How online age-gating laws went mainstream this year
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What are the new online age verification laws in the U.S.?
Online age verification is growing up. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino.
As we close out 2025, we're looking back at some of the big tech trends that went mainstream this year. Today, age verification, where you have to prove your age online. About half of states now require this step to prevent kids from accessing certain content, usually pornography, but in some cases, broader categories of adult content that include social media. Drew Harwell has been following this.
How do age verification tools work in practice?
He's a tech reporter at The Washington Post. There's like a whole cottage industry now of contractors mainly that offer all kinds of different age verification tools. One of them is, you know, you'll be asked to hold up your ID next to your face in front of your computer webcam and it'll scan, you know, are you the face on the ID? There's also a form of software called age estimation where you don't need your ID, but you just look into the webcam and it uses AI to... basically guess whether you're a kid or an adult. And so, you know, the big social media companies, websites will work with these contractors who run this software.
What Supreme Court decision impacted age verification laws?
So you now have this additional security layer that you're seeing in a lot of places. And we've seen this age verification layer kind of building for several years. But this was the year that we got a very notable Supreme Court decision pertaining to state laws requiring it. What did the court decide and how did that decision affect the landscape for age verification? Yeah, so it's really interesting. So at this point, we've now had basically half of the US, 25 states pass their own age verification laws.
How have age verification requirements changed the internet experience?
And in one of the states in Texas, their explicit content age verification law went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that, yes, it is okay for states to demand that websites require this level of due diligence to make sure their users are of age. So that has, you know, in some ways, settled the question in terms of what the tech companies can require and has basically encouraged a lot of lawmakers at the state and even at the federal level to kind of push forward and be more aggressive and requiring this be used by, you know, whichever tech companies they feel like requires it or deserves it. So half of states now require some form of age verification. This year, the UK, just recently Australia, also added age verification regulations for various sites.
How has this practically changed the Internet? Are we getting age verification popping up in places that don't require it?
What are the privacy concerns surrounding age verification?
Is it something that's become more standard? It is something you're seeing in places that you wouldn't expect it, right? I think there's a social media platform called Blue Sky where they are hitting this challenge. And in some states like Mississippi, they basically just had to cancel service to any user statewide because they worry about being designated as explicit or having a user post something that would be explicit and then the state coming after them. A lot of these laws... threaten very big fines against the platforms to, you know, ensure that they comply. So, you know, the companies are being very careful. And it's really the smaller companies and websites that are nervous, not just about the law, but about the cost of the age verification, too.
And, you know, these companies on the age verification, like contractor level, charge per scan, basically.
Are these laws effectively protecting kids online?
So for a smaller website, it can be pretty prohibitively expensive. And just on the user level, I mean, you know, I think we've all gotten used to like the surfing the web reality of just like popping around different websites, not hitting really any like walls as we go. But now, you know, you can be surprised by going to some random website that you just want to look at for a couple seconds and then being forced to basically prove you're an adult by, you know, again, scanning your face, giving a face print of yourself to some company that, you know, you've often never heard of and don't know what it's going to be used for in the future.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What are the new online age verification laws in the U.S.?
0:01–0:47
2
How do age verification tools work in practice?
0:47–1:29
3
What Supreme Court decision impacted age verification laws?
1:29–2:06
4
How have age verification requirements changed the internet experience?
2:06–3:06
5
What are the privacy concerns surrounding age verification?
3:06–4:00
6
Are these laws effectively protecting kids online?
4:00–5:00
7
What is the future of federal involvement in age verification laws?
5:00–11:17