As social media companies begin to navigate the patchwork of age verification laws in parts of the United States, people in Great Britain are dealing with the frustrating reality of those diktats.
The Online Safety Act (OSA) requires all websites to make sure users are over the age of 18. The sites have to use facial recognition, ID scans, digital identity wallets, or bank documents to confirm someone’s identity, instead of the usual box-ticking exercises that Americans check when they visit certain sites.
Kids Online Safety Act … empowers government bureaucrats to determine what is and is not “harmful” for kids.
It’s a little odd considering that Britons aged 16 will be able to vote in the next national election.
Some platforms attempted to comply with OSA to avoid the £18 million penalty ($24.3 million). X defaulted all UK users to sensitive content filter mode until their age could be determined. Google announced it would use a combination of “human review and automated processes” to determine harmful content. Reddit hired the company Persona for age verification through the use of either a selfie or a copy of someone’s government ID.
Other websites, such as Wikipedia, decided to limit access for UK users.
The age verification measures meant people were blocked from viewing Goya’s famous piece Saturn Devouring His Son, information on men’s fashion, a Conservative MP’s speech on rape gangs, gender neutral toilets, King Richard the Lionheart, and — ironically — the OSA itself.
Instead of accepting OSA and the lack of Internet availability, the British fought back. Days after the regulation went into effect, 530,000 UK citizens signed an online petition demanding the law be repealed. Parliament will debate a potential repeal this fall.
The Government has vowed to keep OSA in place because of concern about “small platforms that host harmful content,” promising a “sensible approach to enforcement.”
Other Brits turned to technology — specifically VPNs or Virtual Private Networks — to breach the online blockade. VPNs allow users to access blocked websites and content by concealing IP addresses and locations. The BBC reported VPN makers saw massive spikes in downloads from various app stores, including an 1,800 percent download spike for a Swiss privacy tech firm.
This use of VPNs didn’t go over well with OSA backers.
The Age Verification Providers Association called on websites to start checking to see if someone was using a VPN to access their sites. The group recommended social media sites see if someone was following or interacting with UK-based accounts and if their time zone matched the UK.
But Dame Rachel de Souza, the Children’s Commissioner for England, called for VPNs to start age verification. “It’s absolutely a loophole that needs closing and that’s one of my major recommendations,” she told BBC Newsnight.
De Souza’s hope is that VPNs will be required to put together “highly effective age assurances to stop underage users from accessing pornography.” She cited a report her office put out claiming children are seeing different violence and so-called “harmful material” before they are “old enough to understand what they are seeing.”
She won’t get her wish. The British government has said VPNs will not be banned because they’re tools for adults.
The push to expand OSA didn’t stop at VPNs. Its defenders turned increasingly combative, branding opponents as enablers of abuse. Labour MP Peter Kyle likened Reform UK MP Nigel Farage to Jimmy Savile, a pedophile TV presenter who assaulted kids before social media was invented. “If Jimmy Savile were alive today he’d be perpetrating his crimes online, and Nigel Farage is saying he’s on their side,” he told Sky News.
After Farage, rightly, demanded an apology, Kyle doubled down. “If you want to overturn the Online Safety Act you are on the side of predators. It is as simple as that,” Kyle wrote on social media.
If you’ve read this far and concluded that this is solely a British politics story, think again. There’s a reason that Farage is set to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on September 3 about the “European threats to American free speech and innovation,” including the Online Safety Act. That reason is that a piece of U.S. federal legislation is being considered that would copycat the Online Safety Act. So, there’s an effort afoot to import this sort of dysfunction and big government to the U.S. Worryingly, the legislation in question is bipartisan, which makes it more likely to pass, and therefore more troubling.
U.S. Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) unveiled the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) in May. It moves the U.S. closer to an age-verification type regime like that in the U.K., and also empowers government bureaucrats to determine what is and is not “harmful” for kids. It’s easy to see how progressives, especially, could use it to throttle conservative speech and pushing leftist-ideology-compliant content under the guise of “protecting the children.”
Blackburn and Blumenthal call KOSA an important piece of legislation to prevent children from seeing things like drugs, alcohol, or pornography online. Blackburn blamed Big Tech for not listening to parental concerns about social media. “I’ve heard too many heartbreaking stories to count from parents who have lost a child because these companies have refused to make their platforms safer by default.”
That is directly counter to the view taken by social conservatives, especially. Last year, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R.-Pa.) said that KOSA “will facilitate digital censorship of culturally conservative views, and even appears to create a new iteration of the Biden Disinformation Board whose makeup also happens to look like it will be determined by applying DEI principles and possibly staffed by regulators hand-picked by Randi Weingarten and the AFT — the exact people who caused so much damage to children during the COVID-19 pandemic.” Meanwhile, allies of Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) have pointed out KOSA could easily be used by Democrats to hammer pro-lifers, and pro-life messages, online.
There is also the matter of data protection and cybersecurity.
“In the age of constant cyberattacks and privacy threats, the government shouldn’t be looking to make the situation worse,” said Shoshana Weissmann, Digital Director and Fellow at R Street Institute, Washington, DC-based free market think tank.
Weissmann believes the only way politicians will change their minds is if they’re presented with evidence that age-verification laws don’t work and can lead to data breaches, identity theft, and public dissatisfaction. “[They’re] only going to be convinced when they see the negative effects more broadly,” she said.
It remains to be seen if KOSA will make it to President Donald Trump’s desk. The U.S. Senate passed KOSA by a 91-3 vote last year. However, it went nowhere in the U.S. House, and the House Judiciary Committee hearing could make the path even steeper.
In the meantime, multiple lawsuits have been filed over state-based age-verification laws. While the U.S. Supreme Court appears to be wanting the suits to make their way through the court system before making any sort of decision, there’s evidence suggesting justices will find the KOSA-like laws unconstitutional.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote August 14 that Mississippi’s age-verification law “would likely violate … First Amendment rights under this Court’s precedents.”
In other words, while the UK may be stuck with OSA for the long-haul — at least while Labour is in power — age-verification in the U.S. could be tossed in the legislative landfill where it belongs.
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