Nobody runs for office on "I'm against protecting kids."

Frame a bill around child safety and you've automatically won.

In Australia, 70% of voters back the under-16 ban. In the UK, 9 in 10 parents support one.

Those are numbers politicians would sell their secret Twitter account for.

But here's the thing the polls don't capture: the loudest critics of these laws aren't defending Big Tech. They're arguing that "child safety" has become the wrapping paper on something much bigger: a global identity verification layer for the entire internet.

And whether you think that's paranoid or prophetic, it's about to change how every one of our creators reaches their audience.

Let’s discuss what’s being suggested, what the impacts will be, and what you should do about it.

🌏 The Under-16 Audience Just Became a Regulated Asset (Thoughts Are My Own)

💰 Australia wants to double its fines to $99M

📱 Starmer gives phone makers 90 days on nudity blocking

🍁 Canada joins the under-16 ban club

🍎 Apple credits Australia's ban for its new controls

💪🏼 Jobs from Match, Twitch, and VaynerX

🎭 ...and a dank meme from yours truly!

Let’s get into it.

TLDR:

So how did we get to a place where the entire developed world is age-gating the internet at once, and why is one of the most prominent voices against it a tech journalist most of you follow?

The case for the laws is simple, and it's winning.

Kids are on platforms engineered to be addictive.

Parents feel outgunned.

Jonathan Haidt wrote a bestseller about it.

And when the Australian government says the ban is really "a delay to having accounts" rather than a prohibition, that framing sounds reasonable to most parents. The polling reflects it: this is one of the only bipartisan, cross-border consensus issues left on Earth.

The case against is Taylor Lorenz's whole beat right now.

Taylor, who covered this space for years at the Washington Post and wrote the book Extremely Online, has become the most visible critic of these laws. Her argument, laid out in a March piece for The Intercept, isn't that kids don't face harm online. It's that age verification is a Trojan horse for identity verification.

Her logic goes like this: a platform can't magically know a user is 16. It has to verify who they are. Government ID, facial scan, credit card, biometrics. Whether that data sits with the platform or a third-party vendor, the result is the same: your offline identity gets permanently linked to your online behavior.

To verify one kid, you have to verify everyone.

Which means anonymous speech, the thing whistleblowers, activists, and honestly half of YouTube commentary is built on, effectively dies.

And she's got receipts on the "it won't stop at kids" fear. She points to the Heritage Foundation publicly saying it plans to leverage KOSA-style laws to remove LGBTQ+ and abortion content, and to the UK's Online Safety Act being used to restrict content including videos documenting police violence.

Digital rights groups like the EFF and Big Brother Watch are making the same argument: there is no reliable, privacy-preserving way to verify every user's age, and the infrastructure you build to try becomes surveillance infrastructure by default.

And the messy middle is where reality lives.

Both sides have a point, and both sides have a problem.

The safety side has the polls but not the results. Australia's own data shows most under-16s just kept using social media, kids migrated to Roblox, Discord, and Steam, and a how-to-skirt-the-ban culture bloomed within weeks.

Even the founding chief of the UK's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre says he doesn't know a single online safety expert who thinks a blanket ban will work.

Deplatforming doesn't remove harm.

It relocates it.

Often to darker corners with fewer moderators.

The civil liberties side has the logic but not the alternative that parents can actually vote for. "Safety by design" and "algorithmic accountability" are correct and also sound like a whitepaper. "Your kid can't have TikTok until 16" fits on a bumper sticker. Guess which one wins elections.

So is there a middle ground? A few candidates are actually on the table:

My honest read: the bans are going to keep passing, because "child safety" is undefeated at the ballot box and the tech lobby spent 15 years earning zero benefit of the doubt.

The real fight over the next two years won't be ban vs. no ban. It'll be over what verification looks like, who holds the data, and how far past "children" the definition of protected content creeps.

Taylor is right: the surveillance risk is real.

The parents are right: the harm is real. Any parent who gave their kid a tablet playing Roblox videos for 10 minutes then tried to take it away can tell you it’s true.

And the platforms, who built the addiction machines and are now shocked, shocked that governments came for them, are the least sympathetic party in the room.

If you're repping talent with young audiences and want to talk through what this means for your roster, my DMs are open.

Here's the part of this debate nobody in our industry wants to say out loud: for creator businesses, the under-16 audience just went from an asset to a liability line item.

Think about what actually happened in Australia.

Five million accounts, deleted.

Not churned, not lapsed. Deleted by law.

Every kids-and-family creator, every gaming channel skewing young, every Roblox and Minecraft personality just watched a chunk of their addressable Australian audience get legally erased.

The UK is next, and the UK is a top-three market for most English-language creators.

Now layer on what the workaround data tells us. That BMJ study found most Aussie kids are still there, just lying about their age or on a parent's account.

Which means the audience didn't disappear.

It went dark.

It's unmeasurable, untargetable, and unmonetizable.

A 14-year-old watching through an "18-year-old" account shows up in analytics as an adult, brands buy against that data, and eventually someone at an agency figures out the CPMs were built on ghosts.

What I'd actually do about it:

The uncomfortable truth is that our industry built a lot of value on an audience segment that governments have now decided shouldn't be there at all. You can think that's righteous or you can think it's theater.

Either way, price it in.

The creators, brands, governments, and platforms are making waves this week in the name of fortune, fame, and fun.

💰 Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese isn't easing up. After blasting platforms for "doing the bare minimum," Australia's PM said the government is considering raising the maximum fine to $99 million and extending eSafety powers to app stores and age assurance providers. When the fine doubles, the compliance theater ends.

📱 At London Tech Week, soon-to-be-former British PM Keir Starmer announced the UK will require phone and tablet makers to detect and block nude images for children by default across all apps, with a three-month deadline before legislation and potential criminal liability for tech execs. OS-level enforcement is coming whether platforms like it or not.

🍁 Canada introduced legislation to bar under-16s from holding social media accounts. Pour one out for the Second City Toronto teen troupe.

🍎 Apple credited Australia's teen social media ban as the driver behind its new controls, per the Sydney Morning Herald. When the biggest device maker on earth starts building for the strictest regulator, every market gets the strict version eventually.

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