Online age checks on the rise, concerns over curtailing of internet freedom too

Washington: Online age checks are on the rise in the US and elsewhere, asking people for IDs or face scans to prove they are over 18 or 21 or even 13. To proponents, they’re a tool to keep children away from adult websites and other material that might be harmful to them.

But opponents see a worrisome trend toward a less secure, less private and less free internet, where people can be denied access not just to pornography but news, health information and the ability to speak openly and anonymously.

“I think that many of these laws come from a place of good intentions,” said Jennifer Huddleston, a senior technology policy fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “Certainly we all want to protect young people from harmful content before they’re ready to see it.”

More than 20 states have passed some kind of age verification law, though many face legal challenges. While no such law exists on the federal level in the United States, the Supreme Court recently allowed a Mississippi age check law for social media to stand. In June, the court upheld a Texas law aimed at preventing minors from watching pornography online, ruling that adults don’t have a First Amendment right to access obscene speech without first proving their age.

Elsewhere, the United Kingdom now requires users visiting websites that allow pornography to verify their age. Beyond adult sites, platforms like Reddit, X, Telegram and Bluesky have also committed to age checks. France and several other European Union countries also are testing a government sponsored verification app.

And Australia has banned children under 16 from accessing social media.

“Platforms now have a social responsibility to ensure the safety of our kids is a priority for them,” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters in November. The platforms have a year to work out how they could implement the ban before penalties are enforced.

To critics, though, age check laws raise “significant privacy and speech concerns, not only for young people themselves, but also for all users of the internet,” Huddleston said. “Because the only way to make sure that we are age verifying anyone under the age of 18 is to also age verify everyone over the age 18. And that could have significant impacts on the speech and privacy rights of adults.”

The state laws are a hodgepodge of requirements, but they generally fall into two camps. On one side are laws — as seen in Louisiana and Texas — that require websites comprised of more than 33% of adult content to verify users’ ages or face fines. Then there are laws — enacted in Wyoming or South Dakota — that seek to regulate sites that have any material that is considered obscene or otherwise harmful to minors.