Parental rights have been a hallmark of conservative politics for decades. That nominally continues today. Former President Donald Trump has an entire page on his campaign website dedicated to the issue. Last year, House Republicans passed a Parents' Bill of Rights. The mantra stands that parents know how to raise their children better than the government. However, this noble attachment to parental autonomy in decision-making has all but been abandoned when it comes to technology.
There is an ever-increasing push from the right to implement device-wide age verification. This would force device manufacturers to determine the age of all users. This would pass the responsibility for filtering content a minor might be exposed to from parents to companies like Apple and Google.
Such age verification pushes would remove a lot of discretion from parents. Operating systems on smartphones already provide parents the tools to approve app downloads, limit screentime, and filter content. When scholars like Clare Morell of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) claim that parents "need back up," it is not these commonsense tools to which they're referring. They want the government to march in and take over responsibility for curating kids' online experiences.
However, this kind of legislation often includes language to keep kids away from content that is "likely to cause serious emotional disturbance." Any conservative should recognize that such language resembles the way leftists describe many socially conservative causes and movements. Shifting responsibility to app stores would leave parents little flexibility to allow their children to consume content that they deem acceptable if a more sensitive government bureaucrat deems that content harmful. The rigid language of such proposals does indeed remove some degree of agency from parents.
An EPPC whitepaper from last year claims it is not enough to merely go after websites and platforms themselves. The paper says, "It is now necessary to open up another front to address the threats to child safety online - directing attention toward the devices that serve as children's main portals to the internet."
However, such legislation targeting devices is precisely what some of these harmful websites want. In Alabama, one company making that argument is Aylo, the parent company of online pornography giant, Pornhub, "The best solution to make the internet safer, preserve user privacy, and prevent children from accessing adult content is performing age verification at the source: on the device," Aylo said when lobbying for such an approach in Alabama.
Age verification does not necessarily keep kids off adult sites. What it does is complicate liability in cases when kids do experience bad things online. While many of these anti-tech bills look for different parties to punish - whether it be sites themselves or device manufacturers - they ignore actual solutions. Bills like the INVEST in Child Safety Act would actually target resources toward digital literacy and going after the predators themselves, rather than the sites and devices they use.
Secondly, the supposed ease of such a law change is far from straightforward. In an op-ed piece on the matter, three pro-age verification scholars claimed, "Fortunately, this would be technically simple to implement, as companies like Apple and Google already collect user birthdates during sign-up. The basic infrastructure for age verification is currently in place."
While this is technically true, there is no reliable and privacy-protective infrastructure in place to actually verify a user's birthday. In order for such app store age verification to take place, the app store would have to either use unreliable facial recognition software or collect identifying documents, putting such info at risk in the event of data breaches. This does not make kids safer online. It creates a system ripe for fabrication and, for those that do submit legitimate documents, with an unnecessarily risk their data privacy.
Such legislation is also patently unconstitutional. Limiting access to constitutionally protected speech (even if those limitations are only applied to minors) requires a narrowly tailored law determined to be the least restrictive path towards the stated goal. Given the number of aforementioned parental controls already available on smartphone devices, such age verification legislation being proposed at both the federal and state level fails that test.
It is altogether understandable why conservatives have hopped on this particular hobby horse. The internet does indeed present a number of new challenges for kids today. Further, tech companies have often shown a particularly strong antipathy towards traditional conservative ideas. The desire to safeguard this generation of children is warranted and noble.
However, ultimately, this push is short-sighted from a conservative point of view. If this legislative agenda succeeds, conservatives will have handed a key tool of internet censorship to government officials. They will have done so while expressing a fundamental mistrust of parents' ability to know what is best for their kids and secure it - undermining the very real progress the movement has made on family policy and education reform.