(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


twitter – dropsafe

2021-11

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.

Postscript: YouTube’s age verification, a Twitter analysis

"YouTube are already doing it" – would you like to look into that, and the pros/cons?



Here's Google's guidance on "how to age verify" – how many people do you think manage to "block out" sensitive bits of their ID?



How many nick their Mum's Credit Card?https://t.co/m1rTgeMPTC pic.twitter.com/9EyDTq04LO — Alec Muffett (@AlecMuffett) June 19, 2021
[END]

[1] URL: https://alecmuffett.com/article/tag/twitter
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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