Brad Littlejohn: Internet guardrails

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Wednesday, March 19th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast. Up next, age verification and protecting our kids online. Here’s WORLD Opinions contributor Brad Littlejohn.

BRAD LITTLEJOHN: Even after a decades-long war on childhood, there are still a great many things in this country you cannot do if you’re under 18. You can’t take out a loan or enter any binding contract. You can’t buy risky products like alcohol or tobacco. You can’t access sexually explicit venues, like strip clubs. You can’t even open a bank account without a parent present. But go online—where many kids spend their time—and all that goes right out the window. You can sign away all of your privacy rights to the world’s most powerful corporations. Be whisked into the presence of digital sex workers and predators. And access an endless array of dangerous and addictive apps.

This bizarre state of affairs has been wreaking havoc on the mental health of our youth. But it is at last being challenged by a growing movement. One of the newest groups to join the fray is the Digital Childhood Alliance. The alliance has focused its crusade on the two biggest gatekeepers of the digital world: the Apple and Android app stores. Studies suggest that 1 in 6 children in the United States, and 1 in 8 globally, experience some kind of online sexual harassment or exploitation. And that stat doesn’t include exposure to graphic pornography online.

Most of this happens on mainstream apps like Instagram, Tiktok, and Snapchat. Far more than most parents realize. Even seemingly innocuous apps often have social-media-type functions that offer an open gateway for children to be targeted with explicit messages. Some have built-in web browser functionality that can bypass parental controls. And while both Google and Android app stores feature age ratings, these ratings are effectively meaningless. Why? Because they are not enforced. Neither platform makes any effort to check user age.

Last week, Utah became the first state to pass the App Store Accountability Act. It aims to finally close this massive legal loophole destroying America’s children. The law is being considered in at least eight other states and the U.S. Congress. According to the law, developers can be sued for misleading age ratings. Apple and Google will be required to verify whether app store users are 18 or older. If they aren’t, explicit parental consent will be necessary for every single app download and every in-app purchase. The law constitutes a remarkable redistribution of power away from two of the largest companies on the planet and back to the bedrock unit of every society: the family.

For years, Apple and Google have denied that such age-verification is technically possible. That changed a couple weeks ago when Apple suddenly announced an upcoming major overhaul of its app store. It will enable an iPhone to tell an app whether a user is too young to use the app, without giving away the user’s actual birthdate. The announcement is not all that impressive as a child-safety initiative. It leaves plenty of loopholes in place—including allowing minors to agree to complex terms of service contracts without parental consent. Clearly, Apple is trying to convince legislators to leave it alone, much as Meta did last year in introducing “Instagram for Teens.” But the announcement is an earthquake that could shake the tech industry to its core. It is an admission that parents were right all along—that the app store was unsafe and exploitative, and that Apple had the technology to fix it.

It is essential for parents to keep up the pressure. Technologically, there is now no reason why we can’t age-gate the internet at least as effectively as we do the brick-and-mortar world. And given the well-documented perils of the online world, we owe it to our children to demand nothing less.

I’m Brad Littlejohn.

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