Andrew MacDougall: If we want to keep kids safe online, adults must prove their age

Is that really asking too much?

By: Andrew MacDougall

What is an adult willing to sacrifice to protect a child online?

The question doesn’t appear anywhere in Bill C-34, the Safer Social Media Act, but it’s the question on which the Liberal government’s bill will turn.

The bill proposes actions to regulate AI chatbots and social media, with most of the attention going toward the proposed ban on social media for children under the age of 16. It’s not an outright ban; the platforms can avoid sanction if they can prove to a new regulator that their product is safe. It’s a ban if necessary, but not necessarily a ban. The ultimate goal: social media platforms with age-appropriate designs, ones that don’t harm kids by promoting constant use, prioritizing harmful content, or allowing strangers to send unsolicited pictures of their wangs.

So far, so uncontroversial.

After all, the government bans lots of things if their manufacturer can’t prove their product is safe. Take pharmaceuticals or chemical products. Or toys. There is no right to ship an unsafe product. Nor, for that matter, would we tolerate a stranger showing their wang to a kid IRL.

Nor is it controversial for a government to age restrict a product or service. A teenager can’t buy booze or smokes without ID. You can’t sign up for military service, vote, drive a car, buy porn, or enter a bar until you’re a certain age.

So why are some people already having kittens about a (potential) social media ban for under-16s? Especially when the sacrifice being asked of adults is small, i.e. to verify our age online?

The fact that all of us will have to prove our age in order to keep kids safe online sounds obvious, but it’s a fact that’s easily missed when all of the chat is about a social media ban for kids. The potential ban or age appropriate design might (eventually) apply to them, but it requires our consent, too.

This is somewhat different to the offline experiences listed above. The guy in the booze or porn emporium could take one look at my balding pate and grey around the temples and estimate that I’m well above 18 without asking me to prove it. But suddenly it’s an algorithm’s job to make the guess and we all freak out?

Of course, my buddy in the porn shop doesn’t have to query me when some kid comes into his shop when I’m not there. The offline to online parallels don’t always hold. But I won’t have to show my ID every time a kid comes to an online porn site or social media platform. Just once per shop or, depending on how the government plays things, one time for all time.

The methods will matter, as will a detailed explanation of motive, especially when most people have no idea how online age verification works. Many think it requires the government to play a Big Brother-type role. But it doesn’t. At least, not necessarily. Countries like Estonia might have a government-issued digital ID but other nations currently enforcing age verification, like the United Kingdom, don’t.

The U.K. experience shows that the government doesn’t have to play any part in the verification process, other than to set the rules of the road and enforce them. U.K. legislation specifies seven “highly effective” ways to verify age online, only one of which is a digital ID (which the U.K. does not have). Instead, people can upload an ID or a selfie. Or have their credit card pinged. They can log into their bank on their bank’s servers and have the bank confirm their age. In each case, the government’s role is limited to establishing a policy framework under which private sector operators can sort things out, including sanctions on them if they fall down on the job.

At no point does the government — or the age verification companies — track your usage. Or regulate what an adult can see. But you know who does track you within an inch of your life and determine what you see? The social media companies. The amount of data they — and operating systems like Android and iOS — have on you is enormous. The question isn’t how much people know about you online, it’s what it’s being used for. And how safe that data is. Right now, the major social media companies build an online profile of you so they can target you with the content they know will keep you online so they can ship you the right kind of advertising at the right time to convert a sale. Even if that content is car crashes and self-harm videos. It’s hardly noble.

Which takes us back to sacrifice. And duty. Am I willing to verify my identity so that kids aren’t so easily targeted on social media by large numbers of paedophiles, sextortionists, and drug dealers?

If that sounds overwrought, you haven’t been paying attention. A troll through the memoirs of ex-employees at the major platforms, or of the discovery material in the various court cases being brought against the social media companies confirms all of the harms enumerated above in the previous paragraph, along with facilitating genocide. Even worse, the people who run these platforms knew all about it and took the revenue anyway.

And that’s before we get to the vast amounts of fraud being tolerated on social media, or the (contested) effects of its constant use on our mental health. Or the opportunity cost! If a kid is using social media for hours a day, as the majority now are, that’s hours they’re not spending doing their homework or being present with their friends or family. There is a way to give kids the benefits of social media without these harms and the product design and business model choices that produce them. But the platforms need the stick of a ban to deliver the carrot of reform.

All we adults have to do is verify our age. Do that, and the social media companies have no excuse to avoid giving our children a safer experience. That’s not too big an ask. Not at all.

Andrew MacDougall is a Partner at Trafalgar Strategy and is a Senior Policy Fellow at the Centre for Media, Technology, and Democracy at McGill University.

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