History Repeats Itself: UK Age Verification Law Fails

Under age teens are once again circumventing the age gates on a massive scale, causing the UK age verification laws to catastrophically fail.

There is a famous quote by George Santayana. That quote is, of course, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It was written clear back in 1905, but it’s a nugget of truth that continues to hold true to this day.

Age verification law is just another example of this phenomenon. When it was pushed in Australia, experts all over warned the government that this would not work. The technology that would carry this out simply doesn’t exist, the constitutional nature of these laws are deeply questionable at best, the reasoning behind such laws have no basis in scientific evidence, and the laws stand to cause considerable harm onto the population at large (not just under age people). Those warnings, naturally, went ignored by the die hard true believers and the efforts were treated like a political battle rather than people trying to prevent Australia from making a huge mistake. So, the experts were dismissed as heretics and part of a grand conspiracy put together by “Big Tech” to thwart their just and holy efforts to “protect the children” – much to the tech industry’s facepalming.

The results were inevitable. The age verification systems put in place as mandated by the law were swiftly defeated by sharpies, pictures of golden retrievers, and, of course, VPNs. The security side wasn’t even that much better thanks to the Discord breach, the AgeGO scandal, and the additional leaks and breaches.

To say that supporters with big dreams of taking age verification laws global were completely humiliated would be an understatement. With their credibility in the toilet, supporters for such laws were left scrambling to try and figure out what everyone so easily predicted would happen. So, in response, they decided to go into complete denial, getting the mainstream media to argue that the Australian age verification laws are going off with “barely a hitch” and that everything is going all fine and dandy in Australia. This with argument that Australia has become a world leader in pursuing these obviously failed laws and it is up to the rest of the world to follow suit or risk being somehow left behind in this cliff jumping exercise.

Now, obviously, experts such as myself were raising very serious questions about this. We warned that failure was going to happen in Australia and those failures happened to a massively huge degree, so why are we pursuing these laws in the first place? The response from those die hard true believers of age verification typically fall within the bounds of “the data isn’t in yet”, “it’s too early to tell with Australia”, or “it’s not as bad as they say it is”. Anything to deflect the reality that Australian teens are completely circumventing the age gates at a massive scale and continuing to use social media as if nothing has ever really changed.

Sadly, politicians elsewhere completely bought those lies. Armed with the lies of how the only problem in Australia is that teens are having a tough time adjusting to life without social media – a problem that is totally pinky swear temporary – other regions began pushing their own age verification laws with supporters hoping that doing the same thing elsewhere will totally yield different results.

One experimental region was, of course, the EU, where nations in that region began pushing similar laws. Experts there, of course, warned of the problems faced by Australia only to receive pushback by the cult of the age verification law supporters. To the EU governments credit, it at least listened to the concerns about security, reliability, and privacy, and decided to try and come up with their own solution. So, the government developed their own app that they said would balance privacy and security in this whole thing. This with the talking point that “Big Tech” no longer has any excuses and that they would have no choice but to adopt these practices. Some of you already know where this is going.

The European government would ultimately announce that their app that solves everything was ready to roll out and they even had enough confidence to make it open source to prove that this can, in fact, be done. Within hours of the app’s deployment, it was discovered that the app suffered from multiple security flaws and even a data leak. People were able to trivially hack this app within 5 minutes to defeat it on top of it all. The news was yet another spectacular fail for age verification.

Undeterred from being 0 for 2 in terms of hoping for age verification success, age verification supporters then went to work trying to completely re-write history once again. This with the usual arguments that the hack wasn’t really as bad as it sounds and the argument that more nations are pursuing age verification and it’s up to the remaining nations to do catch-up because that cliff is definitely beckoning for a good jumping.

The UK is one such nation that was the next to jump off of that cliff. Thanks to reassurances that everything is just fine and dandy and that all of those BS lies about widespread anxiety and depression, the UK ultimately passed their own age verification laws. Since denial was the only tool used to push for these laws, it was only inevitable that such laws would fail in spectacular fashion.

Today, I learned of reports that this failure is exactly what is happening. Those reports say that a third of UK children are already defeating the age gates and accessing the very thing the government has forbidden them from accessing: social media. From the Independent:

Children are drawing on moustaches and entering fake birthdays to bypass online age gates and access social media and gaming platforms, a new report has suggested.

It found more than a third of children in the UK have found a way around age verification measures implemented as part of the Online Safety Act, which requires all pornographic sites, social media and online platforms likely to be accessed by children to check their age.

Social media websites usually require children to be at least 13, and users of pornographic sites must be over 18.

The new research suggests one in six parents have helped their child to get past age verification checks, with children reporting “tricking” platforms into thinking they are older.

From a sample of 1,000 UK children, 46 per cent said they believed age checks are easy to bypass, while 32 per cent admitted to having done so.

What is hilarious in all of this is the fact that the drawing of facial hair still works. I wrote about this vulnerability back in January and, at the time, was laughing hard because the facial recognition software turned out to be far worse than even I could have possibly predicted. The fact that this vulnerability was never patched 5 months later makes this story that much more hilarious.

To be clear, the technology was never going to work. You are not going to make a technology that both accurately filters out people of certain age groups while also maintaining the privacy of the users that use it in the first place. It was always a fools errand from the very beginning regardless of the propaganda that argues that the technology exists today and just needs to be deployed. That was never actually true as research has long pointed out that existing “solutions” have a failure rate as high as 87% – and that’s before factoring methods to circumvent the technology.

The other thing about this is the fact that it’s currently only about a third of UK users circumventing the age gates for now. That number will only get higher as time progresses. We know this because that is exactly what happened in Australia. Initially, a portion of the population was circumventing the age gates, but as time progressed, more and more figured it out and defeated the mass government censorship efforts. So, that, too, would only be a case of history repeating itself.

Now, I would like to think that three successive failures in a row for age verification supporters would be enough for politicians to have a serious rethink about all of this, but I know the cult-like mentality would never let silly little things like massive amount of evidence get in the way of a good moral panic. After all, Canada is seemingly itching to be next in this chain of epic policy making failure. No doubt, all of this will be aided by the ever convincing “just believe hard enough and it’ll all magically work on its own” as the main point of reasoning. After all, supporters have spent years pushing this completely evidence free, why stop now?

At any rate, this latest massive failure is not surprising. Age verification supporters have been left thoroughly humiliated a third time. So, I have little doubt they will apply another thick layer of denial to cover up their own failings in their quest to fool more nations into passing such laws moving forward.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.