Currently, I can’t check my Bluesky direct messages until I’ve allowed the Epic Games-owned KWS to look at either my bank card, my ID, or my wizened visage. As I’m based in the UK, it’s not just Bluesky I’ve got to worry about either, with similar verification processes now present on Reddit, Discord, and even my partner’s Xbox.
This is all due to the Online Safety Act, which came into effect in the UK last year. For many, these age checks are an annoyance at best—but they also represent something that will have ramifications far beyond the British Isles. The UK’s Act was designed in part to ensure children in the UK could not easily access “harmful content.” This is a broad term that includes but is not limited to pornography, content that promotes “self-harm, eating disorders, or suicide,” and “bullying”.
To comply with the act and differentiate children from the adults, many platforms have opted for age-gates like the one I’m encountering on Bluesky. Almost 70% of Brits surveyed shortly after the Online Safety Act came into effect said they supported it…though 64% didn’t think it would be all that effective. Indeed, I could log into a VPN to get past the UK-based Bluesky block—though unfortunately for me, I am stubborn, lazy, and cheap (apologies if you’ve been trying to get ahold of me).
As Jacob has previously outlined, there are better ways to implement age checks. As it stands, though, I’m not naive enough to think the data I keep elsewhere is in hands that are any safer. However, not submitting to an age assurance check makes for one less point of failure from which my likeness or even my official documents can leak out.
On the one hand, yeah, I’d rather children growing up today didn’t see all the things I saw thanks to having unfettered internet access throughout the early oughts.
Why not? I survived rotten.com and goatse – but then again, the internet didn’t have much in the way of fake news, hate speech or echo chambers…
I’d also rather young’uns now didn’t have to experience all the harassment I experienced at the hands of my own peers, newly empowered by that unfettered internet access.
On the other hand, the internet answered a lot of questions I was absolutely not going to ask my parents; when I see a vague term like “harmful content” I do have to wonder what genuinely educational resources on the wider internet—say, regarding art history or personal health—might end up age-gated because someone somewhere has decided they’re tantamount to ‘pornography.’
I’m only just the other side of 30, but Section 28 was still in effect for some of my school years. For those who don’t know, Section 28 was a law that prevented schools in England, Scotland, and Wales from doing anything that could be interpreted as “intentionally [promoting] homosexuality or [publishing] material with the intention of promoting homosexuality”. So, until the law was repealed in the early 2000’s, a lot of schools simply pretended LGBTQIA+ folks didn’t exist. The internet, for all of its faults, helped to fill that deafening silence for me.
(Image credit: PromptPirate on GitHub)
Even so, I remember there being content blocks back in my day, too, and I know I found more than a few ways around those. Indeed, if we take just Discord today, our James has found not one but two different ways to fool its face scans—though the platform may already be formulating a counter to these workarounds.
Shortly after issuing assurances that not all users will even have to undergo an age check, a since-edited support article revealed that some UK users “may be part of an experiment where your information will be processed by an age-assurance vendor, Persona.” Amid reports of folks easily fooling its primary third-party vendor’s age verification checks, Discord may have been seeking to diversify its defences.
Persona’s investors include Peter Thiel, co-founder of ICE’s premier surveillance provider, Palantir. Though Persona and Palantir are two totally separate companies that do not share either data or operations, that’s still a pretty grimy connection. Not least of all because earlier this week, the US Department of Homeland Security reportedly subpoenaed a number of major online platforms—including Discord, Reddit, Google, and Meta—in order to obtain the personal details of accountholders who had been critical of ICE or identified the locations of its agents. We don’t yet know if Discord complied, though we have reached out for comment.
(Image credit: Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
There is an even worse wrinkle in the Discord-Persona ‘experiment’: while Discord had previously said that data like age verification face scans would only be stored and processed on users’ own devices, those who ended up part of the Persona experiment may have their information “temporarily stored for up to 7 days, then deleted.”
All of that said, Persona is not part of Discord’s long-term strategy, with the platform telling Kotaku earlier this week that its dealings with the vendor were part of a “limited test” that has since been concluded. That leaves K-id’s on-device processing in effect, but even that doesn’t necessarily end the privacy nightmare. Data breaches usually leave platforms scrambling for user good will, but Discord seems all too happy to keep walking into rakes.
One could jump ship and shop around for a free Discord alternative as I recently did, but all of the platforms I tested will likely have to implement some sort of age assurance check if they haven’t already in order to continue serving users based in the UK in the future. That doesn’t mean I’ll be letting them scan my face any time soon; I may have to deploy Norman Reedus and his funky foetus before long as third-party age verification vendors have done little to earn my trust or a gander at my actual face.
This article is riddled in huge assumptions about causality and the amplification that social media can offer, completely unhampered by any research. But the actual research that they do have interspersed in the article is interesting.
[…]Discovering that an ordinary purchase may be tied to exploitation or environmental damage creates a jolt of personal responsibility. In our research, we found that when environmental consequences are clearly linked to people’s own buying choices, many are willing to switch products—especially when credible alternatives exist.
But guilt is private. It nudges personal behavior. It does not automatically reshape systems. The shift happens when private discomfort becomes public voice.
Consumers are often also the first to make hidden environmental harms visible. They post evidence on social media. They question corporate claims. They compare sustainability promises with independent reporting. They organize petitions, boycotts and review campaigns. By shining a spotlight on the truth, the scrutiny shifts from shoppers to brands.
That shift matters because modern brands depend on trust. Reputation is an asset. When sustainability claims are publicly challenged, credibility is at risk. Research in organisational behaviourshows that firms respond quickly to threats to legitimacy. Reputational damage affects customer loyalty, investor confidence and regulatory attention.
[…]
When the gap between what companies say and what they do becomes visible, maintaining that gap becomes harder.
Our research explores how that visibility can be strengthened. The findings were clear. When environmental and social consequences are personalized and traceable, sustainability feels less distant. People see both their own role and the role of particular firms. That dual awareness encourages two responses: behavioral change driven by guilt and corporate accountability driven by shame.
Shame works because it is social. Brands care about how they are seen. When the negative environmental and social effects of supply chains can be publicly connected to named products, corporate narratives become contestable in real time.
A broken motor in an automated machine can bring production on a busy factory floor to a halt. If engineers can’t find a replacement part, they may have to order one from a distributor hundreds of miles away, leading to costly production delays.
It would be easier, faster, and cheaper to make a new motor onsite, but fabricating electric machines typically requires specialized equipment and complicated processes, which restricts production to a few manufacturing centers.
In an effort to democratize the manufacturing of complex devices, MIT researchers have developed a multimaterial 3D-printing platform that could be used to fully print electric machines in a single step.
They designed their system to process multiple functional materials, including electrically conductive materials and magnetic materials, using four extrusion tools that can handle varied forms of printable material. The printer switches between extruders, which deposit material by squeezing it through a nozzle as it fabricates a device one layer at a time.
The researchers used this system to produce a fully 3D-printed electric linear motor in a matter of hours using five materials. They only needed to perform one post-processing step for the motor to be fully functional.
The assembled device performed as well or better than similar motors that require more complex fabrication methods or additional post-processing steps.
In the long run, this 3D printing platform could be used to rapidly fabricate customizable electronic components for robots, vehicles, or medical equipment with much less waste.
