Recently, companies have been making their platforms safer for kids. However this job really should be on the parents, who are responsible for monitoring their kids. If the companies/websites have to worry about censoring their platforms, then it not only affects the kids but also the adults trying to use those platforms.
For example some platforms, apps and websites like X, Spotify, YouTube, Roblox, Tik Tok, Discord and Minecraft are implementing mandatory age verification to access their services. A lot of companies are verifying ages using facial verification or an ID to determine how old the user is.
Some companies like Roblox are sorting users into age groups. This creates a big problem because not only is it making it very easy to find out how old these kids are, but it is also easy to commit identity fraud. This makes the platform more dangerous because predators can find young kids more easily.
This requirement can also be annoying for people who want to stay private, since almost all of these age verifications use facial recognition or pictures of ID. This makes users not want to comply because they have no idea where their data could go.
“When a platform I use to talk to my friends insisted I verify my age, I wasn’t given a choice about which age verification service would get my driving licence. I was expected to trust that the platform had made a good decision with my best interests at heart. That’s a pretty big ask,” said writer Alex Treryth from The Guardian.
There are also people who just don’t want to have their face associated with their name for privacy reasons.
“The Online Safety Act is a threat to the privacy of users,” said writer Paige Collings from Electronic Frontier Foundation. This also plays into how a Discord security breach caused 70,000 IDs to be exposed.
Discord, like most of these other platforms, uses AI for user verification.
Senior Security Editor Dan Goodin said, “The best advice for people who have submitted IDs to Discord or any other service is to assume they have been or soon will be stolen by hackers and put up for sale or used in extortion scams.”
Asking for age verification in this way can also be seen as excessively controlling especially for older teens and even some adults. A 17-year-old shouldn’t have the same restrictions as a 7-year-old. There is also an issue of friends trying to play games together but find themselves unable to if one is 18 and the other is underage, even if they’re trying to play with parents.
For apps like Roblox and Minecraft, if you are under the age requirement, you will not be able to use some features, one of these being the chat box. This will negatively affect these platforms because it essentially kills the social aspect of these games.
This is why the job of monitoring children should fall on the parents; they should be keeping their children safe, not companies. But that is where the issue starts, as parents aren’t monitoring their kids and are allowing them free access to these platforms. If we want to solve this issue without giving out personal information just to prove our age, then it starts with the parents. There are plenty of kid-safe apps out there where kids can only access curtain filtered content and can’t chat with strangers, and there are also monitoring apps out there to block and/or report harmful or inappropriate content.
Todd Baulch • Feb 23, 2026 at 11:24 am
Hi Katie! Interesting take here. This problem has become a hindrance in my home too, as most of my son’s friends are online (and his main source of communication). I get that the companies are attempting to be safer, but it’s potentially causing more harm than good right now by either reducing social interaction or forcing age verification, which leads to other dangers. I wish there was a better option, but of the 2 choices, I’d go with parents monitoring as well.
Sam • Feb 17, 2026 at 7:33 am
Very appropriate for what’s happening right now with the new internet filter.