There’s only one way to stop kids using fake IDs online

News just in from Ofcom which has revealed new guidance on how it expects website and apps to bring in “highly effective age assurance systems” by July to stop children from accessing harmful content, while allowing adults to access pornography legally.

Systems it considers to be “highly effective” include photo ID matching, open banking, facial age estimation, credit card checks, mobile network operator age checks, email-based age estimation and digital identity services – to which I must ask: has anyone at Ofcom been a child?

And have they consulted, for example, a teenager in the countryside for the most effective way to get around all of these options? Because I assure you, they will be able to give them a list.

As a former child myself, bored out of my wits in the rural 90s, I was well acquainted with swerving around limits, as were my peers. Girls in my GCSE year bought vodka and cigarettes from the offie before going to the local club nights, and we were all served alcohol in the laxer of the school’s town pubs.

At sixth form, you had to really squint to see a likeness in someone’s ID or driving license, because it was usually pinched off a cousin or bought from someone dodgy. Music magazines carried adverts for fake IDs on their back pages. This is not to say it’s right, but it happened, just as it happened in yours, our parents’ generation, and those above.

The Online Safety Act is essential – and arguably, decades overdue – but unless young people are brought into the discussion, all that will happen is people moving elsewhere.

Children of whatever age and whichever generation have always been able to outwit adults. When I asked on BlueSky for anecdotes about getting one over on parents growing up, the results ranged from illegal to hilarious.

On the internet alone: one friend had a specific jumper she used to muffle the modem’s dial-up sound when using the family computer at 1am. Someone else’s parents blocked YouTube in their main browser because they were watching that, rather than studying. They quickly realised the blocker didn’t work in other browsers, so watched YouTube in that before wiping their history.

Another printed novel-length fanfiction to read when their dad cut off the internet. More wholesomely, my colleague managed to hack the password on her family iMac eight times so she could carry on playing The Sims: “Eventually, my parents just turned the password off as they figured there wasn’t any point.”

Tellingly, the responses where no outwitting was involved came from people whose parents were either cooler than they were, or more relaxed. Writes one: “My parents were incredibly lax, so nothing had danger attached to it or was out of bounds. My mum never really made me go to bed at a certain time after about age 10 and taped all of Blackadder Goes Forth for me. I had no need for rebellion.”

That’s what we want to be aiming for: self-expression, by all means, but no need for rebellion. Being able to have level discussions about what young people are going through and what they’ve seen and experienced. Blocking access is a blunt game of whack-a-mole that will only lead to other channels being used, such as pro-anorexia discussions moving from Instagram to closed messaging apps like WhatsApp. What’s important is untangling the discussion in the first place: 20, 30 years ago, exactly the same kinds of discussions were taking place on Geocities websites, in dieting culture – even on Oprah.

Yes, young people need protection – but they also need respect. Adults don’t always know best, not least because we are not all digital natives. When Facebook really kicked off in the mid-aughts, my homepage was filled with reposted stories about people being poisoned by perfume at petrol stations – all easily debunked by the website Snopes – and all the antecedents of the rage-fuelled clickbait we see on social media now (and will see even more of now that Meta has removed fact checkers).

The way to make things better and change things permanently is to learn how they work. Sure, it is easier to ban things than it is to learn how to use them safely. It’s easier to limit access than to teach a child how influencers use apps to change their looks or to teach them (and ourselves) media literacy by deconstructing headlines and TikTok posts. All this takes time – and schools are limited, and parents are limited.

But it is essential, because otherwise, children will learn for themselves – for good and bad – and adults will continue to feel panicked and make snap judgments on what young people can access, rather than teaching them what the consequences are. This is how we’ve ended up with job application letters and university essays written by AI software rather than the person.

February 11 marks 150 years since 11-year-old “climbing boy” George Brewster’s boss sent him up an impossibly tiny Cambridgeshire chimney flue where he suffocated to death, setting into motion a law against child labour that had been 35 years in the campaigning. Children have only been considered “children” rather than small adults relatively recently in history.

If Ofcom wants online security to work for children and young people, they need to involve them from the start. Not simply to understand why these implementations matter important – but so they can point out the loopholes and workarounds that the adults have missed.

We all deserve to be safe – not least as our online and “real” lives become increasingly enmeshed.