Age gating is just the first step

Australia became the first country in the world to ban anyone under the age of 16 from social media. The Online Safety Amendment Bill 2024 received royal assent last year, turning it into an Act which will come into effect by the end of December 2025. The passage of the bill marked a tremendous shift in the digital rights movement across the world as it emboldened several jurisdictions to consider similar restrictions. Proposals have surfaced not only within western political sphere such as Aotearoa, France and Greece, but also in western peripheral allies such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Japan. Whilst the level of restrictions and modes of implementation vary across countries, one underlying thread united these proposals: the reliance on age verification technology, the invasive use of mass surveillance to enforce compliance and the overarching theme of paternalism.

The supposed harms that these measures are seeking to mitigate, ranging from cyberbullying to hate speech, are extensively documented in existing literature. I do not deny these pieces of evidence nor do I dismiss the urgency of addressing them. But I fail to see how a heavy-handed ‘strongman’ approach will solve the root causes of the problems. The struggles of young people are grounded in poverty, discrimination, broken education systems, an economy rigged to reward the rich with endless tax breaks and politics designed to divide and conquer. Their presence online is not the source of their suffering. The invocation of paternalism as the central justification for age gating paves the way for a moral panic, fixated on a single false cause of harm whilst discarding the material conditions shaping the lives of young people.

Such policies certainly have seductive allure as they are often presented as panacea to all our long-standing concerns about children’s safety online or safety, in general. But I oppose this notion that labels age gating as the real, tangible solution to these problems. Age gating is by itself a weapon of coercion and ideological control that seeks to surveil people under the guise of protection and normalise the further consolidation of state and corporate power over our ‘everyday’.

A blanket ban based on a certain state-sanctioned age threshold (18 in the Philippines; 16 in Australia; 15 in Greece; 13 in Malaysia) will have far-reaching consequences that will push young people to further social exclusion and limit their ability to develop crucial digital literacy skills that are vital to their worldmaking. Age gating on social media will exacerbate the extensive digital divide that disproportionately affects youth from working class backgrounds, who rely more heavily on social media for educational opportunities and community support. Unlike their more opulent counterparts, working class families do not have the same resources to afford private tutors and extracurricular programs to fill in this gap. Further, the increasing rate of youth homelessness in urban and rural centres precludes any serious claim that the state is committed to protecting young people. A teenager sleeping rough on the street, who rely on social media for food and opportunity, is not kept safe by being locked out of social media. Instead, they are failed once again by a system that abandons their most immediate needs. The same is true for LGBTIQ+ youth, who often seek safety and affirmation online when their offline environments are hostile. Cutting them off from these lifelines compounds their isolation.

The main principle in age gating policies that frames children as innocent, apolitical and pure is only reserved to children from affluent families who can buy their way to privacy and justice. Children from working class, racialised and migrant backgrounds are never guaranteed the same innocence. The state’s approach to the welfare of working class young people is never defined by safety, but by criminalisation. It is baffling to watch how states that position themselves as guardians of childhood online are the same states that jail minors, lock migrant children in cages and kill teenagers in the name of so-called ’law and order.’ The unfaltering carcerality, criminalisation and killing of working class children rarely reach policy debates. And when it does often through demands on the streets, they are silenced and framed as dangerous, whilst the systemic violence remains unacknowledged and unchecked.

This is the society we live in. Any form of paternalism that is baked into state policy is just another extension of their grip. It becomes a mechanism that conditions young people to accept intervention at every step of the way, relegating them into a permanent state of deferral. If we were to strip these age gating policies down to their core and look at them eye to eye in their barest form, what we will see is a tool for mass surveillance designed to undermine the freedom of thought. We are seeing this manifest in the United Kingdom through the Online Safety Act where the state defines what is deemed ‘harmful’. Following its enforcement, multiple reports noted that subreddits such as r/IsraelCrimes and r/UkraineWarFootage had been blocked in the UK.

As the enforcement of a social media ban through age gating necessitates that all users submit sensitive personal information to verify their age before accessing social media platforms, it becomes an instrument of discipline. This is the initial step in the process of cultivating a false consciousness and pushing us towards acceptance of mass surveillance as a necessary precondition for ‘safety’ (for whom?). Sustained over time, age gating policies will produce generations of adults less inclined to question power that obscures their real class interest.

We are at a time where young people are leading the way, calling for justice on genocide in Palestine, demanding action on climate change and speaking truth to power in the face of late stage capitalism. Age gating seeks to blunt that force. By restricting access to knowledge and voices that challenge dominant narratives, the powers that be aim to keep young people from building their own political consciousness. Our generation and the generations before us have already betrayed the young people of today and plundered their future. We have given them a world on the brink of an ecological collapse, deepening inequality, rising fascism and a digital world increasingly designed for surveillance. And here we are again, as adults offering them quick fixes and punitive control instead of dismantling the systems that exploit them. Age gating is a flawed policy that punishes youth for the crises they did not create, whilst shielding those truly responsible from accountability. Our task now is not to stand in their way but to defend their right to shape the future with dignity and power.