Age Verification Being Circumvented… By Using Old Podcasts?

There are many ways people are circumventing age verification. One novel way is apparently by using an old podcasts comments section.

The government is out to get you and will do everything they can to ruin your life. That has been an overwhelming message people are getting through various age verification laws. This was made clear many times over from the push to implement broken technology to the ongoing censorship creep to even dropping all pretense that this was ever about pornography and slapping age verification on social media in general.

Probably the only silver lining is that these laws are compelling people to take their personal privacy more seriously and adopt anonymous tools like VPN technology to protect themselves from the ongoing government intrusion of their daily lives. In fact, things have gotten to the point where websites are straight up selling VPNs as a method to circumvent age verification.

Of course, this isn’t the only way people are thwarting government control. People have been using video game characters, fake IDs, and simply using websites that don’t comply with age verification altogether.

Another rather creative way people are thwarting age verification, as it turns out, is using the comments section of old podcasts. In this case, this is explicitly in response to children being banned from social media entirely. As it turns out, they are hijacking the comments section of old random podcasts to make an improvised social media network. From TechDirt:

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blockquote>As anyone who has read Techdirt for any length of time knows full well, there’s been a years-long campaign to demonize kids and social media. Never mind that actual experts have said the data doesn’t support the claims of inherent harm, politicians around the globe are rushing to ban kids from social media as fast as they can.

But banning kids from social media has a fundamental problem: kids will find a way. They always do. And part of that is just because kids need those kinds of “third spaces” where they can communicate outside the prying eyes of parents or teachers. And if adults keep blocking off those spaces, kids are smart enough to figure out clever workarounds.

Six years ago, when schools blocked social media apps on their networks, students simply repurposed Google Docs—required for assignments—into an improvised social network which they could hide from teachers and parents by claiming they were working on homework

Teens told me they use Google Docs to chat just about any time they need to put their phone away but know their friends will be on computers. Sometimes they’ll use the service’s live-chat function, which doesn’t open by default, and which many teachers don’t even know exists. Or they’ll take advantage of the fact that Google allows users to highlight certain phrases or words, then comment on them via a pop-up box on the right side: They’ll clone a teacher’s shared Google document, then chat in the comments, so it appears to the casual viewer that they’re just making notes on the lesson plan. If a teacher approaches to take a closer look, they can click the Resolve button, and the entire thread will disappear.

That was 2019. I’m sure things like that are still happening in Google Docs, but it’s apparently also happening in an even more absurd venue: podcast comments.

The latest “How To Do Everything” podcast from NPR featured someone who monitors comments for the TED Radio Hour. She noticed something strange: kids are flooding the comments of random old episodes, turning obscure three-year-old podcasts into makeshift chat rooms where adults won’t think to look.

Yeah, so one of my responsibilities on my team is to monitor our Spotify comments. And for the most part, we mostly get really like nice comments or people engaging with our content, giving constructive feedback or saying how much they liked it. But about 3 weeks ago, I noticed kind of a different floodgate situation. And the first instance was only about 20 comments….

20 comments on one episode that came out three years ago. Yeah. And all the comments kind of had the same like, “No, you’re so pretty. You’re so pretty.” And I was really trying to rack my brain about the content of this episode 3 years ago to be like, is there a discussion about beauty standards that they are trying to engage with?

Yeah. And then about a week later, they struck again, but this time hitting the comments hit into the 90s.

And then I kind of felt like, okay, this really needs to be something we’re flagging. And when I brought it up, it seemed like other teams had also been privately sitting on this very odd situation.

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I knew people were going to find creative ways of circumventing age verification and this absolutely fits the bill. The reality has long been that people who are growing up these days have grown up with the internet. As a result, contrary to what some age verification supporters might have you believe, they are quite intelligent and will work around whatever barrier the federal government will throw at them one way or another. For most, communicating on the internet is a normal thing to do and all they ever knew. So, if it’s not going to happen on social media, it’ll happen somewhere else. What’s more, if it happens somewhere else, it’ll have fewer moderation tools.

The reality is that people want their online safe spaces. If one is to close down, another will get opened up. Whether that is through third party services popping up or people (in this case, kids) taking matters into their own hands. They want to socialize whether or not the government approves of this activity.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.