The government is worried about the harms some youths experience on social media.  

The Prime Minister has announced his support for age limits. Social media platforms would face penalties if those under 16 made it onto their sites. Parliament is now holding a broader inquiry.  

Trying to address real harms can create new problems. A ban, as compared to parental discretion, is fraught. 

First, government must decide what counts as social media. Any definition that seems adequate today might not hold up when kids switch to a different platform that lets them keep talking with their friends.  

But even leaving aside definitional questions, making platforms liable if teenagers find their way onto their site requires finding some balance across three problems.  

A system can be hard for kids to get around. It can be relatively easy for adults to navigate. And it can respect privacy. But it is likely impossible to do all three of these at the same time.  

Any system that is hard for kids to work around will be cumbersome for adults if it also respects privacy. There are versions of online age verification that respect privacy. But where kids have older friends as willing accomplices, those solutions require frequent checks to make sure that a fifteen-year-old hasn’t used an older friend’s ID for verification. Those checks would also affect people above the age limit. 

Making it less cumbersome for adults would require a one-off real identity verification with each platform, like a picture of your passport or driver’s license. Adults will have to prove that they are not teenagers – especially where platforms are up for fines if they get things wrong.  

But there are good, defensible, legitimate reasons for adults to write online under pen names or pseudonyms. If platforms know who you are, so will hackers. If you are posting from New Zealand and have family in China, this could be a problem.  

The UK’s recent online child protection legislation requires age verification for those wanting to see ‘sensitive content’, which currently even includes some speeches in Parliament. UK uptake of VPNs, which let you pretend to be in another country, has skyrocketed. And now the UK is considering bans on VPNs.  

The Simpsons character Helen Lovejoy is famous for asking, “Won’t somebody please think of the children?”  

I wish more people would also think about the trade-offs.