Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - YouTube's AI Age Verification is a Disaster

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

SUPPORT MY PODCAST ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenzBuy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co This week, YouTube rolled out automatic age verification in the US. It forces users who the company's AI system guesstimates might be under 18 to submit their government IDs or full biometric scans just to watch certain videos. YouTube is the first major tech platform to preemptively normalize invasive identity checks for everyday online activity, and it's a disaster. This new identity verification system creates a dangerous precedent. It is building a surveillance infrastructure that normalizes the tracking of legal and previously anonymous content consumption, all under the guise of child safety. For this week's Free Speech Friday I dig into why what YouTube and other tech companies like Instagram and Roblox are doing with preemptive AI age and identity verification is so harmful, and how it might change YouTube forever. Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0 https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz

Welcome back to Free Speech Friday, my series covering the fight for free expression and civil liberties online. This week, YouTube rolled out automatic age verification in the U.S. It forces users who the company's AI system guesstimates might be under 18 to submit their government IDs or full biometric scans just to watch certain YouTube videos. YouTube is the first major tech platform to preemptively normalize invasive identity checks for everyday online activity and content consumption. This new identity verification system creates a digital. dangerous precedent. It's building the surveillance infrastructure that normalizes the tracking of legal and previously anonymous content consumption all under the guise of child safety. The company made this announcement back in February when they claimed that it would soon introduce tech

that would automatically distinguish between younger viewers and adults to help provide the best, most age-appropriate experiences. It follows similar moves from across the tech industry, from platforms like Roblox to Instagram. The company claims that its age estimation model allows them to deliver protections all while preserving user privacy. I would argue it very much does not preserve user privacy, and we'll get into that in a minute. Now, this is the third time I'm recording this video because I messed up the first recording. The second recording had no audio. So bear with me, because I don't have a script for this video like I normally do for all my free

speech Friday episodes. Long story short, with this automatic age verification from YouTube, if you watch a lot of Skittany Toilet videos, for instance, maybe you're a journalist writing about it, or you let your kid use your account to watch videos, you might have to hand over a selfie, a credit card, government ID, just to continue to use YouTube. Today I want to talk about why all of this is really bad, despite the fact that it might sound good. And the first thing that I want to get into is this idea of tech companies

sort of pre-complying with censorship laws. We all know that there are really dangerous censorship laws right now in 11 states. And federally, we have things like the Kids Online Safety Act, a really dangerous censorship bill that would essentially censor any sort of adult content off widespread swaths of the internet. Age verification, as you probably know if you watch any of my previous videos, is sweeping the nation. And frankly, it shouldn't even be called age verification. I keep catching myself saying that it should be called identity verification.

Because in order to properly identify users' ages, you actually have to identify everyone and tie everyone's online behavior to offline identity to know who is a child and who is an adult. So identity verification laws are rolling out. Obviously, we need to do everything we can to stop them in the legislative system. But what YouTube is doing scares me even more than some of these laws because YouTube is preemptively instituting these AI age verification systems without having to do so by any law. So there's no oversight. YouTube's basically pre-complying saying, well, we think we might be regulated. We think age verification is coming. So we're just going to start complying with it already. This creates a really slippery slope where YouTube basically sets a precedent.

And they're going to start normalizing identity checks, monitoring all previous. anonymous online activity, which creates this culture where other tech companies that also want to hoover up massive amounts of our data are going to start doing it too. Instagram has started kind of similar efforts, and we're seeing other tech companies preemptively rolling out age verification because of this public support. This to me is actually the scariest outcome that could have possibly happened, because at least with laws, we can fight the laws. We know what's in the laws.

There's a level of transparency to laws. When these companies just institute these policies that have sort of broken. broad-based support because again, there's this moral panic about social media. So you have parents like, yay, age verification, these idiot lawmakers, these idiot leftist content creators, yay, child safety laws, age verification. There's this sort of public support for dystopian surveillance. And they're able to roll out this deeply problematic tech without any sort of pushback and without any sort of legislative oversight or having to operate within the bounds of any sort of specific law. And obviously, of course, rolling this stuff out comes with a lot of downside.

Identity verification, as I've talked about in my other videos, is horrible. With this new age verification system, YouTube risks blocking legitimate, educational, artistic, and political content from countless young people. YouTube is radically different than most other social media apps. Most social media apps, when you think of social media, you're probably thinking of things like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, even. These apps are a lot more two-directional. So on Instagram, for instance, the primary way that young people spend time on there is DMing with friends. A lot of other apps, users are more likely to post on the apps. They're more like chat platforms and they're truly like social, social media.

YouTube has always been very different in that the vast majority of people that use YouTube are actually consumers of content. They're not posting content themselves. YouTube has become the number one educational platform. It's where people go to learn about news and politics. It's home to tons of video footage of news programs, local news programs, cable news clips, et cetera. It's how people learn about the world. And YouTube also is something that a lot of people watch on TV. They watch actually on the big screen.

They're consuming information. They're using it for learning. They're not using it to like spam posts silly like meme content the way that a lot of people are using Instagram or sharing family photos. So I would argue that YouTube is actually a lot more akin to a big educational resource. Like think of it as a lot. library. I mean, YouTube is kind of the internet's library. It's this big place where you can go to freely access tons of informational and educational content from brilliant people all around the world.

Is there garbage in there? Yes, there's garbage in the traditional library too. But if we start age-gating access to information and rolling out these identity verification systems, young people are suddenly not going to have access to a lot of quote-unquote adult content. We've seen these laws actually replicated in libraries where young people are not allowed to take out classic books like The Catcher in the Rye or other classic tales that have mentions of sex or themes about LGBTQ people, things like that. Now you're seeing that sort of similar restriction come to YouTube where suddenly young people are not going to be able to view potentially a lot of content on YouTube. It's going to be age-gated from them or downranked to the point that they might

not encounter it at all. I think this is really dangerous and I think it's a really concerning road to go down. In preparation for talking about this topic, I actually went to my own YouTube analytics and I was shocked that I actually have a decent amount of my followers that are teenagers, including some that are under 17. Under these new age-gating policies and systems, those young people might not have access to my videos. We know that crackdowns on adult content, as you can see with what just happened in the UK, doesn't just restrict young people from access to corn. It restricts young people's access to journalism, information about war crimes, anything to do with like politics, especially any information that challenges.

challenges the government or systems like capitalism. Also, reproductive justice content, LGBTQ content, content about abortions, women's rights, social justice issues. All of this is deemed adult content under these type of laws and systems. I'm incredibly worried that as this new age verification system on YouTube matures and some of these laws start passing,

younger people won't have access to LGBTQ content creators, female content creators talking about gender, really any content creator on the left that's talking about issues that challenge All of that is going to be censored as adult content under these potential laws. And while YouTube and other tech platforms sort of preemptively roll out this stuff in the meantime, as I mentioned previously, there's not a lot of oversight. It's super subjective and arbitrary.

We have no visibility into these AI systems that they're using or their algorithms. None of this is open source. Moderators can also mislabel content. And there's just a huge potential for potentially or socially sensitive topics to be suppressed under age restricted content. Also, in order to run these age verification systems, which, by the way, are not even effective, really, because they constantly misclassify people. People unlike what a lot of maybe the public believes don't actually age at the same rate. And even the best age verification tools have like pretty wide range of often three to five to seven years of how old they think you are.

Like one 17 year old does not inherently look exactly the same as another 17 year old. And a 17 year old does not look inherently different from an 18 year old. For instance, you could be 17 at 1159 p.m. and 18 at 1201 a.m. And you're not going to meaningfully see any change in your appearance. So I just want to disabuse people of this idea that you can scan people's faces and somehow automatically use AI to know their age. This whole system is already flawed. And of course, YouTube is going to hoover up a huge amount of other user data, user behavior,

the type of content you're consuming to try to make these estimations. But all of this just creates a privacy nightmare. It's a privacy nightmare from the fact that these tech companies, are now going to be able to collect even more data. YouTube is basically coming out and saying, yes, we're going to seize even more data. We're going to monitor literally everything you do on this platform. And if we deem that you're under 18,

you're going to have to manually provide data like your government ID, et cetera. But it all just normalizes this unprecedented level of ongoing tracking. And of course, YouTube is going to claim, well, we don't store any of this data. We're not storing it. We're just using it for a quick ID check and so on. I have to tell you guys, please go watch my other video with Eric Goldman on age verification systems. this still creates huge data privacy risk because there is still that point of exposure.

For instance, when you are taking a selfie, that data does still need to be logged somewhere and recorded somewhere, and your identity is recorded somewhere because you're not going to scan your face every single time you use YouTube, you scan your face once, and then your behavior is tied to that YouTube account.

And if they start to think that you're under 18, again, they might ask you to re-verify your identity. And this data, if it gets hacked, which it inevitably will, can be used by the government, by bad actors, advertisers, just any malicious, person seeking to leverage data against you. And you might think, well, so what? I'm just watching silly YouTube videos. None of this is ever going to be used against me. I encourage you to look at what

the government is doing right now with ICE and consider the fact that Donald Trump has said that he wants to go after U.S. American citizens. Look at what's happening right now in the U.K. under their terrorism laws, where they're prosecuting people for speech. People at the U.S. border are coming in and being asked about their social media accounts, why they follow specific people, why they shared specific memes why they have specific memes on their phones. I made a video recently about one traveler who was attempting to come into the U.S. and was deported after Customs and Border Patrol found a J.D. Vance meme on his phone. Say you end up attending a completely peaceful protest, but your faces scanned there. The government sends it to one of these data hubs, and before you know it, your

offline behavior is being tied to your online behavior. And if your online behavior is watching videos that maybe question the police or are progressive in some way or that challenge the government, Suddenly the government might have a case against you or might try to try you for terrorism. Who knows? This level of surveillance has enormous downsides. I'll give you another example of how your data can be weaponized. Say you start watching YouTube videos about some rare condition or health issues that you start to notice. Maybe that data somehow leaks.

It gets in the hands of a health insurer. Now you're charged higher rates because they believe that you might have some sort of disease. You just don't know how your data can be used against you until it happens. I also think that these age verification or identity verification, systems create a chilling effect. Certainly, if I know that my offline identity is suddenly tied to my YouTube account and what I'm consuming, I would be nervous to consume specific videos. I think a lot of people might not consume certain controversial content. They might be nervous to subscribe to specific creators. And ultimately, it will just leave the public less informed. Content creators will also be

incentivized to not create content that is age restricted, as in not create educational content, information about politics, any sort of content, again, that channels. challenges power and challenges the government or could be deemed adult. All of this leads to a less informed public. I also just hate this idea that young people shouldn't be exposed to potentially controversial news or sexual information. Young people need to learn about the world, especially teenagers. I have no problem with children under the age of 13 being on YouTube kids account, right? At that point, they're kids.

But teenagers are entering the world and they're in this phase of life where they need to discover and learn about the world. Some of them are getting ready to vote for the first time. driven age gating systems shouldn't hold them back from specific content and it goes without saying that all of these changes will have a disproportionate impact on marginalized communities who rely on anonymity as I mentioned this YouTube age verification stuff is starting to roll out this week so if you like my work please support me on Patreon the link is in my bio or on my substack through usermag.co that's usermag.com for my substack where I write about all this stuff

and more you can get alerts when I post new videos and ensure that my content is not being censored out of your algorithm. Thanks so much for watching this somewhat chaotic and rambling episode of Free Speech Friday. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Free Speech Friday. See you then.