Let’s Build a Better Internet, Not a Higher Wall

I’m returning to the subject of banning minors from social media, and particularly, the problem with age verification systems, which are enormously easy to circumvent while at the same time normalize permanent identification, endangering fundamental rights such as privacy and anonymity.

Australia has decided to become the global laboratory for this mistaken idea, with a rule in force since December 10, 2025 requiring platforms to take “reasonable measures” to prevent minors under sixteen years of age from having accounts, under threat of very high fines, as can be seen on Australian government websites.

The problem, of course, is that the internet doesn’t work like that, and teenagers, much less. The first available data point to a fairly predictable failure: research by the Molly Rose Foundation, based on a survey of more than a thousand young Australians between the ages of twelve and fifteen, concludes that 61% of those who already had accounts before the ban still have access to at least one of them, which is equivalent to 54% of the total of that cohort. In addition, 70% of those who continued to use restricted platforms said that it was easy to circumvent the ban, because the platforms themselves simply did not detect or deactivate those accounts. All this also fits with reports of the early days of the law, in which numerous teenagers said they were still using social media. The Molly Rose Foundation’s own investigation, along with pieces by ABC News and The Washington Post make it quite clear that the ban was performance politics.

What’s really problematic here isn’t that the ban is easily being circumvented, it’s that minors themselves say they don’t feel any safer online as a result of it. According to the same study, 51% of young people said that the norm had not changed at all how safe they felt online, while 14% said they felt less safe than before. In other words, the real result does not seem to be a clear improvement in the digital environment, but a mixture of inefficiency, arbitrariness and displacement of the problem. And when a law fails in its main objective and consolidates much more invasive control mechanisms, it ceases to be a bad law and becomes a danger.

Because, to enforce these types of rules, you have to identify yoursef. And while the Australian government insists that no one will be forced to use government ID or Digital ID to verify their age, the official documentation itself acknowledges that platforms will have to implement some form of age assurance. This inevitably implies more data collection, more information processing and more friction points to access spaces for public conversation. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has already had to publish specific guidance reminding the public that these systems must be proportional, minimize the data they collect and not become a blank check to erode privacy. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been even clearer: this wave of age verification laws forces users to sacrifice anonymity, privacy and security simply to access the internet. That’s exactly the kind of slippery slope we should refuse to normalize.

In fact, the Australian case illustrates very well the extent to which the debate is poorly framed. The focus is obsessively placed on the age of the user, as if the essential problem were minors, when the underlying question is what social networks are today and how they make money. Banning the entry of certain groups does not alter their surveillance practices one iota, nor their incentives to maximize attention, dependency and polarization, nor their monetization model based on the systematic extraction of personal data. The EFF itself sums it up succinctly: banning a specific group does not change problematic privacy practices, insufficient content moderation or a business model based on exploiting people’s attention and data.

And therein lies the real issue. This is not a problem about adolescents, but a broader issue about society as a hole. Social networks are not harmful only to kids; they are a danger to everyone. In 2024, the Federal Trade Commission described social media and videogame platforms as having engaged in “vast surveillance” of their users to monetize their personal information, with lax and insufficient safeguards for children and adolescents. An academic study published in PLOS ONE, later picked up by media such as the Harvard Gazette or AP News, estimated that in the United States alone these platforms obtained about $11 billion in advertising revenue from users under eighteen years of age in 2022. When an industry gets so much business from attracting, profiling and retaining young people, the time has come to stop pretending that the problem can be fixed with access controls.

Australia’s reaction, moreover, does not suggest calm reflection, but rather towards an escalation of more enforcement. In late March, the Australian regulator announced investigations into five major platforms for possible breaches of the ban, in the clearest sign yet that the experiment may lead to litigation and sanctions rather than results. Reuters reports that the regulator considers it likely that many minors have been able to open accounts simply by lying about their age. In other words, the more evident the inefficiency of the system becomes, the stronger the temptation to tighten the control machinery.

I think that the important thing is to start precisely from that observation: we are looking at the problem from the wrong end. We don’t need an internet where everyone has to identify themselves in order to speak, read or participate. We need different social networks, free of predatory advertising models, with much less surveillance capacity, with incentives better aligned with the well-being of their users and with real rules on interoperability, algorithmic transparency and minimal data collection. As long as we continue to accept that the public conversation is organized by companies whose business is to spy on their users in order to sell segmentation to the highest bidder, the discussion about whether or not teenagers can open an account will be little more than a distraction.

There’s no point trying to build a wall around social networks; they need to be dismantled.

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This post was previously published on Enrique Dans’ blog.

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