Have Your ID Card Ready

“Adolescence,” this year’s Netflix smash-hit miniseries about a tween boy who kills one of his female classmates, ends with his parents reflecting on the part of him they knew nothing about: his digital footprint. 

“He’d come home, slam the door, straight upstairs, on the computer,” his mother, Manda (Christine Tremarco) says through tears. Her husband, Eddie (played by show co-creator Stephen Graham) bristles. “All kids are like that these days, aren’t they? You don’t know what they’re watching in their room, love. Could be watching porn or anything.” 

Her point is that their son was probably affected by corners of the internet he should never have seen. His point is that there was no way to know his browsing habits for certain, nor was there a way to adequately limit them, even if they had taken an interest in his online life. 

They’re both right. The internet is massive and labyrinthian. It holds a lot of overstimulating, scary and potentially corrosive content. It’s designed to be addictive. It’s also designed to platform and fund the loudest and most controversial voices. Allowing kids to grow up on the internet without guardrails is not ideal for society. I was raised in an era of such universal digital traumatization that virtual grooming and snuff videos are memed by my online cohort as a ubiquitous part of modern digital childhood. And I’m not even a digital native. It’s the generation after mine that was raised on the modern internet at full power. 

There are conversations to be had and improvements to be made regarding youth on the internet. One solution being proffered at the moment by governments and private social media companies are various age-verification laws and practices designed to prevent youth from accessing portions of the internet that are harmful and/or sexually graphic. But like so many conservative crusades of the past and present — anti-abortion campaigns, anti-transgender policies and anti-pornography legislations — these laws make props of “the children” to justify invasive and purposefully vague constraints that, in practice, do more to generally suppress than protect. These latest calls to protect youth are insidious in ways that have already been proven, from enforcing denials of gender-affirming care, contraceptive and abortion access, to using broad and nebulous constraints on browsing to expand the toolkit for 21st century censorship. 

You’re probably at least somewhat informed about these various civil right encroachments and culture war shifts. Age-verification laws could make it much harder to even keep informed. 

It is not surprising that these age-verification laws have already gained a legitimate foothold in the United Kingdom, a country consistently at the forefront of invasive surveillance culture. There are more surveillance cameras per person in the U.K. than any country, save for China. There are endless attempts (across both Labor and Tory regimes) to create legislation that grants the government access to private digital data and biometric information. The country’s latest attempt is the newly rolled out Online Safety Act, which the government describes as an attempt to prevent children from “accessing harmful and age-inappropriate content.” Under this act, anything deemed “harmful content” can only be accessed by posting your ID or live scanning your face as means of age verification. It does not take much imaginative labor to understand what a wildly slippery slope this is. “Harmful content” is a subjective term, and websites in the U.K. are already self-censoring to avoid any content classified as “harmful” in anticipation of overly litigious government overreach.  

And what might the powers-that-be in America deem “harmful”? Would children or those unwilling to give their identity over to digital platforms be able to access basic information about sex education? Transgender rights? Palestine? Slavery? If some of these hypotheticals feel like a reach, consider that Reddit requires users to post age verification through the for-profit artificial intelligence facial recognition app Persona to access World War II or Al Jazeera Subreddits.  

The conservative platform the Heritage Project and Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., support the proposed American iteration of the U.K.’s OSA — the Kids’ Online Safety Act (or KOSA) — specifically because they feel it will help tamp down what they see as “transgender indoctrination.” But what MAGA calls indoctrination is really just youth accessing information about gender identity and potential paths to finding an online community. The “transgender indoctrination” in question could very well be a TikTok For You Page with the occasional video of a transgender person accessing gender-affirming care and living a normal and content life. 

Attempts to implement restrictions that align with the OSA’s requirements so far have been spotty and ineffective. Spotify’s attempt to code an explicit lyric ban in the U.K. is consistently defective. The BBC announced that porn site traffic plummeted directly after OSA was rolled out, but this statistic only accounted for major mainstream porn sites (as anyone who has spent time on the internet likely knows, even if you’re not actively looking for it, there are essentially endless non-mainstream sites and servers that host pornography). The Guardian has reported that since the OSA’s gradual rollout, children’s exposure to pornography has actually increased. It seems the only thing these acts produce is savvier online behavior at an earlier age. 

Since 2022, KOSA has been introduced to the Senate twice and met with broad bipartisan support. In its July 2023 iteration, the act passed 91-3 in the Senate before fizzling out in Congress. Like Britain’s OSA, KOSA functions from a “duty of care” perspective, in which online platforms are responsible for ensuring children are not harmed by content available on their sites. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to civil liberty defense in the digital world, has voiced concerns about KOSA since its fruition, and remains vigorously opposed even as the bill has been supposedly adjusted to address censorship concerns. The EFF points out that the list of what qualifies as harmful is a vast blanket of topics and themes, ranging from mental illness to eating disorders to drug use. “Forums won’t be able to host posts with messages like ‘love your body,’ ‘please don’t do drugs,’ or ‘here’s how I got through depression’ without fearing that an attorney general or FTC lawyer might later decide the content was harmful,” the EFF has warned.  

It may be sentimental to imagine a world where kids are still earnestly utilizing community forums and message boards, or accessing information from grassroots, independent sex education platforms like my generation did. But even if these spaces are a dying digital breed, it remains essential to hold space for them under the principle of freedom of speech and freedom of access to information. 

The issue is not a partisan one. Both the ACLU and Vice President JD Vance warn that age-verification laws may impede freedom of speech; while Elon Musk, Joe Biden and Donald Trump Jr. tout the act’s potential prophylactic value. But the impetus behind age and identity verification is a profoundly reactionary one. Instead of encouraging nuanced, realistic conversations about internet access and safety — including giving parents the resources (including the time and energy) to engage with their kids regarding what they are consuming and interacting with online — governments are lobbying to make blanket policies that decide what can and cannot be privately accessed. 

As Congress moves toward another vote on the latest iteration of KOSA, private companies have begun introducing their own iterations of age-based imitations. YouTube recently rolled out new AI technology that decides your age based on what you watch, and then limits what you can see from this algorithmic determination. If adults want to access “adult” videos, then they will have to share their identification. Meta’s Instagram and Facebook already require you to post your ID to access certain features. 

Both governmental and privately organized age-based limitations are destined to — are arguably designed to — move the goalposts of what qualifies as harmful (or offensive, or obscene). The internet is now an undeniable part of our day-to-day lives. It’s where we access most of our information and where we develop social connections and belief systems. Deciding what qualifies as “harmful” for all children in this space is going to be a subjective practice and appears ready to quickly lean to the side of censorship. Think of the ways in which our government splits hairs over when and what qualifies someone for an acceptable abortion, or who among the LGBTQ+ community is deemed “normal” enough to be welcomed into the dominant social fabric. The danger is that tangible legislation based on subjective perspectives of harm will only accelerate limits on what can be accessed and communicated online, and midwife a fresh round of culture wars.

Even if we were to take “the children” out of it, there are still security and privacy aspects to be considered. Adults who support these laws — and profess to have no problem sharing their photo ID — should ponder the endless data breaches that occur, then decide if they really want to be giving live scans of their face and photo identification over to Instagram, Facebook and Pornhub. Those who feel certain that they have “nothing to hide” should remember that their “clean” searches, casual forum chats and political conversations with online friends could become tomorrow’s “harmful content.”