Newgrounds to Implement Age Verification

The UK Online Safety Act deadline has arrived, requiring websites to implement “highly effective age assurance” for people looking to access material intended for adults.

A number of large sites have rolled out changes and people aren’t pleased. VPN use in the UK is skyrocketing, roughly half a million people have signed a petition to repeal the law and the Reform UK party is running on repealing it.

Newgrounds has been in correspondence with Ofcom (UK regulator) for the past year and has been working towards this deadline, despite missing it. We had already taken important steps like bringing age ratings to forum threads, blog posts and collabinator entries but when it comes to introducing additional layers of age verification, we decided it was time for some major internal overhauls, so that we aren’t just duct taping new messes to any already complicated system.

Regardless of age verification, these overhauls have been benefitting the site with better performance and will make NG easier to maintain into the future.

Regarding age verification, here is our current plan for UK users:

1. If your account is more than ten years old, we will assume you are currently over 18. This is in line with one of the methods of effective age assurance, which involves paying a third party to match your email address against some sort of database of scraped data, which determines if your email has been in use for a long time. We have our own long-term data, so we’ll use that instead.

2. If your account ever bought Supporter status with a credit card and we can confirm that with the payment processor, we will assume you are over 18 because you need to be 18 in the UK to have a credit card.

3. If your account ever bought Supporter status more than two years ago, we will assume you are over 18 because you need to be at least 16 to have a Paypal or debit card in the UK (assuming we are right about this - Update - apparently there are options for kids as young as six to get debit cards).

4. If none of the above applies, you will have the opportunity to pay a small one-time fee via credit card as confirmation of your age.

We are not planning to offer things like ID checks or facial recognition because these require us to pay a third party to confirm each person. Because Newgrounds runs at a loss and doesn’t monetize users very well, this is not an option for us. As Wired noted, Big Tech is the only winner of the Online Safety Act because smaller websites can’t afford to keep up with this sort of regulation.

European Union

The EU has now announced their guidelines to protect minors and will be requiring effective age assurance. 

Unlike the UK, the EU has announced plans to establish a Digital ID Wallet. Assuming this happens, it should mean EU users can verify their age on NG for free. 

That is good for users but to be frank, it would have been better for NG to just extend what we are already building for the UK. Instead, we will have to build a custom solution that interfaces with the Digital ID API. That’s assuming the Digital ID even happens; we may need to implement the UK solution in the meantime.

Side note, EU peeps might also want to check out the Stop Killing Games initiative.

America

There are now 24 states that have passed laws around age verification, requiring an ID check. Most of these laws have exemptions for social media and sites that aren’t entirely dedicated to porn but it’s likely we will need to implement verification in at least some states in the months ahead. If this happens, users will be charged a one-time verification fee and will need to verify their ID with a third party service. Your ID would not be retained by the third party, who only returns a True or False value for our records.

I am curious though, if you are in a US state and are experiencing ID checks on platforms like X, Bluesky or Reddit, let me know which state.

Country-wide, the Kids Online Safety Act has come back from the dead and there are concerns about how it will be implemented by the current administration.

KOSA does propose directing federal agencies to study device-level and OS-level age verification methods. I touched on this in my January Online Safety Update, where I referenced the Digital Age Assurance Act (DAAA). I’ll never understand why this wasn’t the starting point for any of these laws but I imagine Google, Apple and Microsoft might know why.

Because lawmakers ignored device-level verification, they have put the onus on millions of websites to do it instead. While you can generally trust a site like Newgrounds, things get murky when people start verifying on unknown sites. Even our kids will be accustomed to it, with apps like Roblox implementing face scans instead of requesting age data from the device. Imagine the sort of extortion that can happen when bad actors get personal identification from people who are looking at embarrassing topics. A whole new industry of scammers is probably being built around this.

Closing Thoughts

None of this has been fun but we’re trying to do what we need to do for NG to continue to exist.

One positive is that charging small verification fees will hopefully get Newgrounds closer to break-even, assuming we don’t run into trouble with payment processors. In the meantime, it would be greatly appreciated if more of you could become Supporters.

Other News

Random-storykeeper has announced the Art Inspired Music Winners!

Figburn has announced the Contract Rush Art Contest Winners! 

He also made a pretty site skin to celebrate the launch of Contract Rush on Steam.

Pjorg wrote a great postmortem for Babe Alert!

Little-Radiodemon (aka Little-Rena) is looking for BBS Award Helpers.

Marbardan82 was bitten by a bat and is offering emergency commissions due to lack of insurance. Hopefully he will still make it to the Short Short Fest here in PA.

Catch up on our Best of June if you missed those.