Australia Australia intended to implement requirements for age verification under the
Online Safety Act 2021. In August 2023,
Minister for Communications Michelle Rowland released a report by eSafety that recommended against such a scheme, finding that "at present, each type of age verification or age assurance technology comes with its own privacy, security, effectiveness or implementation issue", and suggesting that an industry code be adopted to promote the use of
content filtering software to parents. In May 2024, the federal government allocated A$6.5 million from the
2024 Australian federal budget to a pilot age verification scheme meant to protect children from accessing pornography and other harmful digital content in response to a sharp rise in domestic violence nationally. On 10 September 2024,
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Minister for Communications Michelle Rowland confirmed that the federal government would introduce legislation to enforce a minimum age for access to social media and other relevant digital platforms. The federal government would also work with states and territorial governments to develop a uniform framework. Albanese said that the legislation was intended to safeguard the safety and mental and physical health of young people while Rowland said that the proposed legislation would hold
big tech to account for harmful online environments and social media addiction among children. The minimum age is likely to be set between 14 and 16 years of age. The federal government's announcement followed
South Australia's plan to restrict social media access to people aged 14 and above, and the
Coalition's promise to restrict social media access to people aged 16 if it won the
2025 Australian federal election. The federal government's moves to impose a social media age limit was supported by
New South Wales Premier Chris Minns,
South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas,
Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan and
Queensland Premier Steven Miles. The Coalition's communications spokesman
David Coleman said social media age verification should be limited to those aged 16 and above. In response, the
Australian Association of Psychologists director Carly Dober described the Government's proposed social media age limit as a "bandaid response to a very complicated and deeply entrenched issue". She also said that the ban ignored the benefits that online spaces could offer to young people, especially those from marginalised communities. On 7 November, Prime Minister Albanese confirmed that the government would introduce legislation in November to ban young people under the age of 16 from using social media. The proposed legislation would not include exemptions for young people who already have social media accounts or those with parental consent. The children's advocacy group Australian Child Rights Taskforce criticised the proposed law as a "blunt instrument" and urged the Albanese government to instead impose safety standards on social media platforms. By contrast, the 36Months initiative has supported the social media age limit on the grounds that excessive social media usage was "rewiring young brains" and causing an "epidemic of mental illness". On 21 November, the Albanese government introduced the
Online Safety Amendment, legislation that would ban young people under the age of 16 from accessing social media and proposed fines of up to A$49.5 million (US$32 million) on social media platforms for systemic breaches. The proposed law would affect
Facebook,
Instagram,
TikTok,
X and
Snapchat. However, Albanese confirmed that children would still have access to messaging, online gaming, and health and education-related services including the youth mental health platform
Headspace,
Google Classroom and
YouTube. The opposition
Liberals intend to support the legislation while the
Australian Greens have sought more details on the proposed law.
Canada The proposed legislation
Bill S-210—which passed the
Senate in 2023 and began committee review in the
House of Commons in late-May 2024, would prohibit organizations from making "sexually explicit" material available on the internet for commercial purposes to users under the age of 18, unless an age verification system is implemented, or the content has a legitimate artistic, educational, or scientific purpose. The bill has been criticized for privacy implications, not specifically specifying a required form of age verification, and freedom of expression concerns surrounding its scope—which can include
social networking and online video services, and allow for blocking of entire websites to users in Canada if they do not comply with orders issued under the bill—even if the rest of the content is otherwise non-pornographic.
Germany In Germany age verification systems are mandated by the "Jugendmedienschutz-Staatsvertrag" which was introduced in September 2002. The institution in charge
Commission for the Protection of Minors in the Media (KJM) considers only systems equivalent to face-to-face verification as sufficient for age verification.
United Kingdom With the passing of the
Digital Economy Act 2017, the
United Kingdom passed a law containing a legal mandate on the provision of age verification. Under the act, websites that publish pornography on a commercial basis would have been required to implement a "robust" age verification system. The
British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) was charged with enforcing this legislation. After a series of setbacks and public backlash, the planned scheme was eventually abandoned in 2019. While the UK government abandoned this legislation, age verification continues to be monitored and enforced by regulatory bodies including Ofcom and the ICO. Other standards are emerging for age assurance systems, such as PAS1296:2018. The ISO standard for age assurance systems (PWI 7732) is also being developed by the Age Check Certificate Scheme, the Age Verification Providers’ Association, and other Conformity Assessment Bodies. In 2023, Parliament passed the
Online Safety Act 2023; as part of the mandatory duty of care to protect children, all service providers must use age verification or estimation to prevent children from accessing "primary priority content that is harmful to children", which includes pornographic images. The provisions took effect on 25 July 2025, and apply to all services that host such content, including social networks.
United States Some websites of alcoholic beverage companies attempt to verify the age of visitors so that they can confirm they are at least the American legal drinking age of 21. In 2000, the
Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) took effect at the federal level, resulting in some websites adding age verification for visitors under the age of 13, and some websites disallowing accounts for users under the age of 13. Companies such as
YouTube and
ByteDance have received large fines from the
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for not complying with COPPA. In 2022, Louisiana became the first state to require age verification for accessing adult websites. Usage of LA Wallet, the state's digital ID and mobile drivers license app, subsequently spiked, as LA Wallet allows for remote identification via MindGeek, the owner of many major porn sites. In 2023,
several states, including Arkansas and Utah, passed
social media addiction bills requiring users of
social media platforms to be over the age of 18 or have parental consent, with these bills prescribing that age verification be used to enforce this requirement. A few days before the law passed, in order to protest the bill,
Pornhub blocked their website from being viewed in Utah. In contrast, on August 31, 2023, US District Judge
David Ezra invalidated a Texas law passed in June mandating age verification and health warnings before accessing pornographic websites following a lawsuit from the
Free Speech Coalition, and barred the state attorney general's office from enforcing the law on the grounds that it violates the right to free speech and is overly broad and vague. The
Texas Attorney General's office stated they would appeal the ruling. The
5th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the injunction pending a full hearing. The case eventually progressed to the Supreme Court, who
ruled 6–3 in favor of the age verification law, holding that it "only incidentally burdens the protected speech of adults". A new variant of these laws began to surface in late-2025, which requires all operating system vendors to include functionality for securely storing a user's date of birth in their account, and include an age attestation
API producing a "digital signal" communicating the user's age or age range to applications which request it. They also require all application vendors to request the age signal whenever software is downloaded or launched on the device. Unlike other bills, these bills do not actually require that the age be verified, nor does it require application stores to restrict access to content based on the user's age. However, these bills stipulate that age signals received by applications also constitute
actual knowledge of the user's age, which may make their vendors liable under other state and federal laws. The first of these bills, the
Digital Age Assurance Act, was signed into law by California in October 2025. == Trade association ==