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Foreign.
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Welcome to the Monopoly Report. The Monopoly Report is dedicated to chronicling and analyzing the impact of antitrust and other regulations on the global advertising economy. I'm Alan Chappelle. I'm a privacy and regulatory attorney and have worked with hundreds of digital media and ad tech companies over the years and taken over 30 of them to exits. I also publish a monthly regulatory outlook for digital media worldwide called the Chappelle Regulatory Insider. You can find a link to a sample copy of the Chappelle Regulatory Insider in the show Notes this week my guest is Professor Jess Myers. Professor Myers is a visiting Assistant professor of Law at the University of Akron School of Law. A lawyer and technologist, Jess focuses on the intersection of law and technology with recent research and scholarship centered on generative AI. Jess is recognized as an expert in US Online intermediary liability law and has extensively written, spoken and taught on issues such as online speech, section 230, content, moderation, intellectual property, and cybercrime. I will place Professor Meyer's complete bio in the show Notes Today we're going to talk about age verification, particularly in the context of protecting kids. There are governments worldwide who are leaning into age verification as their go to solution for what they see as the problem with social platforms and kids. So Jess brings a unique perspective to this debate. She's witnessed the evolution of age verification policy from inside Big Tech. She was at Google for a number of years. She's been through the advocacy trenches, as it were, while at the Chamber of Progress and now from academia where I'm hoping she can speak a bit more freely. So let's get to it. Hey Jess, thanks for coming on the pod. How are you?
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I am good. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
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Well, where are we finding you Today.
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I am in Akron, Ohio. Snowy Akron, Ohio.
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B
Ah, wonderful. I'm in snowy New York City. Although I'm guessing that you guys get a lot more snow than we do.
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Yeah, we had about a foot plus couple of weeks ago and we're supposed to get another batch of it this Saturday so we'll see what happens.
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Oh goodness. Good fun. Well, at least you're, you're, you're not in D.C. where they get like three inches of snow and then all hell breaks loose.
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That's right. North east Ohio knows how to handle this. Yeah.
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So you know, over the past several years you went from being what I will lovingly refer to as like a policy nerd at Google and then at the Chamber for Progress to a law professor currently at University of Akron School of Law. I would love to hear a funny story about her transition from policy nerd to law professor and which gig is more fun.
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A funny story. I love that. You know, I've thought a lot about. Because I have law students, so they asked me about what is my career, Ben. And I've thought a lot about, you know, which one is my most favorite, which one is the most fun. I think it's a complicated story. I think each one of the experiences that I had starting at Google, working in the big tech companies kind of taught me, how do these companies operate to Chamber Progress, where you get to go from that very narrow viewpoint of Google and get to zoom out to how do all these different companies work and how do they not work together in some really interesting ways as well? Each of these different companies have different interests all the way to academia, where it's a totally new ballpark. I'm, you know, kind of free to say what I want now. The points that I make, I'm not saying, stuck to sort of the talking points of the companies. You're going to see a lot more. My personality sort of shine through, I guess. A funny story for my transition from policy to academia. I'm not sure if it's, like, the funniest, but I think I had a natural end at Chamber of Progress. It was one of my last testimonies in the California Legislature. And I use this story as a sort of, you know, what not to do for my law students. But it was a heated testimony. We're talking about social media addiction, talking about age verification, all that stuff we're talking about now. And one of the California legislators had remarked something about my tone being too aggressive. And I was really struck by that because not only, you know, not only was I kind of just doing my job and explaining the law, explaining how these things are going to affect our partner companies, but I was also on a panel of all men. And coming from one woman professional to another, it didn't sit right with me. And so the 20 something that I was, I got out of that testimony. I was angry and I tweeted about it and I tweeted, you know, shame on this California policymaker. Kind of called out another woman. And that caught fire. That went viral. And there was kind of this big hullabaloo around, you know, should Jess Meyers be allowed to testify in California anymore on behalf of Chamber of Progress? Well, a few weeks later, I had gotten accepted. I got an offer from the University of Akron School of Law. So it Was kind of this natural lesson learned. I shot off my mouth at the wrong time. But it's okay because I'm going to a place now that'll let me sort of speak freely anyways. So yeah, cool transition.
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B
I love that story. So look, I'll just tell you like, I, I've operated my life where there are definitely some moments that in retrospect I would like to have have back. But that happens way more often when I hold my tongue than when I don't hold my tongue. And so I don't know what the right answer was in that particular situation, but 99 out of a hundred times I would say, boy, good for you. Expressing how you feel.
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That's been the story of my entire career. And it's kind of what I, I, it's kind of the reason why, going back to your question about like what is most fun, I think being an academic is the right place for me because my career has always been just an interesting history of points when I have had something to say and I've either said it and it may have shot me in the foot in some ways, or I have completely self censored and held back and I've regretted those moments. And in academia you kind of get that sweet spot. You can't say anything that you want, but you're pretty much free to speak the things that you care the most about.
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B
Well, I mean, and wonderful and good for you that you found a place that you can be you. Yeah, because that's a gift.
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A
Yeah, I love it. I'm loving what I'm doing now. About a year and a half into teaching and this, I, I definitely think this is the place.
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B
Well, that's great. So the topic today is age verification. And before we jump in, I, I wanted to, to talk a bit about the underlying set of problems that they're trying to solve with age verification. Because these types of discussions often get grounded in platitudes like, and I'm using air quotes here, like we must protect the kids, which, which are kind of unhelpful. And so I'm going to share a few top level thoughts and I'm going to let you agree or disagree because in my view, and I come at this as someone who is adjacent to age verification, but it isn't really what I'm doing every day. But first thing that comes to my mind, and this is just a Captain Obvious statement, but like kids are different than adults. Their brains are different, their ability to process information is different, their susceptibility to bad Influence is different. We can agree on that, right? I'm not trying to. I guess I am leading the witness a bit. But like.
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No, absolutely. I think that's an incredibly important point. It's a point that I make to my students too. It's why they need to be careful about how much of the content that they're consuming every day. They need to be good stewards of that content they're consuming. I completely agree with undeveloped brains. Children are very different from adults in a lot of really important ways.
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B
And I love what you just said because you're sort of leading me to my second point. It was that the social platform and then increasingly AI tech have an ability to impact children's brains. And. And for better or worse, kids are often left unsupervised with, with that tech. And so that creates its own, I think, set of challenges. And like the best parent in the world, you know, I've got my kid on who's six on, you know, Khan Academy, which I think is safe. But every once in a while we find that she's onto something that like she figured out how to get us to pay for that we didn't realize we paid for. Now that's not the end of the world, I suppose, but like, it's really, really hard to be standing over them all the time.
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It's really hard to be a parent. I'm not a parent. I have the most admiration, respect for parents, especially in today's digital world. So I agree with you there. It's hard to be a parent. It's hard to monitor your kids and you can't do it at all times online.
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B
So we're at the point now where there is at least some credible evidence that these platform tools are causing harm to kids. Fair statement or that making you a little uneasy?
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I think it's a complicated statement. So I do just to give a little bit of my background here, where I'm coming from this. One of the pieces of work that I'm currently working on is actually around the youth suicide, public health crisis. And what I've been finding from that research, especially with regards to social media, is that when it comes to the types of harms that we're discussing, whether that be if you look at sort of the underlying. You have to unpack what are the underlying harms? Right. So is it that kids are developing sort of mental health challenges like depression and anxiety? There's this discussion about quote, unquote, addiction, which social media addiction doesn't really find a place anywhere in the DSM 5 for example, but it has some analogy to some of the issues we've talked about with say online gambling or just regular, you know, gambling addiction as well. And so I think it's important to figure out sort of what the harms are that we're reporting, trying to attribute technology to and unpack those harms because at least in the case of suicide, we'll take that as a, as a case study, there isn't one singular cause. Mental health experts, clinical psychiatrists all sort of seem to coalesce and agree around that point that there's not one single point of harm. And in fact what we're finding with a lot of these types of mental health challenges that we are attributing constantly to social media is that they actually stem from things that are a little bit more broad. Like they're like the individual level, some of the individual struggles that they might be dealing with having nothing to do with technology, environmental struggles, community struggles or lack of resources. So that's where I would not want to say no, that is wrong. The social media and technology doesn't have any impact whatsoever. But I want to be careful about drawing a direct causal link because it's a more complicated question.
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B
Yeah, I think that's a fair point and I think one that sometimes gets lost, that type of nuance sometimes gets lost in these types of discussions. Well, okay, I had one last kind of over arching thought as we enter this and that the, the records of the social platforms to address, you know, we'll just see broadly the kids issue has been a little mixed. I think there's been some instances where there's some kind of interesting stuff that's being done. There are some instances where it really doesn't seem like they've gone far enough. And I think there's even some instances where it's like, okay guys, you might want to get started with some of this stuff.
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I absolutely agree with that and that comes from my point of working. I've now seen a wide array of approaches to helping mitigate some of the issues we're seeing with kids using. And I've seen this with small companies, mid sized companies, larger companies that have more resources again. And because we're dealing with a complicated set of harms, we're dealing with kids which they differed. A 15 year old, one 15 year old gets gonna be different, very different from another 15 year old kid. And what sort of triggers them and, and what sort of might trigger underlying harms are going to be different. And so those approaches to those Issues are going to be sort of widespread and dependent on lots of different factors that are at play with these tech companies.
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B
Yeah, yeah, no fair. Great points. Okay, so now we've got governments, you know, in their, in their wisdom, they're attempting to step into a perceived void because, you know, there are, there is something like they feel like they need to do something here. And so I would love it if you would walk me through what's taking place in the following jurisdictions. And I, I'd love to start with Australia, because I think they were the first to just out and out ban social platforms for kids under a certain age.
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A
Yeah, that's right. So, you know, the eu, the UK and the US have been sort of dancing around this, this idea that, you know, they haven't wanted to sort of outwardly say, look, kids under 16 or kids under a certain age can't use these, these services anymore. Australia is one of the first approaches we've seen where policymakers have, have made very clear those who are under the age of 16, it's not just that they can't have addictive features or quote, unquote, addictive features, they can't have content targeted to them. They cannot use these services, period. And so what we've seen in Australia so far is sort of this mass deep platforming or removal, if you will, of accounts that are perceived to be held by users that are under the age of 16 in Australia. And that was fairly recent. So we're still sort of waiting to see what is some of the impact and consequences of that policy.
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B
Is there anything initial initially that we can kind of pull out of what Australia's done, or is it just a little too soon?
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We're pretty early. I've been following, and again, this kind of ties back to a little bit of the mental health crisis research I've been doing specifically with regards to youth. I've been following actually Reddit to see if we can find any accounts from users who would be considered in that under 16 category. And there's actually quite a few. They're using VPNs, of course, to get around these, to get around the service bans. And you are seeing discussions among what appears to be young people really feeling that loss when it comes to the services that they used to use to find community, to be able to find social spaces. And so you're seeing sort of that obvious point of view where the kids are not happy about it. And that, that, that makes sense from a lot of different perspectives. I've also seen, and again, these are sort of accounts, I'm not sure if they've been substantiated yet, but accounts of potentially even adult users who have lost their ability to have access to their services either because their account is giving signals that they're under the age of 16 or they're not able to, or not willing to verify that they're above the age of 16 for some of these services. And that's not particularly surprising because we have seen evidence of, at least with some of these age verification companies, evidence of adult users consistently being mistaken either by, typically by the biometrics processes, the facial analysis processes being mistaken for somebody under the age of 18 or under 16 and losing access to these services as a result. So right now I think to sum up what's happening Australia, you're seeing sort of this mass removal of people, minors and I would argue also adults perhaps on accident from services, from communication services that they once had access to and then sort of this trickle down loss of community and other types of supportive resources that follow from those, those, those services as well.
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B
So I focus mostly on Australia. I would love to, to get your take on what's taking place. Well, we'll start with Europe. I mean I, I, the uk, France. I just saw something where Spain is talking about or at least has introduced legislation. I mean that might be a while, that's, but, but there are certainly initiatives underway in Europe and what's your sense of what's going on there?
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A
Yeah, so Europe has been a pretty fascinating jurisdiction to follow in terms of the age assurance and age verification discussion. What you'll typically see with Europe and the UK are discussions around what work, what they call age assurance. So they try to dance around this topic of verification in that they suggest, look, we're, it's not necessarily that we need you to collect, we need these services to collect the IDs of these users. But if there are signals from the accounts on these services that suggest that a minor is under the, that suggests that a user is under the age of 18, they should lose access to specific features of the service itself. Not necessarily full removal. But maybe they don't get targeted feeds anymore, maybe they can't have access to their direct messages, maybe they don't have access to certain types of content as well. Or I think in the case of some of these services that are directly targeted at minors or that host minors in communal spaces online, even discussions around how do we segregate those minors such that we're only keeping 15 year olds in a 15 year old chat and Ensuring that adults can't access that community as well. And what you're actually seeing is this sort of complex set of guidelines for the companies around age assurance, how to accurately do age assurance, and has in some ways read to the online companies. Well, it might just be easier for us to age gate minors entirely from our services. And typically the focus in the EU and the UK is around things like adult content. But what you're actually seeing is sort of a wider spread because of this uncertainty around, well, what is adult content? What is content that's inappropriate to minors? And so that's why you're seeing. You've probably seen companies like even sports Spotify have moved to try to keep miners from accessing Spotify. Or, you know, Microsoft, I think the Xbox service had put in age gates, I think, at the very early stages of the EU age assurance, to ensure that miners couldn't, couldn't use those services. So that's kind of what's playing out in Europe, is it's more of a guideline structure that the services are trying to follow that is more translating into. It's, in my opinion, more like a ban that we're seeing in Australia. And then you're seeing that again carry over into the United States as well.
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B
Yeah. And let's talk about the us, because it strikes me that all of this just runs headlong into first amendment concerns.
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A
No, absolutely. There's a. There's sort of several concerns and we've seen a few. We've seen a couple big legal developments. One big one this past summer in the Supreme Court, that, that speaks directly to some of the age verification concerns. But I think what's important to flag here, since we're talking about all these different jurisdictions, right, you've got Australia that's banned minors, you got EU and the UK that has sort of what Eric Goldman professor, studies age verification calls, you know, these segregate and suppress infrastructure laws. And then you have the US that's sort of dancing around the EU and the UK approaches as well. It's not a surprise to me that you're seeing the Internet. The Internet services sort of coalesce around this one type of response, which is, in effect, miners are risky to have on our service, regardless of the features that they interact with, regardless of the features that we restrict. It's probably just easier to ban them all. Again, similar to the Australia approach, even though that's not quite what the law is, what the laws are requiring on their face, in effect. That's different.
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B
Right, but it's not Just the law. It's, you've got the state of New York and a bunch of other jurisdictions who are saying, you know what, whatever you're offering to kids is insufficient and so we're going to come after you.
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A
Exactly right. And you're seeing that in. Across pretty much I would say now all 50 states. And you're seeing sort of this Australia based approach, EU based approach, UK based approach, all sort of different, all these different approaches in the different states. And again, signaling to the Internet services, we're not going to have a Virginia version of Facebook, we're not going to have a Virginia version of California or an EU and Australia version of Facebook. Again, if the, if the issue here is minors, it probably makes sense to just keep minors out at the very start in the United States. A lot of these laws. I, I was just sort of explaining to, to my students who we, we just listened to the Net Choice Sctti and that Choice v. Yost oral arguments about age verification a couple days ago and I was explaining to them we've seen sort of like a different variations of age verification throughout the United States. This first sort of attempt from the states was I, I would say more blatant and that's that Ohio isn't a good, is a good example of this, their age verification law that's currently being challenged where you're seeing at the very beginning you saw states sort of say, look, Internet services have to verify if they have minors on their service or not. And they have to restrict certain product features, certain services, even the service themselves from minors if they detect or if a minor verifies on that, on that online service. And that to, to your question about the First Amendment is what I would say is most facially obvious here. Right? We, we have since the 90s, the Supreme Court has sort of said age verification restricts access of information from adults to information they are entitled to to access. And that is repugnant when we're thinking about the First Amendment that offends the First Amendment. Recently we had this Supreme Court case, an FSC Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton that has sort of undone that. We can come back to that later. But sort of that first approach age, if you're just, if you are obviously on its face the law saying look, you must, must conduct age verification to ban minors from your service, that's not going to work under the First Amendment. So we've sort of seen from that lawmakers had learned because they were losing these cases, they were not able to get these laws through. They sort of Learned. All right, well, we have to sort of hide this age verification approach in our second variation of age verification law. So they take sort of this new attempt and that's what you're actually seeing today is more of a mirroring of what's happening in the EU and the uk, where the law itself, itself may not say on its face you must conduct age verification, but it might say something like, you cannot have content targeting features available for minors on your service. And in itself, it sounds like, oh, that's just a product feature that has nothing to do with speech. Right. It may not even use the word content. I'd say something like notifications. Right. That feels like to courts and to lawmakers, some courts, less of a First Amendment issue. But all it's doing is obfuscating what they were trying to do in the first variation of age verification. So, so that's where we at. Where at. Where we are at currently in the age verification landscape.
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B
But, but the challenge there, I go back to New York, but, but like, if you do not create some form of safe harbor that says if you do X, Y and Z, we can't come after you, then you're really, it's, it's an age verification requirement.
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A
Absolutely. And even then, sort of the X, Y and Z, if you were to put in a safe harbor the way things work in the United States compared to the eu, I mean, we are very litigious in this, in where we give plaintiffs a lot of tools and a lot of leeway, again compared to the litigation environment in the EU and the uk. And so what it essentially says is you can't get this wrong. Services, if you, if you try to frame this as, you know, you don't have to take their ID and you don't have to take their biometrics, but you better make sure that your account signals, if it signals it's a minor that, you know, they get removed. Well, what about accounts that just don't signal as minors? Right. And they get that wrong and they let those accounts sort of stay on the service in violation of these laws. That doesn't work. That doesn't sort of support that. You can't get it wrong. So it always sort of falls back into, well, we need to verify, and there's only a couple ways to really verify that every single user on your service is of age.
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B
And that's really what, what strikes me is that almost everywhere the path, eventually the US because of the First Amendment and some other considerations, is perhaps a little more circuitous. But the road is leading to age verification. And I know that you have a pretty strong opinion on, you know, what the problems of age verification are, and I would, I would love it if you would share it with my audience.
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A
To take us back to what we saw in the summer with the Supreme Court, I think it's really important that we, we sort of flesh out what the burdens of age verification are here, because I think the Supreme Court in that Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton case, which had to do with age verification, mandatory age verification in Texas for any services that offered where I think it was like one third of the content they offer is pornographic content, adult content. The Supreme Court in that case had really overlooked the burdens of age verification, has really sort of almost sidestepped the First Amendment analysis and said, well, it's okay if adults have to experience some friction to access speech that would not be legally accessible to minors. And so it, it sort of left this open question for us. Well, what. What are the burdens that adults experience? What are sort of the har. Adults experience with age verification? Well, there's a lot. For starters, anonymous speech is incredibly important, especially online, especially when we're talking about not just things like access to pornography that are already very sensitive. Folks are going to be much, much less willing to probably tie their identities to the type of porn that they're. That they consume, but also if they're engaging in sensitive conversations, especially under today's administration, where some of those sensitive conversations could potentially get you arrested or killed. As we've been seeing, what age verification effectively requires is that for you to be able to continue to engage online with these services, whether that is, again, accessing something like adult content or just using your Facebook account to, you know, use your First Amendment rights to protest the government, your identity is going to be inherently tied to that use or that expression. There's only a couple ways to verify somebody's age. And the sort of the straight, the surefire ways right today are a government id or as we're seeing, some services do facial biometrics that try to scan your face and guess your age. So there's sort of this, this loss of anonymous speech. The other big issue that I'm particularly concerned about, we are effectively creating, and I find this ironic because, you know, these age verification laws are bred out of this sort of angst against the technology companies. Technology companies are evil. They are doing terrible things to our brains, right? They're, they're awful for kids. And yet we're telling the technology companies to consume more information about Children, they, they're going to have sort of these honey pots of kids that are accessing their services, kids identification data, potentially their biometric data. And the reality is that that information is a massive target for hackers. We saw, if I can give you an example, right. The, the T app, which is a dating app for women, I believe that was last year, a few months, a few months ago, last year was hacked and the identities of these women, their licenses, their government IDs, their addresses were released. And what we saw the days following, folks on 4chan were creating quote unquote rape maps for these women use a doxing them using their addresses, using the things that they were able, using the information they were able to get from this breach. And so, you know, we're sort of left to ask ourselves, like, how much do we trust these companies that we have for so long said are terrible about our information, Especially in a country where we don't have a federal privacy law in place to begin with to deal with these companies collecting this extra information and creating a massive target, not just for adults, but for the kids themselves that now have to identify and their parents who will have to identify in order to allow them to use these services, which is a massive honeypot as well. Yep.
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B
And then does all that information magically vanish once the kid turns 15, 17, 18. Probably doesn't.
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A
Depends on the policies of the service. Right. Again, like we, we don't have a federal privacy law to deal with this in the United States currently. You would think that's probably the first thing we would do before we venture into these mandates. It depends on the policy and services. Now some of these state laws are trying to build in mandates that the service only retains that information just for verification. And then it's gone. From my time working at the tech companies, there's not really such thing as completely gone when it comes to data. There's not really such thing as complete removals. There's a lot of reasons why companies retain information. And so you kind of, again, we're left to hope that the policies and the retention policies of these services are properly implemented and that data is removed. But consistently in these data breaches, we've seen that's not the case.
- [28:09]
B
Well, and also there's actually legitimate reasons why they might need to keep that information. For one thing, sooner or later, if you have that policy, somebody is going to say, hey, you allowed my 14 year old onto your platform and so I'm suing you. And oh, by the way, this is five years later. So you are going to need to keep some of that in order to, in order to defend yourself.
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A
Absolutely. Right. Yeah.
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B
I, I have a little bit of a personal bias. I, I married a wonderful woman who was born in Nicaragua. And so one might imagine, like, I don't know how much I wanted out there, ethnicity to, to the point where somebody can come after somebody that I love.
- [28:49]
A
Right, right. And you know, to that point as well. I, I think about this a lot with parents, with kids because again, it's not just going to be if you, if you have decided as a parent, which is, you're right. No, I want my child to be able to access these services. I want my child to get some form of media literacy and, and digital literacy training. And it's important that they use these services, you know, wisely. You are going to have to tie your identity to that child as well for many of these services. So that will require not just information about your child, but yes, information about you or your spouse as well that will also be collected. So again, it's so ironic to me, in this day and age where we don't trust tech companies, what we're effectively manually mandating them to do is to collect more information about our children and their families.
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B
Some of this is just to coin a term of a friend, bonkers. So, okay, so, all right, let's, let's say that that age verification to the point where like you're turning over government IDs is off the table. What about, you know, some things that are maybe a little softer than that? Are those potential solutions? Is it like, like what TikTok is doing, the, what they're calling the human safety net, where they've got some criteria where they can make a reasonable guess around how old somebody is. Like, what are the challenges about that approach?
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A
Yeah, a couple of things. So it kind of goes back to the first point I was making with regards to the differences in litigation regimes and differences in our laws compared to the United States. And let's take the EU for example. Right. A guideline based structure in the EU works a little bit better than in the United States where at the end of the day the question is going to be, depending on how the law is written, did you allow a minor account on your service or not? Should you have known that this user was a minor? You know, did you know or should you have known? Is this is typically the standard when we are, when we're considering whether the technology company acted appropriately towards that account. And so I'm pretty skeptical of these assurance approaches. Like TikToks, because, you know, for starters, right, People are different. There's very precocious 15 year olds that might be using their account maybe just for research purposes and that, that might give their, their account might give certain signals that this is somebody who is an. You also have adults who engage with content that might be traditionally reserved for minors, right? Like you. There's all, there's, there's all sorts of these sort of cartoon fandoms out there, maybe for cartoons that are typically enjoyed by minor groups that adults enjoy too. And so you have sort of that reverse of your.
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B
I'm sure there's, I'm sure there's an entire Reddit community dedicated to SpongeBob SquarePants and how that's really an adult, adult cartoon.
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A
Absolutely, yes. And so then you have, you know, sort of these reverse signals that this account that is engaging with SpongeBob SquarePants, for example, might be a minor account. And then what that adult user loses access to those services because they are sort of coded as, as, as a minor. So there's a lot of ways that the, that the services can get this wrong. And the worst case scenario is you, you know, or, you know, the worst case scenario for the technology services is that they allow minors in a space that they are claiming to be sort of an adults only space. And now you have adults, you have a bunch of adults accessing minor, minor accounts. That's wrong. I mean that, that is probably the worst case scenario is they get it wrong and they will be legally responsible for that as a result. The second, I would say sort of worst case just for society is that more of us are going to lose access to these services because these Internet services are going to be so risk averse that they're going to be more willing to just remove counts and block features first until you have proven then usually through a verification process that you are the appropriate age for that service.
- [32:35]
B
Yeah, and I have some visibility into how some of the social platforms adopt GLBTQ plus communities because there's a, Oftentimes just naming yourself on social media is a choice and is a, and sometimes it's a necessity because you do not, you might want to hold yourself out differently there than you do, for example, with the rest of your high school. And so it's a huge set of challenges.
- [33:01]
A
Absolutely. I mean, again, that kind of ties back to even your, you know, our right to being anonymous, our right to having anonymous speech, our right to present ourselves the way that we, we prefer to present ourselves. And so, yeah, I Think that's a really good point of, especially for LGBTQ individuals who are living in states that are not as tolerant, you know, as, let's say, a California outing yourself. It could be deadly, you know, in some cases for these, for these minors. Yeah.
- [33:27]
B
Okay. So I guess I'm left wondering, are there tangible solutions to this problem? Because if we're, if we're going to say age verification is, is just has too many inherent risks, particularly in the U.S. if we're saying like the, the light verification kind of the, the, the thing that TikTok is trying to do, that seems to be out too. What are the solutions here?
- [33:50]
A
You know, I've thought a lot about this. I hate to be that person, but from my time, I've now seen this at different angles. I've seen this from working directly inside the tech companies. I've seen this from, you know, working for many, you know, working as somebody who represents many of the tech companies at once. And I've also just seen this as a digital native who has grown up with the Internet as well. And it sounds like a talking point, but I feel strongly about it. I really think this goes back to what are the underlying harms and how do we address those harms? Well, it starts with education. At the end of the day, you know, we, we could take this one approach which I think we're all sort of heading towards, no matter what we call it, which is minors should not be allowed on the Internet. And I think that's a really bad idea for a multitude of reasons. You know, one big one being at least when we're talking about youth mental health and the youth suicide crisis. Access to community is one of the strongest protective factors for youth. And so removing their access to community is probably one of the worst things that you can do when it comes to trying to solve some of these mental health underlying harms. I think what actually needs to be happening is one, parents need to be educated on the tools that these services already offer that do allow parents to sort of monitor and implement appropriate safeguards for their children to be able to use these services. You had mentioned at the very beginning, it's really hard being a parent. It's hard to kind of keep an eye on your children's Internet access 24, 7. You don't have to. There's actually a lot of tools that these services implement now that will give you updates as to what your child is looking at and what your child is reviewing. And I think a lot of this stems from parents just not knowing what their technical options are when it comes to both monitoring what their kids are doing online, but also literally blocking kids from being able to access the things parents do not want them to be accessing. But then I think the second part to this is not just educating the parents, but it is educating the kids because we are rapidly, rapidly approaching this digital. We're already in it, this digital media literacy crisis where kids do not know how to safely use the Internet. They don't know how to safely use these services. They don't know how to safely consume information. They don't know how to process that information. We're not talking to our kids about, hey, you know, all of these different, you know, Instagram models that you're seeing. There's a lot of photo editing, There's a lot of. It's a lot of not real. It's AI, right? And then they're taking this as real and their fear of missing out. And it's all the typical things that teens have dealt with for decades upon decades just repackaged into a new media environment. I really think here the solution is not keep kids off of the Internet. It's teach kids how to use the Internet effectively and teach parents how to. How to use the. The Internet effectively.
- [36:32]
B
Who pays for that?
- [36:34]
A
Right? And so this is one of the things that I ran into when I was, you know, when I was working for Chamber of Progress, we had talked about a digital media literacy bill in California, and it ran into the. It ran into issues because it's going to require the state to pony up a lot more money for education. And we currently live in an administrative regime right now in the United States that isn't exactly excited about funding education. And so it come down to the state, and the government just have the.
- [37:05]
B
Data brokers pay for it. That's what California seems to want to do these days.
- [37:08]
A
Right? Right. If it comes out of the government's pocket, it's no go. But what we're finding, and at least what I'm consistently finding in my research about youth suicide, is that there are a lot of solutions that the government should be supporting and pursuing that it has consistently not and has consistently avoided for the past several, several decades.
- [37:25]
B
So I want to shift, just briefly, my audience is in the ad space. They're digital media nerds. And so they're probably excited to be informed about these issues because they're important, you know, as parents, as digital citizens. But there's always a thing in the back of their mind going, okay, well, how is this impacting My ability to close business. So I want to just, just drive this home. From an ads perspective, not exactly the same issue, but similar. So for, for 20 or so years, actually longer than that, you've had COPPA where you know, anybody under 13. And okay, I get what that means. And, and, and really mostly that's, let's face it, that's Disney and Nickelodeon's problem. And so. Okay, and then from an ABS perspective, you, you know what? Directed to children, A digital property that is directed to children. I don't always agree where they land. You know, Angry Birds I thought was kind of a weird designation, but like, all right, fine, I get that. And it's also been, been 20 years, so we're reasonably comfortable with that. What happens when that turns from, you know, 13 to 16 to 18, where now you've got states who are saying, well, you know, knew or should have known that this was going to be a kid. And I'm talking people who are really just collecting pseudonymous info. I'm just, I'd love to get your reaction and your thoughts about how that sort of matriculates as an issue.
- [38:48]
A
Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I'm not exactly an expert on the ad space, so I, I'm gonna, I, I'm actually gonna be really curious about your, your thoughts on this. But I, I think given that it is becoming more and more nebulous, it's, we don't have as obvious of a directed to somebody under the age of 13. We are getting sort of these age clusters in different states. We're even stepping back from directed at and some of the language is just around could be harmful to a minor. And again, that's even more nebulous even than directed at. I like your Angry Birds model. Right. Because anything could be harmful to any kind of minor, to any kind of adult too. And so I think again, you're, you're seeing this tension between at least when it comes to the advertising companies and the online services and the app stores and anyone else in this sort of content hosting space, stack, if you will. Whose responsibility is this? Is it the responsibility of the advertisers to understand what service they're on and what kinds of ads are appropriate for them to be serving? Or is it the responsibility of the actual Internet service itself, like Facebook, like Instagram, to sort of be the gatekeepers, to say, well, we do not have minors on this service. And then that doesn't fall into the ad, you know, anything, anything that comes from the ad companies will be Fine. Because we, we are sort of verifying, we don't have minors on the service. Is it the app stores who, you know, also have sort of this gatekeeping ability to say, look, if your online service like Instagram is not following the laws of say New York or Florida or Texas, should we be allowing you to be downloaded and offered by our app store service? So I think you're going to see this sort of anxiety up and down the stack of who is the gatekeeper here, who is legally liable, who is actually in charge of this? And what we saw with, you know, just to make an analogy, what we saw with how advertisers reacted to Elon Musk taking over Twitter. Now, X advertisers are typically in the media, in the history of media, pretty risk averse. And so they're more likely to remove themselves. And so, you know, it's, it's kind of an existential crisis for the entire industry.
- [40:47]
B
They also have very short memories.
- [40:49]
A
They do.
- [40:50]
B
I would be, I would love to see the list not of the advertisers who left, but for the percentage of the advertisers who left who came back within, you know, three months.
- [40:58]
A
Absolutely, I think that's absolutely right. Right. And so like, is there going to be a point in time where, okay, now we feel like the service is quote, unquote, and it's only sort of the only types of users, the ones that are within compliance of whichever state law that you're in, will they come back? Right. And then again, this also sort of points to this, this sort of existential issue for the industry of which state law should control here. Because I imagine advertisers, and again, the Internet services are not going to want to have 50 different versions of ads that are acceptable on their services for a specific type of audience. And so is Texas's age verification law the most restrictive. Okay, we're going to all coalesce around Texas's age restriction law.
- [41:39]
B
Yeah. And one thing that strikes me just within the context of the ad space is you've got the smart TV environment and that is a very fertile ground now for advertising. But you've got the additional challenge of, you know, people tend to watch those things as a family and so it's difficult to necessarily know at any one time who's actually watching the, the program. And then if you, if you treat the smart TV company and boy, they're under a lot of focus right now in Texas and in California and in the European Union regarding the data that they're collecting pursuant to to, to shows. But, but in any event, if you deputize them as the gatekeepers, you're running into the same age verification chat, set of challenges.
- [42:23]
A
Absolutely. And then you'll see it again in the Internet context where it's the parent that has provided their identity information to allow their children to use the service. Okay. Is the advertiser targeting to the parent or are they targeting to the child that's clearly using the account? Right. I would not want to be an advertiser today.
- [42:39]
B
Yeah, the, the, the, I think the ad space is heading into a very challenging period over the next couple of years and on the one hand it'll, it'll be kind of be fun as somebody who's been in the space for a while to, to see it evolve. But, but there's going to be a lot of pain.
- [42:56]
A
Absolutely. I agree.
- [42:57]
B
Professor Jess Meyers. Where can people find you? Which I guess is kind of a creepy question to ask now that I think about the way I just phrased that.
- [43:05]
A
As much as I yell about privacy, I'm actually all over the Internet. I have very open social media accounts. So I, you know, you know where you can't find me. That's probably a better question. I am not on X. I, I, it is, it's my personal opinion to boycott X. So I've moved from X over to blue sky. If you want to sort of see my updates, there's I blog@control altdescent.com you'll sometimes see me pop up on Tector. I'll be posting there. Eric Goldman's Technology Marketing Law blog. But I'm, I'm all over the Internet except for X these days.
- [43:38]
B
Well, fantastic. And I, I would echo your concerns about X. I've sort of quietly left. Look, people have to make their own decisions. You do you is my mantra. But, but boy, if, if you're not going to draw the line at csam, I, I'm not sure what to tell you. Jess Myers, thank you so much for coming on.
- [43:55]
A
Thank you for having me. This was wonderful.
- [43:59]
B
That was a great conversation. We are seeing a worldwide movement to restrict minors access to social media and online services. And the stated goal is protecting children from mental health harms, addiction and inappropriate content. But as Jess pointed out, the relationship between social media and youth mental health can be complex. I have trouble laying all of these issues at the foot of the social platforms. And I agree that mental health challenges stem from multiple factors. Individual circumstances, environmental stressors, lack of community resources. So technology is only one variable among many. But I'LL also acknowledge that social platforms and AI chatbox are exploiting and at times manipulating kids, and that user education is only going to take one so far. That said, I tend to think that age verification is just not the right solution. Its impact is limited. There are downstream problems created by age verification, and the last thing I want is to blow up the idea of using the Internet anonymously and requiring that we hand over even more sensitive information about ourselves and our children to these large platforms. As I mentioned on the podcast, I'm still looking to Australia to see how their experiment with age verification plays out. Maybe we can learn something from their successes and failures. I appreciate that Jess came here with some solutions. Education of both parents and kids, better platform tools, more awareness of the existing tools to protect kids. All that education costs money. There's also an underlying mental health crisis impacting kids. Now, exactly what percentage of that crisis is directly attributable to social platforms and AI chatbots is certainly debatable. But equally, the impact isn't nothing either. For my audience in the ad tech space, these sets of issues may seem very far away from your day to day work life. In reality, children's issues and age verification are going to start hitting the ad space very soon. For over 20 years we had COPPA providing clear guardrails don't Target Kids under 13 or on properties directed to children. That approach was manageable, but what happens when the age threshold jumps to 16 or 18 and the standard shifts from directed to children to a no or should have known standard? The ad tech world would need to come up with solutions for those questions pretty soon. We'll have more focus on that on the podcast over the next couple of months. Meanwhile, we've got a bunch of other fantastic guests coming up on the Monopoly Report podcast over the next few weeks. Please subscribe to the show@monopolyreportpod.com or on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And thanks for listening.