Age verification is reaching a global tipping point. Is the TikTok strategy a good compromise?

Governments around the world are Move to limit children’s access to social media as lawmakers question whether platforms are able to enforce their own minimum age requirements. TikTok recently became the latest tech giant to succumb to regulatory pressure when it announced it would implement a new age disclosure system across Europe to better keep under-13s off the platform.

The system, which follows a year-long pilot in the UK aimed at proactively identifying and removing underage users, relies on a combination of profile data, content analysis, and behavioral signals to assess whether an account may belong to a minor. (TikTok requires users to be at least 13 years old to register.) According to a company statement, its age detection system does not automatically block users. The system flags accounts that it suspects are run by users under 13 and forwards these accounts to human moderators for review. TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.

The European launch comes amid a global debate about the negative effects of social media on children, and at a time when governments are discussing stricter regulatory approaches based on age. Australia last year became the first country to ban social media for children under 16, including the use of Instagram, YouTube, Snap and TikTok. The European Parliament is also calling for mandatory age limits, while Denmark and Malaysia are considering a ban on children under 16.

“We are in the middle of an experiment where American and Chinese tech giants have unlimited access to the attention of our children and young people for hours every day without oversight,” Christel Schalmoz, a Danish lawmaker and vice-president of the European Parliament, said in November during the parliamentary session.

Likewise, advocacy groups in Canada are calling for a dedicated regulatory body to address online harms affecting young people in the wake of the flood of sexual deepfakes on X by its chatbot Grok. ChatGPT also announced that it has begun rolling out age prediction software to determine if an account likely belongs to someone under 18 so the correct safeguards can be applied. As age verification becomes a new online standard, policymakers are trying to profoundly reshape the Internet of the future. In the United States, 25 states have already enacted some form of age verification legislation.

“U.S. legislatures will likely, in the calendar year 2026, pass dozens or perhaps hundreds of new laws requiring online age verification,” says Eric Goldman, a law professor and associate dean at Santa Clara University, who has argued that any “government-imposed censorship” should automatically be viewed as “constitutionally suspect.”

“Unless something changes dramatically, regulators around the world are building a legal infrastructure that requires age verification for most websites and apps,” Goldman says.

As platforms work to properly handle age verification, is TikTok’s strategy of monitoring users rather than banning children altogether a good compromise? This depends on how you feel about digital surveillance.

“This is a fancy way of saying that TikTok will monitor the activities of its users and come to conclusions about them,” Goldman says. Because platform governance is often politically motivated, and because political solutions sometimes expose children to more harm than help, Goldman refers to age verification mandates as “laws of segregation and oppression.”

“Users may not be thrilled about this additional monitoring, and any false positives — such as an adult incorrectly identifying as a child — would have potentially serious consequences for the misidentified user.” Even if this were the right approach for TikTok, Goldman adds, most services don’t have enough data about their users to reliably guess people’s ages, so this approach isn’t scalable across other platforms.