Following my previous blogpost which provides a pre-formatted Twitter search query for issues around “end to end encryption”, I decided to build something similar for Twitter discussion surrounding age-verification… and have discovered something rather odd…
Simply: you can do a relatively-enormous search across verbose, abstract text strings like "age assurance" and "verification of children online", or for condensed hashtag text like "ageverification" and "ageappropriatedesigncode" – and note in passing that #voco really requires a search on the specific hashtag in order to disambiguate it from so many other uses in other languages – and you will get a long stream of mostly-commercial, mostly-political or mostly-civil-society tweets, which are mostly-discussing age verification as a purported solution to some social ills.
These tweets are mostly professionally written, image-heavy, and are mostly optimised for social-media engagement.
HOWEVER: if you search on the actual string "age verification" – with a space between the words – then the tenor of results changes dramatically; suddenly you are in a heated public (and frequently misconceived) debate about “age verification” and (in specific) how Twitch needs to support it, spiced-up with a few tweets from sex-workers who will demand proof-of-age before engaging with you, contrasting with a further handful of anti-sex-work, anti-porn campaigners who haven’t yet hired professional comms teams.
I am astounded by the dichotomy between the two searches, and feel that this also partially explains why policy-wonks and commercial age-verification offerings sought to reframe the debate around different, new terminology a couple of years ago – hence all the other terms in the “big” search.
If I had to summarise my impressions of the two searches:
- Public anti-age-verification discussion is (currently) all aimed at YouTube, because YouTube’s implementation is highly criticised for impacting usability and/or lacking rationality
- Public pro-age-verification discussion is (currently) all aimed at Twitch
- Anti-porn / anti-sex-work activists are all aimed at PornHub
- Online-safety activists are all shouting that SomethingMustBeDone™
- Politicians are either shouting alongside, or being shouted-at-by, online-safety, anti-porn, or anti-sex-work activists
- Age-Verification Providers are simultaneously trying to (1) present themselves as online-safety activists (2) frame themselves as the solution to everyone’s business / compliance problems, and (3) create further compliance problems which they can then offer to solve
- Sex Workers are already demanding age verification; perhaps the Age-Verification Providers should reach out to them as a potential market?
Take a look. Try it for yourself. Consider what it might mean.
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