By India McCarty
Social media companies are scrambling as new regulations demand they verify the ages of their users — which, in turn, violates the privacy of their younger users.
“Humans are now the minority on the internet; we’ve seen bot-to-human traffic increase 50 times year over year,” Johnny Ayers, the CEO of Socure, an AI-powered identity verification software company, told Fortune.
He explained that, by collecting certain biometric data, social media sites ensure that their users are human, or, in other cases, over the age of 18. However, there’s a paradoxical problem with this collection of biometric data.
“You can’t collect biometrics on a kid,” Ayers said. “And so how do you verify someone is 13 without verifying, without collecting a thing, that they’re 13?”
Related: Battle Rages Over Age Verification Laws — What Parents Should Know
As of now, social media companies are using a variety of tech tools to verify ages, including identity-based verifications that ask users to upload their government-issued IDs, AI face-scanning, tracking user activity and parental supervision tools, like Instagram’s Teen Accounts feature.
YouTube announced their intent to use AI to ascertain their users’ ages, writing in a blog post, “We will use AI to interpret a variety of signals that help us to determine whether a user is over or under 18. These signals include the types of videos a user is searching for, the categories of videos they have watched, or the longevity of the account. When the system identifies a teen user, we’ll automatically apply our age-appropriate experiences and protections.”
However, these tools still fall under what social media companies are calling the “age verification trap.”
“Modern data-protection regimes all rest on similar ideas: collect only what you need, use it only for a defined purpose, and keep it only as long as necessary,” IEEE Spectrum reported. “Age enforcement undermines all three.”
The outlet continued, “To prove they are following age verification rules, platforms must log verification attempts, retain evidence, and monitor users over time. When regulators or courts ask whether a platform took reasonable steps, ‘we collected less data’ is rarely persuasive. For companies, defending themselves against accusations of neglecting to properly verify age supersedes defending themselves against accusations of inappropriate data collection.”
The Age Verification Trap https://t.co/X7EGySYlLl
— IEEE Spectrum (@IEEESpectrum) February 23, 2026
While it’s widely agreed that social media sites need to implement age-verification rules for young users, this “age verification trap” shows there’s a lot of work still to be done to protect minors in a safe way.
Read Next: Discord Delays Age Verification Update After User Criticism
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