Internet Age-Gates Are A Growing Global Threat
from the global-surveillance dept
The internet is an essential resource for young people and adults to access information, explore community, and find themselves—both inside countries and across continents. Yet governments around the world continue to introduce and implement legislation requiring all online users to verify their ages before accessing the digital space. In some cases, politicians are going further, putting forth proposals to ban social media for younger users.
In late 2025, Australia’s government rolled out the first complete ban on users under 16 from having social media accounts. In this sweeping regime, platforms are required to introduce age assurance tools to block under-16s, demonstrate that they have taken “reasonable steps” to deactivate accounts used by under-16s, and prevent any new accounts being created, or face fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars ($32 million USD). The 10 banned platforms—Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Snapchat, YouTube, TikTok, Kick, Reddit, Twitch, and X—have each said they’ll comply with the legislation, which led to young people losing access to their accounts overnight. Reddit is currently challenging the law in Australian courts on constitutional grounds. Recent research notes how the ban is preventing teenagers from accessing news in the country.
In the United Kingdom, rules took effect in mid-2025 under the Online Safety Act that require all online services available in the country to assess whether they host content considered harmful to children; if so, these services must introduce age checks to prevent children from accessing such content. Online services are also required to change their algorithms and moderation systems to ensure that content defined as harmful, like violent imagery, is not shown to young people.
This approach is reckless, short-sighted, and we’ve already seen it introduce more harm to the young people that it is trying to protect. The UK’s scramble to find an effective age verification method shows us that there isn’t one, and we’ve spent years urging UK politicians to abandon any measures that require platforms to collect data or remove privacy protections around users’ identities.
Earlier this year, Indonesia’s Communications and Digital Affairs Minister, Meutya Hafid, announced that users under 16 would have their accounts on “high risk” platforms deactivated from 28 March. The platforms subject to this ban are YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bigo Live, and Roblox; with Hafid noting how this policy would make Indonesia “the first non-Western country to delay children’s access to digital spaces according to age.”
Similarly, the Malaysian government has recently pushed forward with plans to ban users under 16 from having accounts on social media platforms with at least 8 million users in Malaysia, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Users under the age of 16 are being told to download or transfer their data from these platforms in one month before the restrictions are applied. Platforms failing to comply with the ban may face penalties of up to $2.5 million USD.
In Latin America, Brazil approved a new law in 2025 establishing that providers of information technology products and services directed to children and teenagers, or likely to be accessed by them, must conduct age checks when their products and services offer risks to underage users. Regulation requires age assurance for products and services that are not allowed for children and adolescents in accordance with Brazilian legislation. App stores and operating systems are required to provide age signals for other providers.
While the law is already in force, full compliance with its obligations is expected for early 2027, after the approval of further regulations and a transition period, and the authority responsible for enforcing the law is the Brazilian National Data Protection Agency. The list of concerns regarding the implementation of the law include: the wide scope of products and services that may fall within age-check obligations, how these obligations can affect non-proprietary operating systems and free software projects, and how effective the law’s crucial data protection safeguards will be in a context of likely widespread age checks for accessing content online.
Similarly, the European Union has taken large steps towards mandatory age verification that could undermine privacy, expression, and participation rights for everyone. Politicians are promoting an EU-wide approach to age verification through its age verification “app,” which will be fully interoperable with the Digital Identity Wallet. While this mini-app has been announced as technically ready to be rolled out “for citizens to use,” it comes with its own realm of potential privacy and security concerns, such as long-term identifiers (which could result in tracking) and over-exposure of personal information.
The European Commission also supports age verification in various legislative initiatives, from proposals that would allow or mandate companies to scan our communication (“Chat Control”) to non-binding guidelines of existing laws, such as the Digital Services Act. The EU Parliament, too, has proposed an EU digital minimum age of 16 for access to social media, a move that aligns with EU Commission’s president Ursula von der Leyen’s recent public support for measures inspired by Australia’s model. To all these initiatives EFF has provided one consistent response: mandatory age verification measures are not the right way to protect young people.
These proposals restrict the fundamental rights of young people to speak to each other and to access information. They also force all internet users, not just those under a certain age, to upload private data—like a face scan or passport—in order to access a website or service. In considering the vast scope of privacy issues pertaining to the collection, storage, and sharing of this personal information, the problems of age verification in restricting free speech are compounded by these reckless and harmful approaches to verification.
The problem of censorship and surveillance goes far beyond the borders of the internet. EFF continues to explore support for legislative and litigation challenges that recognize how these laws harm everyone’s rights to privacy, free expression and due process.
Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.
Filed Under: age verification, australia, brazil, eu, indonesia, malaysia, uk
Comments on “Internet Age-Gates Are A Growing Global Threat”
I’m kind of surprised how rapidly this all seems to have rolled out, after years of what seemed like mainly just talking about it. What changed behind the scenes?
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Let’s see. There’s the growing explosion in popularity of AI/LLM services, the death of Jeffrey Epstein and the subsequent broadening of investigations into his web of human trafficking, American conservatives gaining massive political power and using it to push measures designed to censor porn (itself a gateway to censoring otherwise anodyne speech that conservatives don’t like), Roblox’s big problem with sex exploitation, underage sexting becoming more prevalent, the push by financial institutions to debank sex workers and adult content creators (as well as the sites that host adult-oriented content)…and that’s just from a couple of minutes of thinking. No one drop is singularly responsible for the flood, but the flood happens all the same.
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Conservatives want to control what kids see and perceive about Israel bombing schools and hospitals and LGBT/racial issues. They see how hard it is to control the narrative when kids are sharing actual footage.
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Obviously, but they’ve been saying that for years, here anyways. In the past year there’s been a flood of new laws, abroad. So something has changed, clearly.
Re: Re: Re:2 Jon Haidt is the crackpot who started it all
I’m surprised no one in this thread has mentioned the elephant in the room:
Jon Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation” is what kick-started a lot of the panic about social media and teen mental health, despite the fact that it’s thesis is virtually unsupported by any reliable research.
The best one-page resource on how dangerously wrong he really is:
https://tinyurl.com/agpanic
Politicians around the world are cutting off isolated teens from outside contact while pushing an end to anonymity online, all while creating a legal regime that only the largest tech companies with the most legal and financial resources can comply with.
Everyone should share that link far and wide ☝️
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Exactly the kind of catalyst I was wondering might have happened. Thanks for the explanation, and the link.
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Epstein died years ago now, and America is the one place where conservatives, try as they might, really CAN’T force through these laws the way other countries with slightly weaker protections on speech can. Yet there’s been a huge flood of these laws in the past year — all abroad, where American conservatives, well, aren’t.
I hope I’m not just being ornery here.
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There’s been quite a few in the U.S., including one that went to SCOTUS recently (Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton) where it was upheld last year.
Nothing national yet, but there’s been a bunch of state ones at varying degrees. And on the national level, KOSA hasn’t been all that far off (it passed the Senate 91-3, but died in the House)
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I don’t think really anything changed, other than one of them eventually passed and wasn’t struck down by a court. There’s been a lot of talk/pressure around it for years, but once there was an actual example, the flood gates were open.
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You mean the Texas one, yeah, I guess. But these other countries aren’t just talking about adult sites, some of them are just talking about basically all social media.
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Social media bans are fucking awful, but they’re largely about banning a method of communication (which will be routed around in short order by people smart enough to do that). Bans on porn are inherently more dangerous because supporters of those bans have plenty of reasons to support the bans. They’re also counting on opponents of those bans to be embarassed about defending porn—especially the kind of gross/disturbing niche porn that makes even regular porn watchers go “what the fuck”.
Porn is the canary in the free speech coal mine. Where censorship of porn goes, censorship of other kinds of speech is soon to follow. Definitely oppose social media bans, but take these de facto porn bans seriously, too. If you, as an adult, aren’t “allowed” to view even a simple Playboy pinup without forking over your ID and your credit card info to some sketchy data company that would just as soon sell that data than protect it, you can bet your ass that non-pornographic content that the censors deem “objectionable” will require the same treatment soon enough.
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I understand the canary theory. The point is, other countries are already PAST the canary and on to even worse things like banning social media. So they’re even farther along on this ride than the situation in the US would suggest.
If they sincerely wanted to tackle exposure to, influence by, and spreading of online misinformation, they’d introduce cognitive tests over a certain age like they do for driving.
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Don’t be silly, that kind of law would get in the way of all the misinformation the backers of these laws are spreading!
Like anything, no one will see the issue until some is abused, hurt, raped, or killed because of things like this.
Parents who like abusing their kids are rejoicing at these laws further entrenching their control of not just access, but information and communication.
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Here in the UK it’s just a backdoor renewal of Section 28. We already have measurements of the consequences of last time.
Not just for kids
It is seriously under reported how much this will affect Adults e.g everyone. If sites must age gate, they must collect ids for everyone. I don’t see a way to do this that doesn’t lead to massive additional id logging.
I think the kids will be smart enough to avoid being blocked. They will us their parents credit card or ID to get in. Heck, I imagine the kids could ask a LLM to creat an ID that would pass. The rest of us old f*cks will blindly give out our REAL-IDs and be tracked.
One of the biggest benefits of the internet is the ability to talk to people outside your personal sphere. It’s similar to the exposure to diversity that a lot of people get when they leave home for college. You can see how a bunch of conservatives who are dismayed by their inability to control what the youth access and talk about would want to lock them out so they can be limited to the indoctrination of their immediate vicinity.
Internet access helps LGBTQ kids when their parents are unsupportive hateful bigots. Internet access helps kids on the spectrum find other people who share their interests and won’t think they’re weird. Internet access helps kids who are being abused finds strategies to report and escape from those situations.
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“And all of that is awful.” — the average conservative, probably
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And this is why the “social media is harmful” grift isn’t just the same as antivaxxism in business model but also in anti-morality, as it relies on intenionally denying these facts to present a skewd harmful over helpful narrative.
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Which is exactly why this wave of new social media bans is so alarming.
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Internet access =/= social media access. I profited immensely from having web access as a youth, but that was before social media. And I watched almost every community I was in die and be replaced by an amorphous social media bubble that was less suited to users’ needs but more convenient to use, so it won.
I’m not saying this is necessarily a good thing. But social media isn’t the web; they just worked very hard to make it seem that way.
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It depends on what you consider to be “social media.” Every platform with interactivity can become “social media” if given a large enough user base. If we’re just talking about algorithm-heavy scrolling and sharing sites, you’ll still catch non-social media focused sites in that net. STEAM communities, video game chat features, Wikipedia discussion pages, etc. are ripe for social interaction that isn’t considered traditional social media. Kids will find a resource if you push them out of dominant social media platforms. Cory Doctorow used this concept in Little Brother and For the Win. And kids banned from their phones have used the tablet built into their family’s smart fridge.
And on the other side of it, social media is often how people find things on the internet they otherwise would not have been exposed to (for good or for bad). Social media is where kids get political perspectives they won’t hear at home. It could be gamergate and 4chan or it can be ICE protests and universal basic income discussions.
I was social on the internet from the beginning of my experience with it, prior to “social media.” You could chat with people on BBSs and that could be toxic. It was just fewer people and owners/administrators had fewer users to regulate and it was easier to ban people. Compuserve and AOL and Prodigy had chat forums. LiveJournal preceded MySpace. The confluence of Facebook and smart phones just got so many more people online and into social media such that it was more profitable to manipulate what they see. Advertising on a platform with fifty regular users united by their interest in trains didn’t make sense unless you sold train stuff.
But back to my original point. Legislators would have to regulate internet access to prevent “social media” access, unless they’re just happy with the illusion that social media just means Facebook and similar platforms. And they’ve already proposed stuff like age-gating at the OS level in California.
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If this age-gating purgatory comes to fruition in a broad sense, it’s also going to push websites that could potentially be labelled “fit for age-gating” deeper into the dark, even if the content is completely benign.
And then in a few years, we’ll have politicians starting another social panic over “harmful” sites that they can’t age-gate.
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My favorite “harm” the psychopaths screech social media use causes is “it makes kids not obey their parents!”
At the core of it, the motive of social media bans is to inflict abuse on children.
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The whole “parents rights” movement is a variation on the “states rights” argument. Right to what…? Right to indoctrinate your kids? To abuse them without intervention? To punish them for being individuals rather than clones who adopt your personal ideologies?
The big tech companies want this.
The big tech companies want this. They wanted this all along.
I am in Australia and well over 16 but when I try and use youtube it insists I log in to “prove I am not a bot”!!! Which is ironic as google is the biggest bot crawler there is.
Google, youtube, alphabet, facebook, they want everybody to log in. They want to know who you are so they can store all your data.
Just to clarify, the UK OSA doesn’t apply to ALL online services – only user-to-user services, search services, and adult content providers.
We would be in deep doo doo if age verification was required across the whole UK internet experience… surely no one would ever contemplate that as a poorly thought out governmental announcement…
Honestly? I don’t think so. They get that data without logins, these days. They won by being convenient, they keep winning by being everywhere. Anything that limits their spread, they’ll hate.
Hang on to those old email addresses and accounts
I foresee a market where you can resell or bequeath your 20 year old internet account to a new person who needs them…
Groups pushing these things are not even trying to encourage privacy focused measures to meet their purported goal of age-gates.