For years, the internet remained largely unguarded. Those who could afford a home PC back in the 80s and 90s were largely hobbyists. Combined with clunky hardware and dial-up speeds, it was hard to do much, if anything, online. In 1984, only about 30% of K-12 students in the U.S. had ever used a computer.
Yet now, in 2026, the landscape has shifted wildly. Following the boom of mobile devices, over 95% of households own some form of computer, and according to Pew Research, 96% of teens are online daily. It is no longer a hobby, but an extension of the human psyche—the air we breathe. Nearly every school in the country now issues Chromebooks, making the digital world impossible to ignore.
As the internet saw this surge in traffic from younger and younger people, it was only natural that moderation became an international crisis. Tech giants spent years arguing that verifying a user’s age is a “censorship and surveillance nightmare.” But as concerns grew over what children were seeing and interacting with online, governments stopped asking for cooperation and started mandating it.
In 2024, the House of Representatives passed PA bill HB 2017, requiring social media companies to obtain consent for users under 16 and verify account holders’ ages. As a result of laws like HB 2017, platforms including Roblox and Discord are being forced to act as mediators, deploying age-checking technology to separate adults from minors. Roblox, which boasts over 151.5M active daily users, now uses ID verification and facial scans to estimate one’s age. Based on the age bracket the AI places you in, your access to games is limited by the age requirement corresponding to the content maturity labels.
Discord has followed suit, rolling out “teen-by-default” designations. This is to ensure minors aren’t wandering into age-restricted NSFW servers by estimating their age based on activity patterns tracked by the AI, known as age inference. Users who want to access NSFW servers or change safety settings are increasingly met with demands for photo identification or facial scans.
Facial scans have inherent flaws; however, recent industry data shows that AI-driven estimation has made huge strides. Error margins have dropped from 4.1 years a decade ago to under 2.5 years in current testing, but with some effort, it is easy to spoof the system. Users on Reddit have famously bypassed Discord’s verification using the face of an old video game character.
Regardless of whether tricking the AI is simple, it begs a bigger question: why should you have to hand over your facial geometry to a third-party just to play a game or talk to your friends? If this is what counts as “moderation,” then platforms are doing the bare minimum. By keeping these controls as loose as possible, tech companies are effectively testing the limits of what regulators will tolerate before legal action is taken—all to avoid what might cause them to lose users.
In other countries like Australia, a landmark ban resulted in over four million suspected underage accounts being locked since December 2025. Perhaps the problem isn’t necessarily moderation, but the fact that some platforms aren’t meant for kids at all.
While age-checking technology can filter out the obvious, it cannot monitor what happens once a user is inside. Social media is increasingly plagued by AI-generated, predatory content and money-incentivized algorithms designed to keep you scrolling.
If the goal is true safety, the only remedy might be to prevent minors from entering these digital spaces in the first place.
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