"To enforce it, platforms must age-check their users. In practice that means anyone opening a new account will likely have to prove they're over 16 by uploading an ID or passing a facial age scan."
> likely
It could, of course, use a double-anonymous system like the French one.
Probably not, but I'd rather that they didn't state their guess as fact in the title.
Of course, it'll be possible to circumvent this with a VPN or a proxy. So what this will achieve is it will reduce the number of British muggles on social media, thus bringing us a bit closer to the Good Old Days when only nerds were online. I'm fine with this.
This comment was brought to you by the British Class System: Making Nanny Proud.
This is, of course, the entire goal of the social media control for "children". And you can safely bet that this will creep from social media to essentially all content. Governments have been looking for a means to destroy the anonymous internet for years, and they're making significant progress lately.
This isn't really true. Many of the AV advocates sincerely want to "protect" children. Their idea of "protection" is in fact actively damaging on net, but they truly are obsessed with the boogeymen they keep hearing about in propaganda. Their moral panic is sincere, and more or less wipes their consciousness of any concern about collateral damange to children or adults.
There are of course also people who are in it for the universal surveillance and see the others as useful idiots, but the idiots are genuine.
What disappointments me even more than the UK having these authoritarian polices, is that so many people seemingly support this.
Anonymity online is of course a double-edged sword, but we've seen the authorities, particularly but not exclusively, in the UK use intimidating tactics against those with unfavorable political views. Even when those views didn't break the law (e.g. no calls for violence).
If you also look at how nearly all the existing "verification" systems work, it is just a giant data drag-net, that is absolutely used to associate your real-ID with their advertising analytics. It isn't subtle. Which is why "big tech" (e.g. Meta, Google, Palantir) aren't far behind many proposals.
One thing I saw receive very little attention is that social media seems to be a bit recruitment platform for the various thief gangs in the UK [1]. It suits everyone that kids do this, as they are gullible, cheap to hire, and have a more lenient penal code.
Sure, as with everything, this ban ks circumventable. But more and more I don't see any social utility of these networks at all. It's the cigarettes or our time.
They're not even particularly social any more. Most posting is done by professional influencers and disinformation bots. And criminals, it seems.
The UK gov's approach to internet regulation is absolutely cancerous.
Fully expect pretty much all countries to follow suit though. The "think of the children" angle to force dystopian surveillance is just too neat of a trick to resist. It functionally can't be defeated. No politician is ever going to stand up against it because it risks "oh so you're in favour of harm to children".
It was never going to stop at just adult sites, and it won't stop with social media. I see s world where the ISP will be required to check your ID and "verify your age" because people were using vpn to circumvent these.
Then it's not a stretch to see the government requiring all good citizens to "check in" with the government every month like someone out on parole.
It would be exactly what they would love and like the frog that slowly boils, I believe they'll get it.
> 8. How will age verification work?
We know that having a range of methods to prove age is important to ensure online spaces are accessible.
> Ofcom will set out in the coming months different options for effective forms of age assurance for proving whether someone is over 16 that are accurate, robust, reliable, and fair.
The fact sheet doesn't actually specify how age verification will be done so it the title is bit speculative. However, it's concerning that there's nothing in description about preserving privacy.
These laws exist because social media is extremely damaging to children, destroying their attention, exposing them to online bullying and extortion, and showing them horrific and traumatic content.
Can anyone suggest a better way of protecting kids, other than age verification?
People without teenagers often say that parents can restrict phone access and use parental controls. In reality most parents don’t do this because it’s very hard to get a teenager to accept something that is not “normal” in their friend group.
In a trade off between child protection and online freedom child protection will win.
> These laws exist because social media is extremely damaging to children
There actually isn't much evidence of this. Most of the thrust for this hypothesis comes from The Anxious Generation, which was written by a moral psychologist as opposed to an adolescent researcher, and has been widely criticized by experts.
There is evidence that social media use is associated with poor mental health but the causation piece is contested. Most stories about social media harm are kids who were already struggling.
> Can anyone suggest a better way of protecting kids, other than age verification?
As far as protection from social media, the best solutions I've seen are:
- Antitrust and interoperability: people want social media, just not the toxicity. Give them a way to migrate to better platforms. CA tried this with the Digital Choice Act (AB 2169) but it got shot down by Big Tech lobbyists.
- Privacy protection: rather that detect who's a child and protect only them from being tracked and surveilled, protect everyone.
IMO social media is a red herring. There are much more obvious sources of youth distress with far stronger effects in the data: poverty and economic hardship, abuse in the home, parental mental illness, drug abuse, marginalized demographics (e.g. LGBTQ+ youth have way higher suicide rates).
The kids would be way better served by things like universal healthcare, universal childcare, a better foster care system, etc.
> Can anyone suggest a better way of protecting kids, other than age verification?
I have children and can suggest a better way. You're not going to like it though.
You can't have children without a license.
"But who decides what the test questions are?! Who decides on the criteria?! Who watches the watchers?! What a dystopian nightmare!"
Jokes aside, is the DVLA a dystopian nightmare? There's an obvious set of requirements and test procedures that make sense for getting a driving license, whether we like it or not.
Similarly, there are obvious things most of us can agree make a good parent. E.g. Caring about the emotional health of a child, caring about the physical health of a child, etc. We can disagree on what "caring about mental well being means", but picking the lowest common denominator for the test is better than having absolutely no requirement whatsoever for _creating a human being_.
Children aside, this is just an absurd amount of data to hand over.
At least people will realize that age verification is something everyone will have to do to prove they're >16 - not just something <=16yo's will run into.
I had to do an age check in the UK recently. There were various options (credit card, face scan, etc). The one that I chose was email address. My email address has been around long enough to vote, so I am that old. It seems like a good heuristic. If your email address is, say, 10 years old, you are likely to be old enough to create an account.
I will get downvoted by people suspicious of handing over a lot of personal data, but we do have GDPR laws, and they're not getting me to install a proctopod (tm). Giving someone my email address to verify my age is not a big deal. They're getting my email address to create an account anyway.
The practicalities of implementing 'good enough' age verification, where the website can prove that they conformed to an acceptable approach, do not require giving up all or significant freedoms. Maybe we get to something similar to DNS verification where you need to create a dummy TXT record in an already verified account.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 45.1 ms ] threadhttps://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/nanogram-pi
So, to be clear, I have to tiptoe around cookies but eu-users will simultaneously do this so they can share pictures of their ...
"To enforce it, platforms must age-check their users. In practice that means anyone opening a new account will likely have to prove they're over 16 by uploading an ID or passing a facial age scan."
> likely
It could, of course, use a double-anonymous system like the French one.
Probably not, but I'd rather that they didn't state their guess as fact in the title.
This comment was brought to you by the British Class System: Making Nanny Proud.
There are of course also people who are in it for the universal surveillance and see the others as useful idiots, but the idiots are genuine.
Anonymity online is of course a double-edged sword, but we've seen the authorities, particularly but not exclusively, in the UK use intimidating tactics against those with unfavorable political views. Even when those views didn't break the law (e.g. no calls for violence).
If you also look at how nearly all the existing "verification" systems work, it is just a giant data drag-net, that is absolutely used to associate your real-ID with their advertising analytics. It isn't subtle. Which is why "big tech" (e.g. Meta, Google, Palantir) aren't far behind many proposals.
Sure, as with everything, this ban ks circumventable. But more and more I don't see any social utility of these networks at all. It's the cigarettes or our time.
They're not even particularly social any more. Most posting is done by professional influencers and disinformation bots. And criminals, it seems.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/police-londo...
Fully expect pretty much all countries to follow suit though. The "think of the children" angle to force dystopian surveillance is just too neat of a trick to resist. It functionally can't be defeated. No politician is ever going to stand up against it because it risks "oh so you're in favour of harm to children".
The strategy is equal parts brilliant and evil
Then it's not a stretch to see the government requiring all good citizens to "check in" with the government every month like someone out on parole.
It would be exactly what they would love and like the frog that slowly boils, I believe they'll get it.
> Ofcom will set out in the coming months different options for effective forms of age assurance for proving whether someone is over 16 that are accurate, robust, reliable, and fair.
The fact sheet doesn't actually specify how age verification will be done so it the title is bit speculative. However, it's concerning that there's nothing in description about preserving privacy.
Can anyone suggest a better way of protecting kids, other than age verification?
People without teenagers often say that parents can restrict phone access and use parental controls. In reality most parents don’t do this because it’s very hard to get a teenager to accept something that is not “normal” in their friend group.
In a trade off between child protection and online freedom child protection will win.
There actually isn't much evidence of this. Most of the thrust for this hypothesis comes from The Anxious Generation, which was written by a moral psychologist as opposed to an adolescent researcher, and has been widely criticized by experts.
https://kidsplaytech.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Panic_Fi...
There is evidence that social media use is associated with poor mental health but the causation piece is contested. Most stories about social media harm are kids who were already struggling.
> Can anyone suggest a better way of protecting kids, other than age verification?
As far as protection from social media, the best solutions I've seen are:
- Antitrust and interoperability: people want social media, just not the toxicity. Give them a way to migrate to better platforms. CA tried this with the Digital Choice Act (AB 2169) but it got shot down by Big Tech lobbyists.
- Education: Teach kids how to be responsible with social media. There's a CA bill authored in cooperation with high schoolers doing exactly this: https://edsource.org/2026/social-media-ai-mental-health/7559...
- Privacy protection: rather that detect who's a child and protect only them from being tracked and surveilled, protect everyone.
IMO social media is a red herring. There are much more obvious sources of youth distress with far stronger effects in the data: poverty and economic hardship, abuse in the home, parental mental illness, drug abuse, marginalized demographics (e.g. LGBTQ+ youth have way higher suicide rates).
The kids would be way better served by things like universal healthcare, universal childcare, a better foster care system, etc.
I have children and can suggest a better way. You're not going to like it though.
You can't have children without a license.
"But who decides what the test questions are?! Who decides on the criteria?! Who watches the watchers?! What a dystopian nightmare!"
Jokes aside, is the DVLA a dystopian nightmare? There's an obvious set of requirements and test procedures that make sense for getting a driving license, whether we like it or not.
Similarly, there are obvious things most of us can agree make a good parent. E.g. Caring about the emotional health of a child, caring about the physical health of a child, etc. We can disagree on what "caring about mental well being means", but picking the lowest common denominator for the test is better than having absolutely no requirement whatsoever for _creating a human being_.
At least people will realize that age verification is something everyone will have to do to prove they're >16 - not just something <=16yo's will run into.
I will get downvoted by people suspicious of handing over a lot of personal data, but we do have GDPR laws, and they're not getting me to install a proctopod (tm). Giving someone my email address to verify my age is not a big deal. They're getting my email address to create an account anyway.
The practicalities of implementing 'good enough' age verification, where the website can prove that they conformed to an acceptable approach, do not require giving up all or significant freedoms. Maybe we get to something similar to DNS verification where you need to create a dummy TXT record in an already verified account.