devices, including those made by Apple and Google, already offer parental controls. While not perfect, they are both less intrusive and harder to circumvent than online age verification systems.

These measures place data security in the hands of a small number of trusted companies and remove the need for constant age verification when accessing different websites. These controls could be mandatory for all mobile devices and computer operating systems.

This is a crucial moment for the internet. The walls are coming up fast, and if we do not stop them now, they will be hard to tear down.