Who benefits from age verification on social media?
When child abusers want to protect children from TikTok, it’s probably about something else
by Norbert Häring*
(6 March 2026) A ban on social media for children and young people is being pushed worldwide, supposedly to protect them. It is being driven by a global “elite” that has abused and tormented young people and children for decades and continues to protect the perpetrators to this day. In reality, they want to put an end to unmonitored use of the internet.
(Picture ma)
It started with social media platforms, porn and gambling sites having to introduce age checks to – allegedly – protect children from content that is harmful to them. This obligation is particularly comprehensive in the UK’s Online Safety Act, where it is enforced with particular vigour. Because the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which allow users to surf the internet anonymously, skyrocketed after their introduction, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has now presented his plan1 to require operators of such networks to introduce age checks. This would eliminate the most important way for journalists, activists and ordinary people to surf the internet without their activity being monitored and stored.
Keir Starmer is the one whose office is currently in serious jeopardy because he appointed a buddy of Jeffrey Epstein, who supplied the global elite with young girls to rape, as ambassador to the United States. He is the prime minister of a country whose elite long covered up the fact that a member of the royal family habitually abused underage girls supplied to him by Epstein. So, it’s a bit surprising that Starmer and the British political elite, of all people, have developed such a strong protective instinct for children.
To avoid misunderstandings: it is long overdue that something be done to protect children and young people from harmful and dangerous content, online addiction, online mental stress and manipulation. This should have been addressed at least a decade ago. Some of this also applies to adults. The question is how to do it and with what intention.
possible, not to keep children away from social media. (Picture
KEYSTONE/WESTEND61/Gary Waters)
Effective measures
It doesn’t take much imagination to come up with effective measures that could have been taken long ago: Enforcement of the data protection law. Prohibition of algorithmic recommendation systems for social media to prevent deliberately created online addiction, opinion manipulation and artificially reinforced radicalisation. Only filters controlled by users (or their parents) would be permitted. Development of a child protection app by digital corporations or governments that allows parents to effectively protect their children from pornography and online addiction. Smartphone bans in schools.
None of these measures would result in an expansion of the control that corporations and governments have over users and citizens. Enforcing the data protection law would actually have the opposite effect. It would not disproportionately interfere with the right of self-determination of children and young people.
Digital Services Act (DSA) in the service of the state
Almost none of this has been done or even discussed. Instead, the Digital Services Act was passed in Europe. Instead of eliminating the platforms’ ability to manipulate, it puts them at the service of the state, poorly disguised by an army of state-funded fact checkers, whistleblowers and “scientists” whose guidelines the platforms must follow.
Contrary to all reason, it is pretended that age checks are the panacea. In practice, these are almost always linked to identity verification and expanded surveillance capabilities over the entire citizenry.
Surveillance capabilities over the entire citizenry
When age verification is done using facial photos analysed by AI, as required by the United Kingdom, among others, it even goes hand in hand with the creation of a comprehensive facial database of virtually everyone active on the internet. This opens enormous possibilities for including analogue public spaces in the total surveillance of citizens through cameras with facial recognition.
The global technocratic elite has been working on realising this for at least a decade. It is obvious that child protection from TikTok and Pornhub is just a pretext for finally achieving the goal of a biometric digital identity for (almost) all citizens of the world.
One of the most avid proponents of this agenda is Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the kind of child-lover that parents want to protect their daughters from. His wife separated from him because he was too often a guest at Epstein’s “parties” and on his plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express”.
A biometric digital identity for all people
In 2016, the Rockefeller Foundation, Microsoft, cloud operator Accenture and the Bill Gates-controlled vaccine alliance Gavi founded2 the organisation ID2020,3 in New York, which aims to ensure that by 2030, all people will have a biometric digital identity – just to help them identify themselves, of course.
The organisation held its first annual ID2020 summit4 at the UN headquarters in May 2016. Since then, those who cannot defend themselves have been the first to be given biometric identities: residents of refugee camps and vaccine recipients in poor countries. The hardware and software were tested and further developed on them.
Now the technology is mature and has reached us. The EU has decided on a “voluntary” digital identity wallet, which will be rolled out soon. To enforce its widespread use, there is hardly anything better than general age checks on the internet. This is because the app can probably be used to transmit, in a relatively data-efficient and reliable manner, that a person has exceeded the respective age limit.
If you ask yourself whether globally dominant technology companies, whose business model is based on mass data misuse, want to implement a technology that is very well suited for research worldwide, either to do something good for humanity or to be able to research people even more comprehensively and accurately, what is the obvious answer? What the corporations themselves say about their intentions is not necessarily a good indicator of their true intentions.
Don’t be misled
It is difficult to determine whether the politicians who want to impose age controls on platforms and VPNs are doing so for the sake of the tech multinationals or whether they have simply fallen for their framing. There are probably many gradations and intermediate types. It is important that the public does not allow itself to be misled by the pre-selected range of problems and solutions. We should always ask: Who benefits from this? Is the proposed measure one that really addresses the most pressing problems? Are there others that cause less damage to civil liberties and can solve these problems just as well or better?
Source: https://norberthaering.de/news/alterskontrollen/, 18 February 2026
(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)
1 https://keirstarmer.substack.com/p/giving-children-the-space-to-grow