So-called age verification for social media is spreading across the world, framed as an effort to create a safer internet for children. In reality, age verification lays the foundation for a fully government controlled internet. Countries around the world are moving to introduce online age verification. Part of this involves age verification for harmful content (most often pornography, sometimes video games), but above all it focuses on banning social media for children. The big tech social media companies are bad. Their business model is bad; it is based on mass surveillance and manipulation, and they cooperate with governments in mapping entire populations. But age verification is fundamentally the wrong approach to preventing children from using big tech social media platforms. Introducing age verification is based on the state being able to force social media companies to verify their users’ identities. But the big tech social media platforms already know which of their users are children.…