Big Tech knows that age verification is necessary
September 7, 2023
State legislatures are leading a revolution to transform the experience of the internet, and with it, American childhood. In the past year, starting with Utah’s Social Media Regulation Act, S.B. 152, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas and Virginia have all passed laws requiring parental consent and age verification for minors to open social media accounts or access pornography.[1] By giving parents greater control over their kids’ exposure to social media and pornography, with their documented ill effects, these laws will improve kids’ lives.
But for these laws to prevail, age verification must be shown to be both effective and capable of preserving user privacy. The platforms argue, relying on Supreme Court precedents from the 1990s, that these laws are unconstitutional. But these precedents—which informed the 2004 Supreme Court ruling in ACLU v. Ashcroft, striking down a federal law requiring age verification for pornography sites—are based on factual predicates that are now demonstrably false—such as (per Reno v. ACLU) “the Internet is not as ‘invasive’ as radio or television,” and “[u]sers seldom encounter [pornographic] content by accident.” To prove the point, a recent report by Common Sense Media found that more than half of today’s teens (58 percent) have encountered pornography accidentally.
