(If you read this in Mastodon or any other Fedi app, you may click here to read this on my blog)

Übermedien is one of my favorite podcasts. A very recent episode offers an excellent opportunity to combine recommending this online magazine for media critic with a fresh new rant about the thought-lazy idea of putting an age lock on social media. So, first off: If you understand the German language, subscribe to Übermedien podcast. For readers who don’t understand German, but do understand English, there is this great presentation on FOSDEM’26 about the same topic by Ella Jakubowska and Elina Eickstädt.

The wrong question

In this Übermedien episode, Sebastian Meineck of Netzpolitik.org a journalism platform focusing on digital freedoms. The first part of the conversation covers why age verification is very problematic. One could argue that it is senseless to discuss this issue before discussing whether a minimum age would serve any goal anyway. However, the point @sebmeineck makes in this conversation is precisely that: When the topic of age verification is discussed in media, the question is simplified to: Are you for or against a minimum age to protect children from the harms of social media? This question implies the assumption that social-media related problems are solved when children are banned from social media.

What is the actual problem?

The tacit assumption “an age ban solves problems”, as Sebastian Meineck explains very well, expresses the utter laziness to actually define the problems that are to be targeted by such ban. In political debates, on television, but most awkwardly in silly surveys that newspapers do under readers, “age verification” is presented as a solution for a diverse set of problems that are only handwavingly mentioned. Meineck draws a “palette” of these problems as he has heard in media coverage of the debate, listing addictive designs, manipulative designs, mobbing, grooming, unwanted spreading of intimate materials – fake or real, disinformation, harmful content.

“Social media” are not the problem, an age ban is not the solution

Analyzing this wildly diverse list of “social media-related” problems, Meineck observes two issues: First, all of these problems concern adults as well as children. Second, these problems occur on social media, but most of them also occur offline. From these observations, there is just no logic in banning children from social media.

Instead, one should address specific problems with specific measures. Such measures should be derived from expert opinions based on proper research. As an example of such targeted solution Meineck mentions how the EU’s Digital Services Act has already allowed the EC to trial TikTok for having an addictive design.

A solution that Meineck does not mention is my hobby horse: interoperability. I am pretty sure that Meineck ignored this topic for reasons of brevity. In an earlier post (only in dutch), I have argued how interoperable social media, like the platforms constituting the Fediverse, have the potential to break the attention-based business model that causes many of the problems related to social media. I will soon write an English piece on this too. (and hope I don’t forget to add the link here)

Age-Verification is extremely problematic. For you!

Now, for a moment just forget the above and deal with the fact that so many empty-headed politicians are already convinced that age-verification solves a problem. Then we need to talk about the enormous problems with this “solution”.

The problems with age-verification are threefold. An age ban harms online inclusiveness, security, and freedom of expression. When judging these, keep in mind that these problems do not effect children only. These problems affect adults in exactly the same way: you need to identity yourself too!

Inclusiveness is hampered as any method of verification will be problematic for certain groups of people. Depending of the implementation, you would need a passport or a face that can be recognized by a computer, or both. Many people don’t have these luxuries. People without a passport, or people whose face is difficult to scan due to, e.g., illness will have a hard time accessing social media.

Security is at risk, because any organization who gets the responsibility to enforce the age bane will need to store your passport or face scan data. Independent of how this is implemented: Mistakes can and will be made and sensitive identity data will get breached.

Your freedom of expression is confined: Your data may not only be accidentally leaked. Your government may impose rules that grant them access to the data collected about you. Such limitation of privacy may strongly limit your freedom of expression. Indeed, even the possibility of this happening one day, knowing that your data is already being collected, may lead to self-censorship before your government turns evil.