The Surgeon General is pushing for the misguided social media policy

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This week, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a long-awaited message warning Americans what they already know: Social media is hurting children. but looking through the 19 page notice, the surgeon general’s solutions seem potentially more dangerous than these same pariah platforms. He is pushing a critically misguided policy that many state legislatures and regulators have already enacted, a mistake that threatens to undo what little Internet privacy we have left. To protect children from social media, she argues, platforms and lawmakers need to enforce age minimums. This is equivalent to ID required to go online

Thirty years ago this July, an iconic New Yorker cartoon joked that “On the Internet, no one knows that you are a dog.” It was an ironic comment on the then novel anonymity that seemed to define digital spaces. Online, you could create a construct, someone surfing the internet as you wanted to be seen, not as you actually were. Sure, modern social networks often provide a fraction of the invisibility users once found in early text-based bulletin board services, but there are countless online communities where anonymity not only persists but is indispensable.

Anonymity is what has allowed many of us, including teens, to make connections and find community, especially when we live in places where in-person support is hard to find. It’s a lifeline for LQBTQ kids facing homophobia, fearing homelessness or violence if their parents find out who they are. You can create a safe way for undocumented people and formerly incarcerated people to have a social life even when they fear retaliation from law enforcement. And digital platforms are increasingly the only ways for pregnant people in anti-abortion states to find out how to get the care they need, whether by mail or by traveling across state lines. For more and more Americans, secure and anonymous Internet platforms are the only way to hide from those who would persecute or even arrest them simply for who they are.

Of course, the Surgeon General and state legislators don’t intentionally try to sabotage these aspects of life online, but this is the inevitable consequence of how they approach the threat of social media. The Surgeon General’s notice calls on platforms to strengthen and enforce age minimums, and on lawmakers to develop specialized requirements for teens on social media, including everything from limits on harmful content to more advanced technologies. strict for age compliance. But the surgeon general never says what magical technology could prove a user’s age without destroying all our privacy.

As for states that already require proof of age to access a given website or create an online account, the picture is bleak. One of the easiest ways to verify age is to ask users to send a government ID to access a particular service. This should concern everyone who claims to want to protect younger users. Require government ID to access He New York Times or creating a Wikipedia account, for example, will prevent millions of unidentified Americans from reaping the benefits of these sites. And what’s worse, those who do have IDs will have their legal names tied to everything they do online. And this isn’t just for teens. The only way to identify teen users is to give each user of any age a card each time they log in. This paper trail will make it easier than ever for police and other law enforcement agencies to search our records online.

Alternatively, some states may allow users of the sites to enter their credit card information to verify your age. But that will be easy to circumvent (as every child who has used a parent’s card knows). Worse yet, it will exclude unbanked adults from online services. In an even creepier development, some platforms have proposed using AI to guess a user’s age based on a photo of their face or an evaluation of their browsing history. But these error-prone strategies are likely to get websites sued when they inevitably misguess the age of users.

It’s simple: the surgeon general and legislators can focus their work on protecting the privacy and mental health of all users, including children, or they can continue to push misguided laws that put children at risk. But regardless of which path they choose, the truth is that magical technology to confirm everyone’s age will remain a fantasy, and the price of reducing digital anonymity is too potent a threat.

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