Age-verification laws don’t keep minors off adult sites, study suggests

Back in March, a working paper from researchers at NYU and other universities suggested that age-verification laws are ineffective. Now, a new analysis not only supports the same finding but also suggests that these laws may impose a burden on adults’ First Amendment rights.

The new study, conducted by the public policy nonprofit the Phoenix Center, finds that these laws should fail a constitutional cost-benefit test. Meaning, if the laws are ineffective, then the cost to adults’ constitutional rights to view legal content likely outweighs the benefit of preventing minors from seeing it.

Age-verification laws in the United States and beyond typically require websites that host a decent amount of explicit content to verify visitors’ ages with more than a “yes or no” checkbox — such as with their government ID or a facial recognition scan. But, especially with the onset of the United Kingdom’s age-verification law over the summer, some non-explicit platforms like YouTube are starting to implement age checks as well.

Experts have long told Mashable that these laws won’t work for their intended purpose of keeping minors off pornographic websites. Software like VPNs can circumvent them, and users can simply visit websites that don’t comply with the laws. There are also privacy and security concerns associated with these laws, such as the inability to browse legal content anonymously and inputting personal data into a third-party system that may be vulnerable to hacking.

Still, lawmakers have introduced and passed age verification laws in many states and countries. And since the initial release of the working paper in March this year, the Supreme Court has deemed age verification laws constitutional, despite concerns that they quell free speech and thus infringe on the First Amendment.

Costs and benefits of age-verification

The Phoenix Center’s cost-benefit analysis is important due to SCOTUS’s recent ruling. In June, the majority of the court decided that Texas’s age-verification law was subject to the “intermediate scrutiny” standard. As the study outlines, the Supreme Court held that “Texas’s age-verification law served an important government interest and that age-verification was substantially related to achieving that purpose.”

Phoenix Center’s chief economist, Dr. George S. Ford, conducted the study and reasoned that age-verification laws should deter substantially more minors than adults in order for this standard to hold up.

He used Google Trends data before and after states implemented their laws and/or Pornhub blocked itself in these states. He found spikes in searches for “VPN” (47 percent increase in the week Pornhub pulled out of the state, sustained for around 20 weeks) and “free porn” (30 percent increase without a significant decrease back down).

And while Google doesn’t break down whether it’s an adult or a minor searching, other research has found that adolescents aged 13-18 are likely to know how to use VPNs or can easily adopt them. This suggests that users, including minors, simply go around the laws.

“The evidence suggests a regulatory regime where the intended targets — tech-savvy minors — can easily bypass restrictions while adults exercising constitutional rights bear the primary costs,” Ford stated in the press release.

In the study, Ford also laid out cybersecurity risks of using free VPNs, such as increased vulnerability to ransomware incidents, IP leaks, and third-party tracking.

While more research has to be done, Ford wrote in the study that the effectiveness of age verification laws at protecting minors is “questionable,” both because knowledgeable teens can find ways to circumvent them and because of the costs of impeding adults’ First Amendment rights.

“When a policy’s burdens on protected speech substantially exceed its effectiveness at achieving its stated purpose, it fails the constitutional requirement of being ‘substantially related’ to that purpose, regardless of how important the objective may be,” he continued in the press release. “Add to this the cybersecurity risks and degradation of internet infrastructure, and we have a clear case where costs exceed benefits.”