Age verification: what’s the harm?

Welcome, friends, to my grubby little corner of the internet. A corner so strewn with obscenity that the UK government has decided you must prove you’re a grown-up before you can access certain parts of it. The UK’s new Online Safety Act has come into force, so UK people might have noticed a bunch of websites suddenly demanding you take a selfie, share your credit card details, or jump through another hoop to prove that you’re over 18. Quite a few of my friends have been discussing this in the pub, because for understandable reasons people who aren’t embedded in the world of online pornography or internet law are suddenly curious about why the internet is now so very broken. They’re also often convinced that the government will change its mind and therefore no one really needs to worry. I’ve had this conversation so many times now that I reckon I’ve got the basis for a fairly solid layperson’s guide to age verification: what it is, how it affects you, and why we absolutely, genuinely do need to worry.

↫ Girl on the Net

Girl on the Net basically published the definitive guide on why age verification online, as currently implemented in the United Kingdom, and explored by the United States and the European Union, is such a terrible idea. It’s a privacy disaster, a clear onramp for Christian extremists to go after LGBTQ+ content, it doesn’t “protect the children”, it’s easily circumvented, breaks accessibility, casts such a wide net that it even hits sites like Wikipedia, and so, so much more.

Whenever anyone online tries to sell you on age verification as a means to “think of the children”, you can just point them to the linked article. If, after reading it, they still believe this is the way to protect children from seeing naked people (while leaving the door to the most brutal forms of violent content wide open, of course, as is tradition), they will have either ulterior motives, or are some form of extremist you can’t argue with anyway.

The demonization of sexual content and the sex workers that produce it as a means to introduce strict authoritarian control over the internet is something that will never go away. “Think of the children” is an incredibly powerful rallying cry for authoritarians to scare sheltered boomers into accepting pretty much any draconian measure, regardless of efficacy, and I doubt we will ever definitely win this fight.

But we won’t have to sit down and accept it.