The introduction of Government-led age restrictions to use websites will probably end anonymity online, and I don’t really care.
In the same week that the Irish Government is discussing introducing a State-led age verification system for Big Tech companies, the Australian government is bringing forward new laws that will ban children under the age of 16 from using social media.
As we all know, when a website is age restricted, it generally just requires you to tick a box saying “Yes, I am over 18” and then it lets you in, with zero verification or follow-up. It is the easiest thing in the world to circumvent as a minor.
In contrast, this new system would require actual verification of the person’s identity, where they have to prove their age, similar to showing ID before you can buy alcohol or cigarettes.
The risks here from a civil liberties perspective are obvious. Naturally, in order to verify your age, a website or app will also have to verify your identity, because how else will it know how old you are if it doesn’t know who is trying to access the website?
This means you will have to either give your identity to the website you’re accessing, and can’t use an anonymous account, or verify it with the Government in some way, which means the State will have a record of what websites you’ve accessed. Granted, that sounds quite risky and potentially open to abuse – I can imagine a number of ways in which this could go horribly wrong.
But if a law having potential downsides meant we shouldn’t pass it, then we could never pass any law, for any reason, ever. Every single piece of legislation – indeed, everything in life – comes with a degree of risk.
Increasing the legal penalty for murder might lead innocent people who are wrongly convicted to be given harsher sentences – but that alone is not an open-and-shut reason to not do it. It might be an argument or datapoint you could use as part of a broader case, but you can’t simply shoot down the entire idea on the basis that “it could go wrong”.
Sure it could go wrong – what about it? What if anything and everything went wrong?
To quote Donald Trump, “What if a bomb fell on your head right now?”
The question, then, is not whether bringing in age verification for websites has downsides, but whether the downside is justified given the benefits such a policy would confer. And I say it absolutely is for a number of important reasons – chief among them being the absolute scourge of young people being exposed to online pornography at the cusp of their adolescence, when they are most vulnerable to it.
A 2019 study by the University of Galway found that 58% of young men – i.e. a clear majority – report seeing porn for the first time under the age of 13. Note that it’s not like the remaining 42% saw it when they were 21 or something – we can reasonably infer that a good chunk of the remainder will have been exposed at ages that were still far too young.
And these figures are from 2019, six years ago – this problem is only getting worse, not better, so I would not be remotely surprised if that figure has grown since then.
The detriment that this can cause is obvious and well documented. We have a situation where 9-year-olds are suddenly being presented with access to the most disgusting, depraved content imaginable online, with zero restriction or oversight in many cases.
We all know what can be accessed on the internet with relative ease – not merely people having sex, but violent acts, weird fetishism, warped sub-genres and categories that could easily distort one’s desire if their brain is, say, developing and in a state of youthful plasticity.
There is essentially nothing stopping a pre-pubescent child right now going online and viewing video of a hardcore BDSM gangbang – sorry to be crude, but it’s important to convey what we’re talking about here. All a child has to do is click a button saying “Yeah, I’m 18” and they can watch a ballgagged woman being whipped while 12 men have sex with her, or worse.
Even if it’s not the absolutely sick stuff, though, it’s still devastating to the health and wellbeing of young people. When you hit your teen years and your hormones start surging, particularly as a young man, you have access to the most attractive women in the world on demand. How can a teenage boy realistically resist that?
Even if it’s totally “vanilla” stuff, it is incredibly easy for young people to get sucked into a wormhole of addiction given the power of the stimuli you’re being exposed to and your natural attraction to the opposite sex during adolescence. And once you know it’s there, you have access to it 24 hours a day through your phone. So even if a young man correctly realises “This is probably bad for me, I should really stop,” how do you quit something that releases that much dopamine which you have constant access to?
It’s like trying to quit crack when you always have a bag of crack cocaine in your pocket. It’s essentially impossible. And getting rid of a smartphone in the modern day is not practical for most people.
All the research shows that this stuff can create lifelong addictions for people, lead to erectile dysfunction at a young age due to desensitisation, and destroy one’s ability to have meaningful romantic relationships. It can warp the mind to develop weird unnatural fetishes and disrupt normal desires.
In short, it is nothing short of devastating, psychologically and physically. And yet we are allowing a situation where 10-year-olds can watch videos of orgies en masse, or have social media accounts where they get groomed by adult creeps, or post ill-advised stuff due to their youth which they will later come to seriously regret, but which is now online forever.
Shortform brainrot content ruins their attention span, their creativity, and their ability to focus, and being young and naive, they don’t have the maturity to moderate themselves or know when they’ve gone too far. It’s nothing short of poison to a developing mind.
Even in a non-sexual context, there’s an unbelievable amount of gore and blood which carries a natural morbid curiosity. I didn’t watch it, but I distinctly remember a load of lads on the back of the schoolbus when I was 12 trying to show me a cartel chainsaw beheading video. As easy as it would be to write them off as freaks, on some level, I get it; I can imagine it is mesmerising in a horrifying way. But once you see this stuff, you can never “unsee” it.
In short, the current scenario is an intolerable, unacceptable situation, and an epidemic that urgently needs to be tackled. It is essentially as damaging as if we had a widespread trend of letting 11-year-olds taking drugs, and it requires the same level of decisive action to counteract it.
Because in the same way there are risks to restricting anonymity online, there are clear harms evolving from the current situation – not just hypothetical risks, but actual tangible harms which we can observe and measure in reality. And on balance, I would argue that the current situation is far worse than the alternative.
Realistically, nothing is anonymous online anyway. If the State wants to get your IP address, they can do that easily regardless of whether you hand it over voluntarily or not. And websites harvest user data for a living. Whether that should or should not be the case, it is the case, so the debate is probably fairly notional anyway.
On a more principled level, if stripping anonymity online forces people to be more thoughtful about what they post and not just blurt out idiotic slop from behind a 3 follower incognito burner account, that’s probably a good thing too for separate reasons.
All-in-all, we do not take the internet’s risk to children seriously enough as it stands, and this measure, while it clearly carries some issues, will receive no complaints from me.