Thu Apr 19 02:28:51 PM CEST 2026

Age Verification Discourse

The discourse concerning new age verification laws has been bubbling away in most of my online feeds for the past couple of months now. For me, it all started when I got recommended a Lunduke video about the new California law AB-1043. I watched the video, and I have been bombarded by Reddit posts and new YouTube videos about the subject ever since. Against my better judgment, I sometimes find myself watching some of these videos or reading some of the posts, and the "discourse" truly is insufferable.

The new age verification laws coming out of California, Colorado, Brazil, and recently the U.S. federal government are all bad. It is my opinion that they all infringe on a value that I hold dear to my heart, the anonymous internet, while failing to achieve their goal of protecting children. These laws are just one part of a larger trend of misguided government regulations, like the EU’s Chat Control law, and there will be more of them coming in the near future. I find all of these laws quite upsetting, which is probably what makes it such good "outrage slop".¹ Because although i have nothing good to say about these laws, the people who theoretically should be on "my side" of this issue also tend to get on my nerves.

Before I started writing this post, I thought I would rewatch the original Lunduke video in order to formulate my grievances with it. But to my surprise, I found no issues. The video was a mostly brief, informative overview of the law, with some level-headed commentary on his opposition to the law and on child safety online. So, where does the "insufferable" part of all of this come in? Cue the YouTube comment section:

If you have experienced the age verification discourse, you have probably seen your fair share of these kinds of comments. A bad law that threatens your anonymity online becomes "mass surveillance" with no relation to the stated intent. Nothing but an excuse to "see everything you do on the internet." In fact, this is the only perceivable explanation for such a law. We truly do not live in a free society. And then, as a chef’s kiss at the end, we are hit with the wise words of stickofephraim: "It sure seems like age verification is starting to get pushed at an accelerated rate. That’s no accident."

The 64 responses to this last comment really captures the mindset of these people. The whole chain talks about how "they" are taking your freedom away from you, and how this is only the beginning. Very rarely is "they" specified; the gamut ranges from politicians and big tech to Jews and elites.² All of this is of course quite standard in the world of conspiracy theories, which has come to encompass so much of online discourse. This is probably one of the reasons that all of it annoys me so much; it all melts into the "culture wars" and becomes another layer of populist brain rot. All while being proclaimed in the most unimaginable smug way possible, making your average Redditor seem like a humble Buddha. Importantly, none of these comments have any value other than feeding the narratives and delusional worldviews of the commenters. All of the "rightful anger" only obscures the reality of how and why these laws are passed, making the real work of stopping these laws only more difficult.

If you want to understand what’s actually causing these laws to be proposed and passed, I recommend listening to episode 495 of The Rest is Politics, starting from 25:17. Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell, both mainstream political figures, interview two people from IJM, an INGO working on combating child sexual exploitation. The stories of abuse, especially online abuse, that they tell are truly horrifying.

In the interview, the IJM workers lobby for their proposal of mandating all device manufacturers and operating systems to implement local scanning of all videos and photos (using AI) before they are uploaded anywhere, be it privately or publicly. If you are like me, this sounds like a privacy nightmare, and it would be a gross overstep of government power to create a law mandating this software. Rory and Alistair can’t understand why this was not implemented yesterday. Not because they are crooked politicians who want to control and spy on you, but because they are tech-illiterate boomers who want to protect children.

I’m not claiming all of these laws stem from mostly well-meaning NGOs and ignorant politicians. I have read about how Meta and other large social media platforms have tried to use age verification laws to shift regulatory burdens away from their own platforms. The fact that the point of access for programs is a persistent age API is also suspiciously convenient for those who are in the business of collecting data and selling it. All of this is concerning, but the argument that they put forward to the politicians will be one of child safety, not "Hey, I want to know all of my users’ age so I can sell their data for more profit!"

Politicians have a tough gig in this case. They are not domain experts on the internet or user privacy, and they don’t want to be seen as the ones mounting pushback against protecting children. I say this not to defend their actions; I think we should expect our representatives to educate themselves to some level on what they vote for, outside of what some lobbying group teaches them. I say this because correctly identifying the problem is the first step to finding a solution. Once you realize that the politicians are not guided by a lust for control or lobbying bribes, you might start doing less soy posting online and start making more calls to your representatives and sharing your view.³ It probably won’t make any difference, but I can guarantee that it will make more of a difference than posting comments under a Lunduke video or karma farming on Reddit.

1. The "slop" meme has become way too widespread, but I think it's used appropriately here.↩
2. Here's one of these replies to the original comment that I quite enjoyed: "It has to do with certain views of a certain genocidal ethnostate heavily tied to the United States and Jeffrey Epstein believing that Americans have too much freedom of speech for their liking."↩
3. An important caveat for this entiry post is that I am talking in the context of a liberal democratic government. The incentives and mechanisms of an authoritarian state are different.↩