Close All Tabs - Sex Workers Tried to Warn Us About Age Verification Laws

Episode Date: March 4, 2026

Requiring internet users to verify their ages before accessing mature content may sound reasonable. Shouldn’t we be doing a better job protecting kids from online vulgarities? But free speech advocates say the push for age verification isn’t really about protecting children — and that bills like the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) would open the door to greater surveillance, censorship and control of what people can do online. Those same free speech advocates say the evidence lies in what happened to sex workers after the passage of the bills known as Allow States and Victims To Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) in 2018.  In this episode, Morgan is joined by writer, researcher and dominatrix Dr. Olivia Snow and Mashable associate editor Anna Iovine to explore the connections between porn, sex work and surveillance — and what age verification laws could mean for the future of the internet.  Guests:  Dr. Olivia Snow, research fellow at UCLA’s Center on Resilience & Digital Justice Anna Iovine, associate editor of features at Mashable Further Reading/Listening: Age verification is going to destroy the entire internet — Anna Iovine, Mashable Are You Ready to Be Surveilled Like A Sex Worker? — Dr. Olivia Snow, WIRED Sex Workers Have Been Banned From Airbnb for Years. Will You Be Next? — Dr. Olivia Snow, The Nation Discord delays age verification measures as it admits what it got 'wrong' — Austin Manchester, Polygon FOSTA-SESTA was supposed to thwart sex trafficking. Instead, it’s sparked a movement — Liz Tung, WHYY  The Internet Loves Sex. Why Does it Hate Sex Workers? — Luna, The Swaddle When social media censorship gets it wrong: The struggle of breast cancer content creators  — Savannah Kuchar, USA Today What would ethical age verification look like online? — Anna Iovine, Mashable Project 2025 Co-Author Caught Admitting Secret Conservative Plan to Ban Porn  — Shawn Musgrave, The Intercept Going Viral vs. Going Dark: Why Extremism Trends and Abortion Content Gets Censored — Kenyatta Thomas, Electronic Frontier Foundation: Stop Censoring Abortion Campaign  FCC finds no violations in Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show at Levi’s Stadium — Aidin Vaziri, San Francisco Chronicle  Read the Transcript here Email us at [e-mail] Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠TikTok⁠ Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Katie Sprenger is our Director of Content Operations. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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shop new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. From KQED. So, you know the messaging app, Discord. Well, they recently

announced that later this year, everyone on Discord will be a team by default. Does this mean you'll be transported back to middle school, confront your teenage bullies, and kiss your childhood crush like some kind of reverse 13 going on 30? Sorry, but no. It does mean that the way you can use Discord now might be very different. It's part of a bigger push to age gate the internet. Discord's new Teen by default setting means that all users automatically get the teen version of the platform. So sensitive content is blurred out and certain servers are off limits. Discord said it'll use both AI detection and human review to decide

which servers are for adults only. How do you get past the age gating? Easy. Just upload a face scan or a photo of your government ID. So on its face, that seems like a pretty good idea. Like, I mean, who needs to be accessing adult content on Discord? Like, sure, we'll all be safe, fine. But I mean, none of this is ever about protecting children ever. This is about data farming and mass surveillance. This is Dr. Olivia Snow. She's a researcher at UCLA's Center for Resilience and Data Justice, where she studies sex work and algorithmic surveillance.

And she's writing a book about this topic. And I'm also a dominatrix. It turns out, being a sex worker has become increasingly perilous on today's internet. As a sex worker herself, Olivia has seen firsthand the way platforms have targeted and surveilled sex workers. even if they aren't posting explicit or sexual content that violates the site's rules. She says that Discord's new age verification policy raises a lot of red flags about privacy. By requiring ID, like on one hand, that can prove that you're of, you know, the right age.

On the other, it also provides a digital footprint of the content that you're consuming, which under our current administration can be really dangerous. if that content happens to be, for example, like queer-related, if it's organizing around racial justice. Now Discord could potentially just offer up a list of names. Discord said they're offering privacy forward verification options. They claim that facial scans would never leave the user's device, and that IDs would only be used to verify age.

They also said that users' real identities would never be associated with their accounts, and that their third-party vendors wouldn't store any of this verification data. It's all supposedly deleted right after users are age-checked. Of course they're not doing that, but like there have been multiple reports of that data getting breached and leaked. And, you know, how would that happen if they were getting rid of our data? Oh, right, they aren't. They're selling it. Yeah, Discord had a major data breach last year that exposed about 70,000 years.

user's government IDs. The company initially enforced age checks in the UK and Australia last year to comply with local social media regulations. But hey, the company said that the vendors they're working with now had nothing to do with that huge violation of user privacy, so it's all good now. Last week, we talked about Roblox, the super popular kids gaming platform, and their new age verification policy. That came on the heels of dozens of lawsuits against the company over allegations of predators grooming children on the platform. Agegating is becoming the norm online, as platforms face increasing pressure to keep kids from seeing potentially harmful content. With age verification laws sweeping the UK, Australia,

much of Europe, and even here in the U.S., free speech advocates are sounding the alarm about censorship and surveillance. Of course we want to protect children. We always want to protect children, but that's not what the legislation is actually about. If any legislation were about protecting children, then we'd have like gun reform. But we don't. It's really about expanding the surveillance state and using protecting kids and protecting, you know, children's purity, whatever, as an excuse. And it's an excellent excuse. And there's one group that's been warning us about this exact issue for decades, sex workers. Today, we're diving into the link between porn and the First Amendment and how the tactics first used to censor and surveil sex workers

are now being used against everyone else. This is close all tabs. I'm Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let's get into it. So what does sex work have to do with free speech? A lot more than you think. The UK's Online Safety Act went into effect last year, which puts the onus on platforms to ensure that minors aren't exposed to, quote, harmful content, porn or violence or self-harm. It's a very broad and subjective umbrella, which means that all kinds of content can now be age-gated, like footage of police brutality against pro-Palestinian protesters,

or discussions of LGBTQ relationships. The UK's Online Safety Act is responsible for the most recent and widespread changes, but it's definitely not the first piece of legislation to require age verification. Let's start with a new tab. Why do I have to verify my age on Discord. Joining me is Anna Iovini, Associate Features Editor at Mashable, who primarily covers dating, relationships, sex, and sex work, and how they're all linked to this current digital landscape. So she's been covering the effects of age verification laws pretty closely.

Very broadly, age verification laws require personal data, such as a facial scan or a government ID in order to access data that might be deemed, quote, harmful for minors. So in a lot of cases, this has to do with pornography. And in the United States, around half of the country has these laws now, but they're all different because they're state laws. Louisiana was the first state to enact one of these laws back in 2023. And we've seen this moral panic around pornography really for years leading up to that point. And since then, there have been copycat bills of the Louisiana law. And then last year, the Supreme Court deemed that the Texas age verification law was constitutional.

So that proved that age verification laws were here to stay in the country, at least for now. So the United Kingdom's Online Safety Act went into effect this year. What are some of the unexpected places that we're seeing this roll out? So some platforms that are not NSW have started age-gating their content, such as Spotify, and now we see Discord. And even some subreddits have been age-gated in the UK, such as Stop Drinking, which obviously doesn't have anything to do with pornography. But the UK Online Safety Act deem some content categories potentially harmful for minors and addiction content does fall into that, even if you're talking about recovery, which is the issue with some of these laws in that if you're discussing some of these quote unquote adult topics, you might not even be posting. anything harmful or you might be trying to get help. So that's just one ill-effective of these laws, but it spread way beyond pornography. Yeah, I mean, we're saying this across the world.

Like these laws initially targeted porn sites and sexually explicit content. But now we have to submit your face to Discord to chat with strangers. What is the logic behind trying to agegate some of this content? There are the outward purposes of these bills, which is to, protect children, but in actuality, children are not protected when they have to scan their face and input their personal data, sensitive data, into websites that might not know how to hold this data. I don't think that makes children safe. And I also don't think it's safe to prevent children from seeing certain types of content. For instance, one category that falls under the Online Safety Act is eating disorder content, which can be very harmful. But if you're in eating disorder

recovery, why should you not have access to recovery content? I don't think that algorithms or AI or whatever systems they use to filter out what content is, quote-unquote, for adults, knows a difference between what can be helpful and what can be harmful. And I also think that, at least in the United States, historically, moral panics have been outwardly centered on children, like, oh, think of the children, such as the satanic panic in the 80s. But really, I would speak for myself, I think it's to chill speech and to chill sexuality and just blame it on like, oh, we cannot have this content around children. But as a result, now adults have to input their personal data. Adults may not have access to content that is their right to.

Are these policies effective? Like, can't you just use a VPN to get around it? Exactly. You can use a VPN and they are not effective is the problem. What people see when these laws go into effect is that searches for VPNs go way up because people will figure out a way to get around them. That's what happens with censorship. And in the case of porn sites that have to implement an age verification system, in the U.S. and in the UK, if a site is based there, there's a high likelihood that they will comply or will try to comply. But otherwise, if a website isn't based in one of these territories, then they might not comply at all.

And that's something that Pornhabas pointed out that if other porn sites are based in other European countries or what have you, why would they want to follow a law in a different territory? It doesn't make sense. So people can either use a VPN or just go to a site that doesn't comply with the law. While the use of age verification technology is relatively recent, the crackdown on porn really ramped up almost a decade ago. And similar to age verification laws today, the legislation that led to the porn crackdown made online platforms responsible for the content their users posted, sweeping changes that heavily surveilled and censored sex workers. We're now seeing similar tactics being used against the general public. We'll dive into the ripple effects of a pair of laws called FOSC. and sesta. But first, a quick break.

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Girl, winter is so last season. And now spring's got you looking at pictures of tank tops with hungry eyes. Your algorithm is feeding you cutoffs. You're thirsty for the sun on your shoulders. That perfect hang on the patio sundress. Those sandals you can wear all day and all night. And you've had enough of shopping from your couch. Done hoping it looks anything like the picture when you tear open that envelope.

It's time for a little in-person spring treat. It's time for a trip to Ross. Work your magic. We're back, and we're diving into the great porn ban of 2018. Let's open a new tab. Are you ready to be surveilled like a sex worker? Right now, age verification laws in the UK, Australia, and in the U.S. are leading to a crackdown on porn in the name of protecting children. We saw similar restrictions years ago, but that was in the name of stopping sex trafficking.

So back in 2018, President Trump's side. a pair of bills into law called Fasta and Sesta and drastically change the internet. Here's MASHABLE editor Anna Ivini again. So Fossa Sesta stands for Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act. And outwardly, it was to stop online sex trafficking. And it had bipartisan support because if you said, oh, I'm not voting for the bill that stops online sex trafficking, it looks really bad. But in actuality, this bill made sex workers less safe and did not do much for sex trafficking at all.

I was actually looking at a report released in 2021 that there was only one federal conviction from Fasta Sesta of a sex trafficker. But this made people less safe because as a result of Fasta Sesta, which was a carve out of Section 230, all these online platforms will now be liable for any content that is quote unquote soliciting or, you know, enabling. prostitution or sex work. If you've been listening to this show for a while, you may notice that Section 230 comes up pretty often. It's known as the 26 words that made the Internet. Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act protects online platforms from liability for what their users post.

It also protects platforms from liability if they choose to remove or restrict user content, even if it's not criminal. That's why platforms are allowed to remove hate speech. Now, Section 230 doesn't let platforms get away with criminal activity, like openly selling drugs. It holds platforms responsible for their own actions, but not for those of third parties. It means that if you have a blog and someone else leaves a comment that says, hey, buy drugs here, you aren't liable for what they commented on your post.

And they also can't sue you if you delete their comment. 2.30 enabled Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, substack, and even the New York Times recipe comments section to become the vibrant town squares of discourse that they are today. Okay, maybe that's optimistic. Whether you love or hate the incessant arguing online, that level of openness and exchange is only possible because of Section 230. However, Foster and Sesta removed that legal immunity for platforms that facilitate sex trafficking, a phrase that is like, been interpreted very broadly. Platforms are now held legally accountable for any of their users' activity that could be linked to sex work. One of the biggest sites to go down after

Fosta Sesta passed was Backpage. It was kind of like Craigslist, an online bulletin board where users could advertise equipment rentals, seasonal gigs, and escort services. Backpage was notorious for its role in trafficking minors, and multiple investigations shut down the site. But Fasta Sesta also wiped out platforms for consensual sex work. As a result of this, people who wanted to do sex work suddenly found that they had fewer resources. They couldn't talk to each other about clients or the like. They couldn't vet clients online because all these avenues of finding clients suddenly went away. And if they wanted to say advertise their services or just live online and have an online presence like all of us.

do. They had their accounts banned or what's called shadow band, which means it gets deprioritized by the platform and it can't be searched and they don't show up on the explore page and such. So if anything, it actually was a boon to sex traffickers because it made sex workers more vulnerable. They were suddenly more disconnected from each other and potential safer clients. And I think it made it easier to prey on sex workers because they didn't have the, because they had fewer online. online resources than they did before Fasta Sesta. And there are multiple studies that say that as a result of Fossa Sesta, sex workers are less safe now. I also want to mention the ripple effects of Fossa Sesta.

A ton of people that are not sex workers are also getting their accounts shut down or getting shadow banned, especially if they're people of color or LGBTQ people and maybe show a little bit of skin. And these are all people who do not have power. Like Kim Kardashian can post whatever she wants, whatever. whatever scantily clad photo she wants, she can show it, she will not get deprioritized because she's rich and famous. But if someone, if an erotic artist or a content creator, or God forbid someone has an only fan and wants to find some clients, they cannot post on

Instagram the way that Kim Kardashian does. And that is a big effect of Fostasasas as well. This overcorrection has made it much harder to post anything related to sexuality or women's bodies. And it extends into all online platforms. Poll dancing instructors have been banned for showing off their athletic feats. Sex educators have been banned for trying to raise awareness about STIs and birth control. Instagram bans images of, quote, female breasts that include the nipple, but makes exceptions for depictions of breastfeeding or post about mastectomies. However, like many other platforms, Instagram's automated moderation isn't great. and understanding context. So content about breast cancer awareness is still taken down.

And in terms of women's health, we've also seen that on meta in particular, women's health ads get rejected, such as if you're trying to sell period products or rather create ads for period products, you can get rejected for being sexual. And yet, in a lot of cases, ads for male sex toys or erectile dysfunction medications often don't have that problem. And it's not just social media platforms. Payment processors, for example, don't want to be held liable for potentially facilitating sex trafficking, so they've refused to service anything related to sex, from adult content creator subscriptions to the sale of sex toys. Fasta Sesta has rippled into every online service, and it's affected sex workers on platforms

totally unrelated to their work. Like how Airbnb flagged sex workers and anyone close to them, like roommates and partners. Dr. Olivia Snow, the UCLA surveillance researcher and dominatrix, has been flagged on Venmo and Cash App. Even her DoorDash account was suspended a few years ago. So one day I had a friend who had just moved to Los Angeles and she was struggling and living in a hostel and I was like, yeah, I'm going to send her a sandwich. I'm going to be a good pal.

And I like get on DoorDash and I'm sending her a sandwich. And it just suspended my account like as the transaction was about to go through. And then I got an email about it that was like, your account has been suspended due to like X, Y, and Z. I was flagged as a high risk user the same way that I've been flagged on Venmo or Cash App. But Venmo and Cash App make a little bit of sense because, you know, I've received like tribute from clients on those. I haven't received the same on DoorDash.

But it's still the same technologies. that were able to flag me. How do platforms know? According to Olivia, algorithmic surveillance. Like everyone else on the internet, sex workers have been tracked across platforms. All of this data has been used to identify certain users as high risk. It's not unlike the way that platforms track user activity to figure out what their specific demographic likes to buy. For example, Olivia's cat made an appearance right before we saw.

started recording this interview? We were talking about my cat earlier, right? It is not unlikely that after me saying that, are you hearing that or anyone watching this? If they open up Instagram, they're going to get an ad for cat food, right? They share data and they sell it to each other, mainly to better market to us. And by us, I mean, like, everyone who's using the internet. They know what device we're on. They know our phone number. They know an email address. They know credit card number, social security number. So when you have like this, like these constellations of data points that we are willingly sharing with these platforms. And it's really not too difficult to link these things together.

Olivia often compares sex workers to the canary and the coal mine when it comes to surveillance. She said sex workers are often the test population for data collection, surveillance, and censorship. One thing I really love about the canary and the coal mine metaphor is that the way that the canary the canary functioned in coal mining was that it was when the canary stopped singing that you wanted to take note because that meant that the oxygen levels weren't enough to sustain the canary's consciousness. So it's not that like, oh, I finally hear the canary, like, which is how I feel that it's often misinterpreted as. It's more like, oh, the canary's been singing and now just isn't anymore. And that is openly the plan for how to deal with sex workers.

on the internet and on various technologies. We don't want to see porn. And then when we don't see the porn, we know that our content moderation is working. But, you know, the people who you're moderating out of sight are the same people who are saying like, hey, this is going to get used against you next, but you don't hear that because you can't hear them anymore.

Let's look at a real-world example of this. surveillance and censorship after Roe v. Wade was overturned. Fosta Sesta cast a very broad net around the, quote, facilitation of trafficking, which meant that platforms crack down on anything related to sexuality. They responded similarly after the Dobbs decision in 2022. We almost immediately saw this censorship expand to people sharing information on how to access abortions, how to access contraceptives, safe sex in general. there's no language in there that criminalizes talking about abortion on Instagram,

especially if you're in a state where abortion is protected. But whether it's an abundance of caution or plausible deniability or a genuine desire to silence activists or, you know, censor this information and styming its circulation, platforms just started going after abortion and like safe sex content, you know, pretty immediately. Olivia pointed to the Texas Heartbeat Act, which effectively bans abortions after six weeks. The law also allows private individuals to sue anyone who performs, induces, or AIDS and Abetz abortions after the cutoff. AIDS and Abetz is very broad.

It can include clinic staff members, Uber drivers who take someone, to an abortion clinic, or even friends who help pay for the procedure. The same methods used to identify sex workers as high-risk, like tracking activity across platforms, collecting location data, tracking keystrokes, can also be used to flag anyone seeking or providing abortions, especially in states where it's criminalized. So that certainly mimics Fasta Sesta in the criminalization of facilitation. And I mean, that rhetoric and that language and these other policies around prostitution already existing made it really easy to justify expanding that to people seeking or accessing or providing abortions. Another demographic that I've seen absolutely throttled is Palestinians and pro-Palestine activists.

Like I noticed myself when I was tweeting about Palestine, I got far more severe shadow banning doing that. than I ever did tweeting about sex work. But, you know, the reason they were able to do that is because the infrastructure was already in place. So Fasta Sesta led to a widespread suppression of sexual content and much more surveillance in an effort to stop trafficking. And now, a few years later, we're seeing another legislative push to restrict the internet. But this time, it's the name of protecting children. The era of age verification is here. Since 2022, Congress, Congress, has been trying to pass a federal law, similar to the UK's, called the Kids Online Safety Act, or COSA. Here's Anna again.

COSA is interesting because it almost combines Fossa Sesta with age verification laws because it requires platforms to have a duty of care to basically make it so children cannot see quote-unquote harmful content. And like the Online Safety Act, what qualifies as content harmful for children is really broad and includes harmful behaviors such as the eating disorders and addiction and also covers bullying and such in addition to pornographic and sexual content. So what would this do? It's so broad, I think it signals that people don't know about how the intranet works because it's like, how would this even happen? How can you prevent children from seeing this? Anna thinks it'll result in a combination of foster cesta and age verification.

laws, which means that a lot of content will be wiped from the internet. I think a lot of this content would be removed. I think tech platforms would just like delete everything. Or if they're using different tools, I think they would install age verification systems in order to corner off this content from minors. So it potentially has the power to be worse. Granted, COSA has been introduced and failed and reintroduced a bunch of time, so I don't know the viability of this law, but it keeps coming back. So it does seem like it's not going away, but it does have the potential to be scary because I think it's internet policy written by people who don't know how the internet works. So there's a real dilemma here.

Obviously, we don't want to expose kids to sexual or harmful content. But do we have to give up our privacy for that? Let's open one more tab. Protecting kids versus the First Amendment. Free speech advocates are very concerned about COSA and laws like it. So how does age-gating porn affect the way we can interact with the internet outside of just sexual content? It seems like as age verification laws become more and more right spread, that it will be harder to be anonymous online, which I think is a huge privacy and security concern. And it also is scary because in terms of content that can be harmful for children, there's a capacity for people to put. point at something that they don't like, such as criticism of the government and saying, you're actually bullying, or to look at two people of the same sex and say, that's pornography.

So it really has the capacity to chill free speech and make it so you cannot be yourself online or you cannot say what you want to say, and the internet can be fundamentally changed from 30 years ago when Section 230 was passed. Whenever there is censorship, people will try to go around that, which is exactly what people are doing with VPNs. And now there's a push to ban VPNs or at least ban them for children, which according to First Amendment and internet experts that I've spoken to falls under second order censorship. So a lot of lawmakers are making the assurance that they're not trying to just ban porn with AB laws. But in Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump's second term, they literally did lay out a plan to ban porn. And

imprison sexual content creators. What is the environment right now around a so-called porn ban? They don't want porn. I think because they don't like it. They don't like human sexuality. They think it's disgusting, what have you. But I also think it's because they know that if porn is banned, they can call things that are not pornographic porn and just chill speech that has

nothing to do with explicit content. We're already seeing it. There was a congressman who called, Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show pornography, which I think is exactly the kind of thing that we should be seeing because it shows that it's not just about the explicit content. It's not just about people being naked and having sex on camera. It's about much more than that. Right. Is there an ethical way to keep kids from seeing sexual or harmful content without severely restricting the internet for everyone else? Yes. There is a way. It's called device-level filters.

So free speech advocates and sex workers and the like have been advocating for this method for years. A device level filter is on the actual device and it blocks all websites deemed restricted to adults and you cannot get around it. You can't use a VPN on the device. You can't like suddenly, I don't know, turn it off and turn it back on again and it's gone. It is on the device. And yet if you're an adult, you won't have this filter. and you won't have to submit your ID or a facial scan or what have you. So according to these advocates, it is the best way.

And it's also what Horn Hub and its parent company have been advocating for three years. Why is sex so intertwined with free speech online? I think because it is so shamed in our society. Because people in person don't talk about sex a lot. We're not taught it in schools. our parents maybe don't talk about it as much. So I think it's really the third rail in a lot of these cases because it's such a charged topic in our society, but human sexuality exists and it's within us. And it's natural to want to express it, whether it's talk about sex, learn about it,

or watch people have it. And we also see that whenever technology advances, porn is the first thing to go on it. Pornographers were very early adopters of the internet. They're early adopters, of VR and now they're seeing their early adopters of AI. If it's done consensually, defakes are a whole different story. But I think it's natural. It's one of those things like food and sleep and even though it's not compulsory like those other two things, I think it's natural to want to discuss it, especially when it's so squashed as a topic of conversation. Porn is often credited as the driving force behind the internet. The sex industry pioneered streaming, digital advertising, and e-commerce.

Sex and the internet are so intertwined that it's been enshrined in internet lore. Rule 34 is this meme that says, if it exists, there's definitely porn of it online. And like we've heard throughout this episode, banning porn or even restricting sexual content, will affect everyone, regardless of whether you Google smut. Olivia warns that teenagers will always be able to access porn if they're determined enough, but these restrictions on sexual or harmful content will ultimately stop them from accessing information about safe sex or consent. Many free speech advocates argue that it should be up to parents, not the government, to monitor and limit what their kids do online. In December, a House subcommittee advanced 18 bills that revolve around protecting kids online, including COSA.

The debate between protecting kids and protecting free speech and privacy, is an ongoing fight. And Olivia said that it's never been a better time to listen to sex workers. Because what they're doing to us, they will do to you next and you're not going to like it. It sounds excessive. It sounds like a moral panic. And yet, all of these things that sex workers have been predicting for years are happening every day. Discord's teen by default policy was supposed to start this month. It would require users to submit facial scans and upload their government ideas.

in order to access flagged servers. But last week, after significant backlash from users, the company announced that it's postponing age verification requirements until the second half of this year. In a blog post, Discord CTO and co-founder Stanislav Vishnevsky acknowledged that the platform missed the mark and said that he gets the skepticism. Discord's age verification is still going to happen,

but Vishnevsky at least promised more transparent. and alternative options that don't involve giving your face to a third-party vendor. Okay, let's close all these tabs. Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Maya Kueva. It was edited by Chris Hambrick and Chris Agusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. Our team includes Jen Sheehan, who is the director of podcasts. Additional music by APM.

Brendan Willard is our audio engineer. audience engagement support from Mahasanaad. Ethan Tov and Lindsay is our editor-in-chief. Some members of the KQEDA podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California, local. This episode's keyboard sounds were submitted by my dad, Casey Sung, and recorded in his white and blue Applemaker-A-F99 keyboard with Greywood V3 switches and Cherry Profile PPP keycats.

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