Why Resisting Age Verification Puts Kids at Risk

In July 2025, both the United Kingdom and Ireland introduced landmark age verification laws to protect children from harmful online content.

These rules were not rushed. They followed years of mounting evidence showing children were being exposed to violent, degrading, and exploitative material, especially pornography. This was often accessible before children even entered their teenage years.

Since last week, the UK’s Online Safety Act and Ireland’s Online Safety Code require websites and social platforms to verify a user’s age before granting access to adult, or inappropriate content on a multitude of platforms.

Privacy-preserving technologies like facial age estimation, and anonymous token systems are now being used to enforce this. And it is important to highlight that these platforms do so, without storing any personal identifying information.

But barely a week after these laws went live, something has became very clear. Something that was unexpected to be fair. The greatest threat to child protection isn’t a failure of technology, it’s now an adult resistance to the means they need to use under law to access pornography.

The Technology Behind Age Verification

It’s important to understand what modern age verification looks like. Tools like Yoti, AgeChecked, and Persona allow users to confirm their age without uploading names, locations, or permanent records. Facial scanning can verify age in under 5 seconds without storing a faceprint. In some cases, anonymous vouchers or banking checks are used to avoid data collection altogether.

These tools are not about surveillance. They’re about creating a digital bouncer, a momentary check, to keep children out of spaces built for adults.

Real Examples of Resistance

Despite the safety-focused design, adults across the UK and Ireland pushed back hard. On Reddit, Twitter (X), and Discord, users shared workarounds within hours of enforcement. In the UK, Proton VPN became the most downloaded app, with signups increasing 1,800% in a single day. People began posting guides on how to spoof their location, avoid detection, and even trick facial recognition systems.

In the UK, Proton VPN became the most downloaded app, with signups increasing 1,800% in a single day. People began posting guides on how to spoof their location, avoid detection, and even trick facial recognition systems.

One method involved using the face of a video game character, Norman Reedus’s character from Death Stranding, to bypass Discord’s age check. By manipulating the character’s expressions in-game, users were able to fool the system completely.

This wasn’t just a glitch, it was a shared exploit, posted publicly for others to follow world wide.

Meanwhile in Ireland !!!

In Ireland, enforcement has been even more fragile from all directions. By the end of the first enforcement week, X (formerly Twitter) had not enabled any new age gates.

Children can still access adult content. The regulator, Coimisiún na Meán, confirmed they had not received any real evidence of full compliance.

In Ireland we are asking big tech, what will you do between now and next year to address this problem. Then tell us what you are doing to address it.

What Children Learn from Adult Behaviour

When adults treat age verification as a joke or an inconvenience, children watch and learn. VPN tutorials and facial spoofing tricks are not just shared between adults, on social media, quickly become tools for kids to access exactly what the laws were meant to block.

The content they’re accessing isn’t harmless.

Today’s mainstream pornography is saturated with incest content, violence, misogyny, and other extreme sexual practices. Young girls, in particular, bear the brunt of this exposure.

Reports show that girls as young as 11 are being pressured to send nude photos, perform acts they’ve seen in porn, or believe their worth is tied to sexual availability.

Early exposure to pornography has been linked to increased anxiety, depression, body image issues, and acceptance of abusive behaviour in intimate relationships.

Laila Mickelwait and the #Traffickinghub Movement

Few have done more to expose the dangers behind mainstream pornography than Laila Mickelwait. Her #Traffickinghub campaign uncovered how Pornhub, owned by MindGeek (now Aylo), was profiting from videos of child sexual abuse, non-consensual recordings, and trafficking victims. Her work led to Mastercard and Visa cutting ties with the site and forced the removal of millions of unverified videos.

Through her efforts, the public learned that online porn wasn’t just fake, it was often real abuse, filmed and distributed for profit.

Had age verification and upload verification been in place earlier, many of these crimes might never have reached public platforms. This is why Mickelwait and countless others now support age assurance, not to limit adult freedom, but to protect children from lifelong trauma.

A Look at the Psychology Behind the Backlash

So why do so many adults, across genders, resist something as simple as an age check?

Cyberpsychology offers answers. In online environments, people experience what’s called moral disengagement. Behind a screen, empathy fades. Personal accountability weakens. A delay in gratification, even for five seconds, feels like a violation.

Combine that with the dopamine feedback loop created by instant access to pornography, and any interruption to that habit becomes frustrating, even threatening.

Echo chambers on Reddit and Twitter reinforce this mindset. People convince themselves that age verification is a government intrusion. But that belief is often fuelled by addiction, entitlement, and misinformation, not reality.

Even more troubling is the fact that some women are helping to promote these ideas. While often framed as defending sexual freedom, this resistance ignores the ways online pornography disproportionately harms girls and women. What begins as defiance becomes denial, and children are the ones who suffer for it.

This Isn’t About Freedom. It’s About Responsibility.

Adults claim they’re defending their rights, but we already verify our identity for less sensitive things every day.

We scan our faces to unlock phones, verify our age for alcohol, upload IDs to banks, let our phones track our movements for food delivery. So why does age verification for pornography trigger such outrage?

The answer lies not in privacy, but in priorities.

These laws are not perfect. No technology is. But they’re a massive step forward. And the more adults share bypass tactics, the more they chip away at that progress.

What Needs to Change

We don’t need more technology, we need more accountability. Adults must understand that every workaround they share online is a gift to predators, traffickers, and abusers who rely on platforms staying lawless.

To turn this tide, we must:

• Support public enforcement and transparency by regulators like Ofcom and Coimisiún na Meán
• Promote verified, privacy-first age assurance tools like Yoti
• Call out misinformation about age checks being surveillance tools
• Amplify the work of advocates like Laila Mickelwait
• Ask a simple question: Who benefits from resisting age verification? (Spoiler: it’s not the children)

Final Thoughts

Age verification isn’t about policing adult sexuality. It’s about protecting a generation of children from growing up believing that exploitation is normal.

If adults continue to resist basic safeguards, if they keep putting convenience over conscience, then they are not just failing our kids, they are helping to destroy them.

More Information

• Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport. (2023). Online Safety Act. UK Government. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-bill
• Ofcom. (2024). Online Safety: Protecting Children. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/online-age-checks-must-be-in-force-from-tomorrow
• Financial Times. (2025, July 26). VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in. https://www.ft.com/content/356674b0-9f1d-4f95-b1d5-f27570379a9b
• Wired. (2025, July 25). The Age-Checked Internet Has Arrived. https://www.wired.com/story/the-age-checked-internet-has-arrived
• PC Gamer. (2025, July 27). Brits Can Get Around Discord’s Age Verification Thanks to Death Stranding. https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/brits-can-get-around-discords-age-verification-thanks-to-death-strandings-photo-mode
• Independent.ie. (2025, July 22). Children Still Able to Access Adult Content Despite New Law. https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/day-one-of-online-age-crackdown-no-change
• Mickelwait, L. (2020). #Traffickinghub: Holding Pornhub Accountable. Exodus Cry. https://www.exoduscry.com
• Dines, G. (2010). Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality. Beacon Press.
• Wilson, G. (2014). Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction. Commonwealth Publishing.