Access Denied. Age Verification as a Blueprint for Digital Control?
Why Age Verification and Social Media Bans Do Not Protect Minors But Threaten Civil Liberties
Governments across the globe are increasingly driving initiatives to restrict children’s and adolescents’ access to social media. In doing so, they typically point to the possible mental health consequences of social media use. In this line of argument, platforms often appear as the central cause of complex societal and individual problems. Yet while political demands tend to present causes and solutions with deceptive simplicity, a closer look reveals that large parts of the debate rest less on robust empirical findings than on intuitions and recurring reflexes against new media. At the same time, such measures are discussed without adequately considering their far-reaching consequences for fundamental rights. Ultimately, demands for social media bans for minors and comprehensive verification obligations put nothing less than the open internet itself up for debate. History and regulatory experience show that child protection has repeatedly served as a legitimizing framework for sweeping restrictions on civil liberties.
What does the evidence say?
In the most recent survey by the Pew Research Center, the overwhelming majority of adolescents, reported that using platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat, or Instagram had no impact on their mental health, consistent with earlier surveys. More adolescents reported positive than negative effects. These self-assessments are consistent with a large body of recent research that finds no causal relationship between social media use and deteriorating mental well-being.
High levels of screen time are often hastily interpreted as a cause of mental health problems, even though intensive use of social media is, in many cases, more likely a symptom of deeper underlying problems than their actual cause. For some children and adolescents, social media can also serve as a refuge from the problems of everyday life. From this perspective, calls for social media bans bear a closer resemblance to the medieval principle of punishing the bearer of bad news. Moreover, social media provides opportunities to stay connected with friends and like-minded people, follow current events, and access educational resources.
Ultimately, social networks are media which—like books, television, or films—can produce different effects depending on how they are used. Comparisons of social media with alcohol, tobacco, or other drugs, which have demonstrably negative and only limited positive effects, are therefore entirely inappropriate.
The consequences of restrictive approaches are already becoming apparent. A recent study suggests that many Australian adolescents are consuming less news since the social media ban came into effect. Yet under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, children also have the right to freedom of opinion and information. This explicitly includes the freedom “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice.”. At the same time, under the Convention, responsibility for the upbringing and development of the child lies primarily with the parents or, where applicable, the legal guardians, whose rights and duties states are required to respect.
Already today, parents have numerous options at their disposal to control and regulate their children’s media use: smartphones allow control over which apps can be installed, and social networks offer their own tools for parental oversight.
Of course, raising children in the digital age remains demanding, and social media along with the accompanying “peer pressure” certainly does not make it any easier for parents. But the notion that the state could relieve parents of this responsibility through blanket bans and verification systems appears not only naive but downright counterproductive.
Mandatory age verification is likely to create a significantly less safe environment for children and adolescents. Rather than eliminating risks, it may expose minors to additional vulnerabilities while undermining not only children’s rights but also the fundamental rights of all adults. The most widely used framework for classifying risks to minors online, developed by the OECD, distinguishes between content, conduct, contact, and consumer risks, alongside cross-cutting risks. Social media bans and mandatory age-verification requirements do not structurally address any of these categories of risk. On the contrary, there is a credible risk that such measures may exacerbate several of them.
While large social media platforms host significant amounts of content that may be considered harmful to children and adolescents, they are often safer than smaller, less regulated services. Major platforms typically invest substantial resources in content moderation, safety tools, and reporting mechanisms that are absent or far less developed on fringe platforms.
If regulatory bans push children and adolescents away from established services and towards less moderated alternatives, the overall risk environment may become more dangerous rather than safer. In such cases, exposure to harmful content could increase rather than decrease. If minors migrate from larger platforms to services such as 4chan or other lightly moderated online communities, it is difficult to see how this would advance the goal of effective child protection.
Moreover, age verification systems can be circumvented through a variety of methods, including the use of parents’ identification credentials. As a result, children and adolescents would continue to use social media, but through adult accounts rather than accounts designed with age-appropriate protections in mind. This would undermine existing safeguards, such as content filters, protection mechanisms against harmful contact attempts or special data protection rules for minors. Evidence from Australia suggests that such concerns are not merely hypothetical. According to a recent survey, three out of four 14- to 15-year-olds remain active on social networks.
A central principle of digital literacy has so far been to caution children and adolescents against disclosing personal data on the internet. Age verification systems effectively invert this principle by making comprehensive identity checks a prerequisite for participation in digital spaces. Experiences from the United Kingdom have also demonstrated how vulnerable such systems can be to data breaches. Accordingly, more than 400 security and privacy researchers warn in a joint statement against the social harms as well as the unproven effectiveness of age verification mandates.
Why are these measures nevertheless so popular?
A key reason likely lies in the persistence of “technological determinism”, the assumption that societal problems are primarily caused by technological developments. Complex social, psychological, and cultural problems are reduced to supposedly clearly identifiable technological triggers. In this narrative, social media appears not as one medium among many, whose effects depend heavily on the contexts of use, but as a quasi-autonomous driver of undesirable social developments.
Such societal reactions to new technologies can be observed throughout history. Similar reactions have occurred in response to almost every technological innovation, from the printing press to the radio and television. The narrative that the technology in question is particularly harmful to young people is a constant feature. Looking back historically, however, these fears appear exaggerated. Today, hardly anyone talks about children and young people being endangered by books or comics. These recurring fears are also referred to as “technological panic” and, at best, offer a welcome opportunity to avoid debates about deeper-seated problems
At the same time, in the debate over age verification and social media bans, technology appears not only as the problem but also as the simple solution. This line of reasoning can be described as “technological solutionism” and encompasses the tendency to address complex societal problems through supposedly efficient technical solutions that reduce political complexity. Solutionism does not replace tackling the root causes, but rather masks them with control infrastructures whose long-term impact on fundamental rights, privacy and information systems has not been adequately considered. This is because policymakers favour symbolic regulatory measures that signal a capacity to act, even if their actual effectiveness is limited or even counterproductive. Their appeal lies primarily in their communicative simplicity: they offer clear attributions of blame, seemingly unambiguous solutions and the opportunity to visibly address widespread concerns.
Age verification and digital control
Ultimately, there is not only a risk that technological determinism and solutionist policy approaches will result in ineffective regulatory mechanisms, but also that infrastructures will gradually be established which extend far beyond their original purpose. What is initially justified as a means of protecting minors may, in the long term, contribute to more comprehensive control infrastructures that permanently undermine the fundamental principles of an open, free internet.
The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, recently pointed to Australia’s “pioneering” role in banning social media, suggesting that similar regulations could be pursued in Europe as early as this summer. The European Commission has already developed a blueprint for a corresponding app and is urging its member states to introduce it on a mandatory basis for age verification. The fact that this app was hacked within minutes of its release can be seen as an additional warning sign. But the central reason for concern is something entirely different: namely, that it introduces a centralized infrastructure that potentially empowers governments to restrict access to information.
Once introduced and enforced, it is easy to deny certain groups of people or individuals access to social media simply by blocking the relevant identification documents used for age verification. Anyone who does not fear this with regard to current governments should be warned that political majorities can change. We are already witnessing a worldwide decline in freedom of expression. In Europe, too, individuals can be sanctioned for using their right to free expression or have their homes searched for offenses such as “insulting politicians”.
Whistleblowers in particular, but also political minorities or refugees, would be dependent on the goodwill of states for access to information and the opportunity to make themselves heard. Not only could individual identification documents be blocked from verification procedures; once established, a simple software update is enough to collect or transmit to platforms not only the age but additional characteristics for restricting access. That this is not merely a hypothetical danger is already evident in the fact that governments and politicians are already coupling demands for age verification with calls for a real-name requirement on the internet.
The establishment of central verification infrastructures is not only inconsistent with child protection but, against this background, also a fundamental threat to the open society, to privacy, and to the right to free expression.
History shows that child protection has repeatedly functioned as a gateway for infringements on freedom of expression. Socrates was found guilty of corrupting the youth in ancient Greece. Modern examples, such as the blocking of websites in Russia under the pretext of child protection, illustrate the same dynamic. Precisely when measures are justified with the lofty goal of child protection, special vigilance is required so that fundamental civil liberties are not lost sight of for the sake of high-sounding motives.
In the end, it is not the decisive factor whether control infrastructures were created from the outset with problematic intentions and child protection served merely as a pretext, or whether they emerge from well-meaning motives but, from the very beginning, carry within them the danger of a creeping expansion of their purpose. Once such systems are established, there is always a risk that their scope of application will continuously expand. The road to hell is paved with good intentions – and the road to the end of the open internet may well be paved with debates about protection of minors.