I’ve been online for nearly 34 years, and I’m thinking of becoming a child. Or at least, a child to big user-to-user social media services, which next week will start asking for proof of adulthood. On July 25, the new age verification requirements under the Online Safety Act come into effect in the UK. The regulator, Ofcom, has published a guide.
Plenty of companies aim to join this new market. Some are familiar: credit scorers Experian and Transunion. Others are new: Yoti, which we saw demonstrated back in 2016, and Sam Altman and Andreessen Horowitz-backed six-year-old startup World, which recently did a promotional tour for the UK launch of its Orb identification system. Summary: many happy privacy words, but still dubious.
Reddit picked Persona; Dearbail Jordan at the BBC says Redditors will need to upload either a selfie for age estimation or a government-issued ID. Reddit says it will not see this data, only storing each user’s verification status along with the birth date they’ve (optionally) provided.
Bluesky has chosen Kids’ Web Services from Epic Games. The announcement says KWS accepts multiple options: payment cards, ID scans, and face scans. Users who decline to supply this information will be denied access to adult content and direct messaging. How much do I care about either? Would I rather just be a child to two-year-old Bluesky?
On older sites my adulthood ought to be obvious: I joined Twitter/X in 2008 and Reddit in 2015. Do the math, guys! I suppose there is a chance I could have created the account, forgotten it, and then revived it for a child (the “older brother problem”), but I’m not sure these third-party verifiers solve that either.
Everyone wants to protect children. But it doesn’t make sense to do it by creating a system that exposes everyone, including children, to new privacy risks. In its report on how to fix the OSA, the Open Rights Group argues that interoperability and portability should be first principles, and that users should be able to choose providers and methods. Today, the social media companies don’t see age verification data; in five years will they be buying up those providers? These first steps matter, as they are setting the template for what is to come.
This is the opening of a floodgate. On June 27 the US Supreme Court ruled in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton to uphold a law requiring pornographic websites to verify users’ ages through government-issued ID. At TechDirt, Mike Masnick called the ruling taking a chainsaw to the First Amendment.
It’s easy to predict that here will be scandals surrounding the data age verifiers collect, and others where technological failures let children access the wrong sort of content. We’ll hear less about the frustrations of people who are blocked by age verification from essential information. Meanwhile, child safety folks will continue pushing for new levels of control.
The big question is this: how will we know if it’s working? What does “success” look like?
At Platformer, Casey Newton covers Substack’s announcement that it has closed series C funding round of $100 million, valuing the company at $1.1 billion. The eight-year-old company gets to say it’s a unicorn.
Newton tries to understand how Substack is worth that. He predicts – logically – that its only choice to justify its venture capitalists’ investment will be rampant enshittification. These guys don’t put in that kind of money without expecting a full-bore return, which is why Newton is dubious about the founders’ promise to invest most of that newly-raised capital in creators. Recall the stages Cory Doctorow laid out: first they amass as many users as possible; then they abuse those users to amass as many business customers (advertisers) as possible; then they squeeze everyone.
Substack, which announced four months ago that it – or, more correctly, its creators – has more than 5 million paid subscriptions, is different in that its multi-sided market structure is more like Uber or Amazon Marketplace than like a social media site or traditional publisher. It has users (readers and listeners), creators (like Uber’s drivers or Amazon’s sellers), and customers (advertisers). Viewed that way, it’s easy to see Substack’s most likely path: raise prices (users and advertisers), raise thresholds and commissions (creators), and, like Amazon, force sellers (creators) into using fee-based additional services in order to stay afloat. Plus, it must crush the competition. See similar math from Anil Dash.
Less ponderable is the headwind of Substack’s controversial hospitality to extremists, noted in 2023 by Jonathan Katz at The Atlantic. Some creators – like Newton – have opted to leave for competitor Ghost, which is both open source and cheaper. Many friends refuse to pay Substack even when they want to support creators whose work they admire. At the time, Stephen Bush responded at the Financial Times that Substack should admit that it’s not a publisher but a “handy bit of infrastructure for sending newsletters”. Is that worth $1.1 billion?
Like earlier Silicon Valley companies, Substack is planning to reverse its previous disdain for advertising, as Benjamin Mullin and Jessica Testa report at the New York Times. The company is apparently also looking forward to embracing social networking.
So, no really new ideas, then?
Illustrations: Unicorn (by Pearson Scott Foresman via Wikimedia.
Wendy M. Grossman is an award-winning journalist. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.
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