UK’s Failed Age Verification Law is Becoming A Political Scandal

The UK’s failed age verification law is becoming the latest sign of political failure with the UK prime minister.

In the leadup to the UK age verification laws, mainstream media and other backers of the law sold it as just part of a global trend for an alleged safer internet. What ended up happening was that age verification laws are just one of a number of symbols for everything that is wrong with modern politics.

Did age verification laws depend on casting aside expert advice? Yes. Did age verification laws depend on the ignoring of evidence? Yes. Did age verification laws depend on moral panic pushed by the media? Absolutely. Did age verification laws ultimately make matters worse? Without a doubt.

With age verification laws failing both in Australia and the EU, the UK went ahead and stumbled into yet another bad internet law making its way into the books. After ignoring the experience of these laws elsewhere, the end result was little more than a case of history repeating itself for at least a third time. While countries like Canada are continuing to insist that they can do the same thing again and have every right to expect a completely different result, age verification has long become the perfect example of political stupidity and belligerence. Hey, if mainstream media can completely re-write history, then their expected result is bound to turn up sooner or later, right?

In the UK, though, swelling beneath the surface is, of course, growing discontent from the political realm. Say “UK Prime Minister” and you might get a reaction on par with the response you’d get for saying “prostate examination”. The role of UK Prime Minister hasn’t exactly been one that would net you a whole lot of seniority. For non-UK residents, just try and think of who the UK Prime Minister is and that might be a difficult question to answer. There is a good reason for that. Between 2016 and now, there was David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, and now currently embattled Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. While not exactly dependent on the day of the week who the UK Prime Minister is, we’re not exactly that far off from that, either.

Reports we’ve seen says that the Labour Party is contemplating ditching Starmer as well to find a new leader. According to one report from France 24, the popularity rating is not exactly high for Starmer for the time being:

After the seeming moral vacuum of former prime minister Boris Johnson’s Covid-era government and the revolving door of British PMs that followed, Starmer seemed to represent something new: a sense of stability and decency that British politics hadn’t seen in some time.

But those qualities have not been enough to cement Starmer’s leadership. As of May 2026, his approval ratings are slightly above their lowest ebb, but 70 percent of the British public still think that he’s doing badly as prime minister – and just 19 percent have a positive opinion of him overall.

Some 29 percent of voters who have defected from the party since the last election believe that it has not delivered on its promises and failed to reduce the cost of living.

Matthew Torbitt, former Labour advisor and political commentator, told FRANCE 24, “9.7 million people voted in 2024 for change – that’s what the Labour party offered… but if you’d have been in a coma for the last two years you wouldn’t notice a difference if you woke up today.”

One of Starmer’s key election promises in 2024 was to improve public services, eroded by years of austerity after the global financial crisis of the late 2000s.

But waiting lists for healthcare remain above pre-pandemic levels with lengthy backlogs for many services while there remains widespread exasperation ​at under-resourced local government and justice services and disrepair across road networks.

Yeah, not exactly the prettiest of pictures there. Now, I’m sure some of you are thinking, “that’s great and all, but what does this have to do with age verification?” Well, when things are going sideways, what is a politician’s favourite thing to do? Blame the internet. It’s long been the default thing to do when you don’t really know what else to do to salvage your situation. That appears to be exactly what Starmer is doing. From TechDirt:

It started a week ago with an announcement that if internet social media companies didn’t wave a magic wand and make all sexting disappear… he would start putting tech execs in prison.

“Today I’m calling on tech companies operating in this country to introduce device controls that prevent children from sending and receiving sexually ​explicit images,” Starmer said in a speech at London Tech Week. “This is not an impossible challenge.”

Under the new plans, firms like Apple and Google ​would have to build or activate technical solutions on smartphones and tablets to detect and block nude images for children. ⁠Adults would still be able to take, share or view nude content through an age verification process.

If companies did not act within three months, the government said ​it would bring forward legislation to force them to do so or risk facing fines or, as a last resort, the threat of criminal liability for bosses.

This is very much the magical “nerd harder” thinking by a technologically clueless bureaucrat who thinks that societal problems can be solved by making tech companies do the impossible: stopping humans from doing stupid things.

That magical wishcasting continued this week with Starmer announcing that the UK would be following Australia’s completely failed experiment in “banning” kids from social media, by putting in place an even stricter ban of teens from even more internet services.

The U.K. plans to follow the same model for a social media ban as Australia, which last year became the first country to bar under-16s from holding social media accounts. Platforms that fail to take reasonable steps to exclude children younger than 16 could be punished with multimillion-dollar fines.

The U.K. said its ban will apply to platforms including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X, but not YouTube Kids or messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal. Starmer stressed that enforcement action will target tech companies, not children.

The prime minister also said he will go further than Australia’s measures.

He said the government will act to prevent strangers from contacting children on gaming and livestreaming platforms. Authorities are also considering additional measures including overnight curfews and breaks in infinite scrolling for those under 18. More details are expected next month.

This is more nerd harder nonsense. Again, Australia’s ban has been a total joke, with the vast majority of kids figuring out how to get around the ban, and the ones most hurt by the ban being teens who have lost access to the communities that were most important to them.

Now you see why I brought up UK politics. You have a Prime Minister who is rapidly losing the confidence of not only the general population, but also his own party as well. So, in a desperate bid to try and change things up, it appears that Starmer is going down the “blame the internet” road in a desperate bid to try and turn sagging poll numbers back around. As Mike Masnick pointed out, the age verification is more to do with political theatre than child safety.

Indeed, contrary to the mainstream media narrative, age verification laws generally put children in harms way far more than make them safer. This as teens find less safe alternatives or methods that would encourage teens to stay quiet about their presence on the social media platforms that have meant so much to them all this time. These observations are increasingly making appearances in scientific literature as one study back in May pointed out that teens are becoming less informed about what is happening in the world should they become impacted by the government censorship that is age gating or social media bans – however you want to call it.

Of course, you don’t even have to take our word for it. This has become increasingly the consensus among observers witnessing the actual impacts of such laws becoming implemented. For instance, you can read about this through the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) who had lots to say about the UK age verification laws:

This week, politicians in the UK pushed forward with plans to eviscerate privacy and free speech on the internet by announcing a ban on social media for users under 16 that is set to take effect in Spring 2027.

The UK government continues to falsely characterize this policy as a necessary response to growing concerns about online harms for young people. In reality, much like the Online Safety Act, it will cause more harm than it will prevent.

Users of all ages are burdened with proving their age before accessing content, with social media platforms such as Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X included in the ban. There remains no reliable, privacy-preserving method of verifying the age of every internet user and methods vary from one platform to the next.

Young people will not simply be protected from being contacted by adults or endlessly scrolling—they’ll also lose access to educational videos on YouTube, local events on Facebook, and potentially cut off from distant friends and family.

Public policy must be effective, proportionate and respectful of fundamental rights. Young people deserve better than a policy built on panic, and all internet users deserve a safe and free internet. A social media ban generates headlines, but it will not solve the problem.

Teenagers actually impacted by these laws have long spoken out against such measures. They point out that the internet has long been a safe space for people like them to express themselves, shielded from a world where older generation culture is often seen as the only acceptable culture anyone of any age can have. That safe space is what is being cut off and, along with it, the teens creative expression along with it. From the BBC:

Ziame Stewart can barely remember a time he was not performing for social media.

The 15-year-old has always loved singing and dancing, and says he has been filming “silly little videos” almost his whole life.

He started by making videos for friends and family when he lived abroad as a young child, but his hobby gradually grew into a passion and now potentially a future career.

Had Ziame been born a few years later, his career might have been in trouble before it even began thanks to the UK’s new policy banning under-16s from social media.

Although he will be turning 16 just before the new rules come into effect next spring, the budding singer and dancer is still frustrated. He thinks the policy could bury a generation of creative talent.

He points to hugely successful artists such as Justin Bieber and Billie Eilish, and his own personal inspiration, British rising star Sekou, who were all discovered on social media as teenagers.

“Imagine if this ban was put through ages ago – we wouldn’t have any of this music,” he tells the BBC.

Child safety groups are also sounding the alarm over age verification laws as well. Some are pointing to Australia and rightfully saying that importing such laws to countries like the UK is a recipe for failure. From Tech Radar:

Banning all children from social media apps has been this week’s headline-grabbing, simple fix to an online world growing more hostile by the day. Too bad that it may not work, after all.

Not only is a blanket social media ban incredibly difficult to enforce from a technical standpoint, in fact, but the fallout will hit everyone where it hurts the most: our digital privacy, ultimately perhaps even taking down VPNs in the process.

Children and teens living in Australia were the first in the world to take an enforced break from their Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok lives — a break that law now states must last until they turn 16. That’s the theory, at least, but reality tells a very different story.

In March, Australia’s body tasked with overseeing the young person social media ban’s implementation, the eSafety Commissioner, found that around seven in 10 under-16s still have an active account on major platforms. Worse still, three months later, and there have been no notable changes in the cyberbullying or image-based abuse reported by children that this law was designed to stop.

The numbers are not encouraging and show that the sweeping restrictions are failing to bring the hoped-for results. Nonetheless, the UK government is convinced that banning all under-16s from social media “is the right step for Britain”, and has set a deadline for implementing an Australian-like model by spring next year.

Of course, this isn’t even getting into the question of whether the UKs crackdown on the internet is going to extend to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). What action the government is going to take has been a bit more up in the air since at least 2025. There was the technologically baffling idea of extending age verification to VPNs (which is something that makes absolutely no sense at all) and the idea of just banning VPNs altogether (which is completely insane). As recent reports show, these discussions have not really slowed down, either. From CyberNews:

After a minister was interviewed by the BBC on Tuesday, there has been concern that the UK government is considering a ban on virtual private networks as part of a string of measures to ensure that the social media ban for under-16s announced on Monday was effective.

Speaking to the public broadcaster on a breakfast time slot, technology Secretary Liz Kendall hinted that further restrictions could be introduced on VPNs as well as on AI chatbots and measures to prevent 16 and 17-year-olds from “doom scrolling” in their bedrooms overnight.

While the minister didn’t say the government would ban VPNs outright, she told the BBC she would “come back in July with a further statement about VPNs.”

I would imagine that this is not exactly the kind of news users of VPNs want to be reading. After all, the UK government is already moving ahead with the failed age verification laws and now they are taking their ignorance to regulating VPN services on top of it all. If this was my government, my reaction would be a frustrated “That is just freaking great.”

I’d love to talk about how basic logic and reasoning would suggest that moving forward with something as demonstrably failed as age verification would be a sign that maybe you shouldn’t be pushing such laws in the first place, but in this day and age, we have gone well past basic logic and reason and have landed squarely in the realm of pure lunacy at this point. You want basic logic and reason, well, that ship has sailed years ago when we were talking about link taxes. At this point, we’re just seeing just how insane government is willing to devolve to.

No sane person wants age verification laws at this point. Anyone who is paying attention at this point knows just how bad these laws truly are and is witnessing a government push these terrible laws anyway. The only people left that are actually pushing these laws are the lunatics and the technophobic ignorant. As with more and more facets of every day life, the lunatics really have taken over the asylum.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.