Wouldn’t this be a good thing? MS social media age verification law can go into effect.
A recent ruling from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals is allowing Mississippi to move forward with a law requiring age verification for social media users. While some argued that such measures infringe on privacy and expression, it’s worth asking: if law enforcement is truly concerned about adults using the internet to prey on minors, shouldn’t age verification be the first and most obvious line of defense?
Age verification — especially on dating apps — would go a lot further to actually protect children than the headline-grabbing “stings” we see so often, where enormous resources are used to lure people into committing crimes they may not have otherwise considered. If children are being exploited on platforms designed for adults, then preventing their access in the first place seems like a far more effective and proactive solution.
NetChoice, LLC v. Fitch, No. 24‑60341 (5th Cir. Apr. 17, 2025) is about social media accounts, but if technology exists that could prevent alleged sexual predation on dating apps, shouldn’t that be something everyone is pushing for? Or would it harm the “sting” business model?
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I like where your head is at. It would beautiful if it could be designed to work that way. The ugly truth is, it will become twisted. There goes a registrant doing 5 miles over the speed limit. Nevermind that they did it to avoid catastrophe, add another charge onto them. Are we at three yet?
The groundwork for maintaining this finding is already in place now at SCOTUS where the applicability of it to other areas, e.g., social media, etc, is going to spread…
“The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June 2025 to uphold Texas’s age verification law for adult websites in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton (23-1122), a 6-3 decision finding the law constitutional despite arguments that it infringes on free speech. This ruling affirmed the constitutionality of requiring age verification for access to adult websites that contain sexually explicit material, setting a precedent for similar laws in other states and potentially impacting online speech more broadly
Check out tomorrow’s weekly update for some thoughts about this.
If providing an ID is their requirement, then that’s good, but if you don’t have one, then do you just make up a birthday that shows you are a different age than what you actually are? How does that help?
They can use facial AI recognition that does a pretty good job of telling a person’s age from various images taken by the device. AI has gotten quite good at age detection.
Facial recognition is bad, period. And AI is very fallible. Our daughter is nearly 40 years old and people think she’s 20. When she was 30 she was mistaken for 17 or maybe 18. In her 20’s there were people who thought she looked 16 or 17. AI will be just as wrong.
I’ve met teenagers I would swear were in their 20’s. Everyone doesn’t degenerate at the same rate. There’s no such thing as aging. That’s a label “they” CONjured for nefarious purposes, to CONjure laws for persecution. We generate, we degenerate, and then regenerate /reincarnate. And each person has a different schedule.
There will be adults that can’t get into platforms because the AI will make the decision. ARTIFICIAL intelligence. And teens will make it in. The hype they give us is not what’s going on.