Social Media Age Verification Laws Are the New Prohibition — And They’ll Fail Just as Hard

It risks building an internet where ordinary adults have to identify themselves simply to speak, read, organise or participate in public debate.

That is not a small technical inconvenience. It is a fundamental shift in the relationship between citizens, platforms and the state.

Age-gating social media is often presented as a straightforward solution: establish that someone is over a certain age, then allow access. In practice, however, determining age online is considerably more complicated than putting a date of birth into a registration form.

A system that actually works has to distinguish between minors and adults reliably. That could require government-issued identification, facial analysis, third-party verification services, payment information, biometric systems or other forms of personal data. Every additional verification layer creates another database, another potential security vulnerability and another organisation holding information that users may never have wanted to disclose.

And the problem does not end there.

A determined teenager is unlikely to see an age restriction as an absolute barrier. Young people already find ways around geographic restrictions, parental controls and other digital barriers. VPNs, borrowed accounts, fake credentials and alternative services can undermine systems designed around the assumption that a person's age can be established once and for all.

Meanwhile, legitimate adults bear the cost.

This is where the comparison with Prohibition becomes useful—not because banning alcohol and regulating social media are identical policies, but because both demonstrate the limits of trying to solve complicated social problems primarily through broad restrictions.

When demand remains strong, prohibition tends to push behaviour into less visible channels rather than eliminating it. Digital age-gating risks doing something similar. Users may migrate to smaller platforms with weaker moderation, foreign services outside the reach of domestic regulators or anonymous corners of the internet where governments have even less visibility.

The result could be an internet that is simultaneously more restrictive for law-abiding users and harder to police.

There is also a free-speech problem that cannot be dismissed as an abstract constitutional argument.

Social media is no longer merely a collection of entertainment apps. It is where journalists publish, activists organise, businesses communicate, political movements mobilise and ordinary people discuss public affairs. Restricting access to these spaces based on identity and age creates a system in which participation increasingly depends on successful verification.

The obvious response is that adults have nothing to fear if verification is used only to establish age.

But privacy is not merely about having something to hide.

A person may reasonably object to a government-linked system knowing which platforms they use, what communities they participate in or when they access politically sensitive material. Even if today's government promises that such information will not be abused, laws and administrations change. Infrastructure built for one purpose can eventually be expanded to another.

The better question, therefore, is not whether children deserve protection. They do.

The question is whether universal identity checks are the least damaging way to provide it.

There are alternatives. Platforms can improve default privacy settings for minors, limit targeted advertising, redesign recommendation systems, strengthen parental controls, respond faster to reports of exploitation and impose meaningful penalties when companies knowingly fail to protect children. Schools and parents can also play a role in teaching digital literacy rather than outsourcing every responsibility to the state.

Most importantly, regulation should focus on demonstrably harmful conduct and platform practices rather than treating access to an entire category of communication as inherently suspect.

There is a temptation in politics to choose the most visible solution because it gives the impression that something decisive is being done. Mandatory age verification offers exactly that appearance.

But a policy can be politically satisfying and technologically ineffective at the same time.

The internet is too large, too decentralised and too adaptable for governments to assume that a verification gate will neatly separate children from harmful content. If the gate is weak, it will be bypassed. If it is strong, it may require intrusive surveillance. If it is universal, it risks burdening millions of adults to address the behaviour of a much smaller population.

That is a poor trade.

Protecting children online is a legitimate public-policy objective. But protecting children does not require creating an internet where anonymity becomes suspicious, privacy becomes conditional and speech begins with an identity check.

The lesson from prohibition is not that governments should never regulate harmful behaviour. It is that good intentions do not make an unworkable system workable.

Age verification may promise a cleaner internet.

It could instead produce a less private, less open and no safer one.