Online threats to children are real, but the headlong pursuit of age verification that we’re seeing around the world is unacceptable in its approach and far too broad in scope — and we simply can’t afford to get this wrong.
To be clear, parents’ concerns are valid and sincere. Few people would argue that kids should have unfettered access to adult material, to self-harm how-tos, to social media platforms that manipulate them and expose them to abuse.
But it’s the very depth of those worries that is being cynically exploited. Age verification as is currently being proposed in country after country would mean the death of anonymity online.
And we know exactly who stands to gain: The same tech giants who built the privacy nightmare that the internet is today.
It bothers me that we know that this bullshit has nothing to do with the kids and is probably being lobbied by the genocide gang and AI companies, even more that it has become obvious that the only value AI has is mass monitoring, but nobody abords the real issue. We are playing their book.
99.9% navigate the system and grow up perfectly fine, or fine enough. We shouldn’t have to completely surrender our anonymity for the tiny percentage that went wrong.
Before the Internet, some people got weird, and in the Internet era, some people are going to go weird. Age verification isn’t going to change that.
This isn’t about the kids. We all know it.