Angus Reid Poll Undermines Media Age Verification Narrative

Canada’s mainstream media has been pushing the narrative that age verification is popular. Not quite according to Angus Reid.

Canada’s mainstream media has been desperately trying to push age verification laws. Fortunately, their talking points have repeatedly gone down in flames when examining the evidence. Indeed, we’ve witnessed many other talking points in the past go down in flames – some of which are very nervously used to this day despite them only to result in the media getting relentlessly ridiculed after.

Initially, the talking points were that other countries and jurisdictions are jumping on board with age verification, therefore, Canada should jump on board with this as well. Australia, the most popular of the jurisdictions that the mainstream media cites as a reason why Canada should follow through with our own law, quickly saw their age verification collapse shortly after passage after the technology was swiftly defeated with sharpies, pictures of golden retrievers, and VPNs. Compounding the problems was all the security incidences that inevitably ensued including the Discord breach, the AgeGO scandal, and other leaks and breaches. Desperate to keep the narrative alive, the mainstream media even went to the extreme measure of denial, arguing that the only issue that Australia is experiencing is that teens are adjusting to life without social media – this as teens are circumventing said age verification and continuing on with business as usual. Famously, the media argued that things are going off with “barely a hitch” which is such a comically bad lie, it’s amazing they even tried that in the first place.

Hoping that the Australian experience was just a fluke, the mainstream media looked to other jurisdictions, hoping and praying that all of those pesky experts were wrong about the failures of age verification. Some cited European nations as examples of how other nations are also ‘getting on board’ with this and arguing that Canada is falling behind other nations. Europe’s government, frustrated with the repeated failings of the private sector, developed their own app as the be all, end all solution to reliability and security. Within hours of the big rollout, the app suffered from multiple security issues as well as a data leak. What’s more, the app could be hacked within 5 minutes to defeat the age verification systems.

The UK proved to be no better off. In fact, in that country, the UK showed that history was more than capable of repeating itself. The technology is swiftly getting defeated on a massive scale as teens circumvent the age gates with ease. The UK experience repeated exactly what happened in Australia. Teens are bi-passing the age gates and carrying on with business as usual, humiliating the companies and supporters in the process. In fact, sharpies are still being used to defeat the age gates which is hilarious since the companies had months to fix this, yet this continues to be an effective method of fooling the facial recognition software.

With the talking point of other nations efforts going down in flames, the mainstream media then turned their moral panic efforts to apparent science. The talking point they pushed is that social media is causing anxiety and depression among teens. They famously argue that teens brains are getting “rewired” by social media and this is damaging their developing brains. Never mind the fact that the human brain is constantly “rewiring” itself regardless of the presence of social media, the science that actually looked into the impacts of social media painted a very different picture. Social media, they found, had either a net neutral or net positive impact. At any rate, the narrative was completely destroyed over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. The mainstream media, desperate to find anything at all that supports their narrative somewhere in science, quickly turned to widely discredited “expert”/”social media critic”, Jonathan Heidt. When the mainstream media ran with this, they quickly got called out for pushing disinformation. In one instance, the mainstream media even responded to this criticism by effectively arguing that it’s not their job to fact check – a shocking argument that went viral for obvious reasons.

So, the mainstream media is now 0 for 2 in trying to sell age verification. So, what other source can they turn to try and sell age verification to the wider public? As it turns out, their efforts turned to manufactured consent. The mainstream media, back in April, began heavily pushing a petition, arguing that sweet innocent parents are petitioning the government to better protect children. As it turned out, the people pushing the petition made a pretty significant mistake when pushing it because they left their profiles out in the public. As it turned out, a number of the main signatories were actually venture capitalists and AI corporate executives potentially looking to make a fast buck off of mass government censorship. When we exposed this massive conflict of interest, efforts to push this petition quickly died down.

After ditching that part of the narrative, the mainstream media, in recent weeks, then tried a different tact. They pushed the narrative that age verification is widely supported. In a particularly asinine example of this, the CBC had a whole hour of Cross Country Checkup devoted to their sales pitch to Canadians. They interviewed grand parents and people who don’t use social media what their thoughts are on all of this even though they are generally the least qualified people to even be talking about this. You could tell with the “expert” agreeing with one of their callers that letting children use social media is comparable to giving them a table saw which is such an obvious false comparison in that it compares apples to air craft carriers. At another point, when one caller said that they don’t support the age verification efforts because it can quickly be defeated, the host responded by saying that, in that persons opinion, we shouldn’t erect walls to protect children. This, of course, was not what the person was saying and was putting words in the callers mouth. Shortly after, their “expert” on hand quickly dismissed the flaws in today’s available technology and pivoted back to pushing the moral panic.

Other reports out there are arguing more blankly that age verification is “widely supported” among people in general and that there is no excuse at this point, the government has to act. While the argument that age verification is a very poor metric to which to guide policy decision making – especially when all of the other evidence is pointing to the conclusion that age verification is a bad idea – it turns out, even those soft talking points are going down in flames.

Recently, I stumbled across an Angus Reid poll talking about age verification. At first, the numbers look pretty grim with the headline grabbing “75% support a social media ban”. This may be where the mainstream media, without citing sources, are getting their figures from. After digging further into the numbers, it quickly becomes clear why the mainstream media is actively choosing not to cite this poll as their source. Take, for instance, the first picture:

You might be tempted to look at those numbers and say, “wow, that sucks.  That many people support this?”  Here’s the thing though, look closer at those numbers – specifically the bottom:

As it turns out, this was a very narrow poll.  They only polled people who have kids aged 10-17.  In all likelihood, they chose that specific demographic because it would be most likely to garner support.  In fact, nowhere in the poll did the institute poll children who use social media at all.

Another headline grabbing stat that seems to be cherry picked from the poll was that most people support the idea of a social media ban, however, when you look at the actual data, you see a very different picture:

Out of all of the “solutions” that was asked,a full social media ban was actually the least popular choice out of all of the above.  In fact, a full ban garnered the most opposition out of all of the choices involved. Out of all of the choices, Canadians agree with a full ban the least.

The most damning slide of all was buried towards the bottom.  Those same parents were also asked who should be responsible for keeping their kids safe when it comes to social media in general.  Overwhelmingly, those same parents admit that this is the job of the parents, not the government:

This slide completely nukes the argument that everyone supports the age verification laws and that everyone agrees that government should act.  If we are going to use the soft support statistics above (which is, in and of itself, a questionable tactic), then we are allowed to say that 72% of those polled say that it is not the governments job to intervene and dictate how people use social media.  It is the parents job, not the government, to regulate social media use according to those same people.

For the last month, I’ve been wondering where the heck the mainstream media got their talking point of how age verification laws are widely supported. Now I think I know and there was a very good reason why the media chose to bury their source on this. They cherry picked the data and didn’t want anyone to read what the rest of the study actually had to say. So, mainstream media, you’ve been busted once again. This time, for cherry picking data to support your narrative.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.