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EFF has spent this year urging governments around the world, from Canada to Australia, to abandon their reckless plans to introduce age verification for a variety of online content under the guise of protecting children online. Mandatory age verification tools are surveillance systems that threaten everyone’s rights to speech and privacy, and introduce more harm than they seek to combat.
Kids Experiencing Harm is Not Just an Online Phenomena
In November, Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, claimed that legislation was needed to protect young people in the country from the supposed harmful effects of social media. Australia’s Parliament later passed the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024, which bans children under the age of 16 from using social media and forces platforms to take undefined “reasonable steps” to verify users’ ages or face over $30 million in fines. This is similar to last year’s ban on social media access for children under 15 without parental consent in France, and Norway also pledged to follow a similar ban.
No study shows such harmful impact, and kids don’t need to fall into a wormhole of internet content to experience harm—there is a whole world outside the barriers of the internet that contributes to people’s experiences, and all evidence sug
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