Tech
Age Verification Is Reaching a Global Tipping Point. Is TikTok’s Strategy a Good Compromise?
Governments worldwide are moving to limit children’s access to social media as lawmakers question whether platforms are capable of enforcing their own minimum age requirements. TikTok recently became the latest tech giant to give in to regulatory pressure when it announced that it would implement a new age-detection system across Europe to keep kids under the age of 13 off the platform.
The system, which follows a yearlong pilot in the UK meant to proactively identify and remove underage users, relies on a combination of profile data, content analysis, and behavioral signals to evaluate whether an account possibly belongs to a minor. (TikTok requires users to be at least 13 to sign up). According to a statement from the company, its age-detection system does not automatically ban users. The system flags accounts it suspects are run by users under 13 and forwards those accounts to human moderators for review. TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.
The European rollout comes amid global conversation around the negative effects of social media on children, and as governments debate stricter age-based regulatory approaches. Australia last year became the first country to ban social media for children under 16, including the use of Instagram, YouTube, Snap, and TikTok. The European Parliament is also advocating for mandatory age limits, while Denmark and Malaysia are considering a ban for children under 16.
“We are in the middle of an experiment where American and Chinese tech giants have unlimited access to the attention of our children and young people for hours every single day almost entirely without oversight,” Christel Schaldemose, a Danish lawmaker and vice president of the European Parliament, said in November during parliamentary session that, according to Reuters, “called for an EU-wide ban on access for children under 16 to online platforms, video-sharing sites, and AI companions without parental consent and an outright ban for those younger than 13.”
Advocacy groups in Canada are similarly calling for the creation of a dedicated regulatory body to address online harms affecting young people following the flood of sexualized deepfakes on X by its AI chatbot Grok. ChatGPT recently announced that it was rolling out age prediction software to determine whether an account likely belongs to someone under 18 so the correct safeguards can be applied. In the US, 25 states have enacted some form of age-verification legislation.
“Legislatures in the US, just in the calendar year 2026, are likely to pass dozens or possibly hundreds of new laws requiring online age authentication,” says Eric Goldman, a law professor and associate dean at Santa Clara University who has argued that any “government-compelled censorship” should automatically be looked at as “constitutionally suspect.”
“Unless something dramatically changes,” Goldman says, “regulators around the globe are building a legal infrastructure that will require most websites and apps to be age-authenticated.”
As platforms act to properly address age verification, does TikTok’s strategy of monitoring users instead of banning kids outright seem like a good compromise? That depends on how you feel about digital surveillance.
“This is a fancy way of saying that TikTok will be surveilling its users’ activities and making inferences about them,” says Goldman. Because platform governance is often tied to political motives, and policy solutions sometimes expose children to more harm than help, Goldman refers to age verification mandates as “segregate-and-suppress laws.”
“Users probably aren’t thrilled about this extra surveillance, and any false positives—like incorrectly identifying an adult as a child—will have potentially major consequences for the wrongly identified user.” Goldman adds that even if this is the right approach for TikTok, most services don’t have enough data about their users to reliably guess peoples’ ages, so the approach is not really scalable across other platforms.
Tech
The Best LED Skincare Deals I’ve Seen This Mother’s Day Are at Megelin
The red-light therapy market shows no signs of slowing down. According to Fortune Business Insights, the industry is projected to grow from $1.21 billion in 2026 to $1.76 billion by 2034. Riding that wave is Hong Kong-based Megelin, which is currently running its largest Mother’s Day sale yet, offering major discounts on most of its LED devices and select electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) tools.
I’ve been testing the Duo Lux Laser & LED Light Therapy Mask for the past two weeks as part of a six-week trial. While I’m still forming my final verdict, I already have some early thoughts (more on that below). In the meantime, check out the standout deals because some of these discounts might be too good to pass up while they’re live.
This Laser & LED Light Therapy Mask Is $270 Off
The Megelin Duo Lux Laser & LED Light Therapy Mask combines 660-nanometer (nm) and 1,064-nm lasers with a 660-nm LED light for a more intensive treatment. The brand claims it can help smooth wrinkles, soothe inflammation, reduce pigmentation, and minimize redness. After two weeks of testing, I haven’t noticed any visible changes in my skin just yet, though to its credit, I also haven’t experienced any irritation or adverse reactions.
My biggest issue was the initial unboxing experience: The mask had a strong chemical odor that reminded me of formaldehyde. For a device that sits against your face and doesn’t have a mouth opening, that’s not exactly reassuring. Wiping it down and letting it air out significantly reduced the smell, but it definitely made for a less-than-ideal first impression.
That said, the mask itself is extremely comfortable. The soft, flexible silicone contours well to the face, and the dual-strap design keeps it secure without feeling restrictive. Treatments are quick and easy to customize thanks to four different modes, all controlled through an attached remote. And because it’s cordless, you’re free to move around while using it.
At full price, it’s a steep investment compared to its competitors. But with the current $270 discount, it becomes a much more compelling option, especially given the added laser therapy component, which isn’t as common at this price point. I’ll continue testing through the full six-week period before sharing my final verdict, but if you’re tempted to take advantage of the sale now, Megelin does offer a 60-day money-back guarantee and a one-year warranty.
Tech
‘Orbs,’ ‘Saucers,’ and ‘Flashes’ on the Moon: Pentagon Drops New UFO Files
Trump first teased the release in February in a Truth Social post. The Pentagon coordinated the release in partnership with the White House, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the Energy Department, NASA, and the FBI. Many of the files in this new drop contain documents that are already publicly available. However, some versions of these known documents in the new files contain more pages, or fewer redactions, than previously released versions.
More than 60 percent of Americans believe that the government is concealing information about UAP, according to YouGov, while 40 percent think UAP are likely alien in origin, according to Gallup. Congress has held hearings into whether there’s been a decades-long program to recover “non-human” technologies, yet evidence remains elusive.
Courtesy of the US Department of Defense
“If it’s just more blobby photos or redacted documents that don’t have any details in them, it’s more of the same,” Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester who studies the search for alien life, says of the new files. “What we need are actual scientific results from the investigations that should have been done if the most extraordinary claims being made are true.”
The document drop follows a week of high-profile discussions of aliens, including Stephen Colbert’s interview with former President Barack Obama, released on Wednesday. Obama cast doubt on government cover-ups about aliens by joking that “some guy guarding the installation would have taken a selfie with the alien and sent it to his girlfriend.”
Courtesy of the US Department of Defense
Members of the Artemis II crew also second-guessed the idea of a vast government-wide conspiracy to hide the discovery of extraterrestrial life in a discussion with The Daily this week.
“Do you realize that if we found alien life out there, and we came back and reported on it, NASA would never have a budget issue for the rest of eternity?” said Reid Weisman, the commander of Artemis II. “So trust me.”
Victor Glover, the astronaut who piloted the mission, added: “Why would we hide that from you?”
Tech
Nick Bostrom Has a Plan for Humanity’s ‘Big Retirement’
Philosopher Nick Bostrom recently posted a paper, where he postulated that a small chance of AI annihilating all humans might be worth the risk, because advanced AI might relieve humanity of “its universal death sentence.” That upbeat gamble is quite a leap from his previous dark musings on AI, which made him a doomer godfather. His 2014 book Superintelligence was an early examination of AI’s existential risk. One memorable thought experiment: An AI tasked with making paper clips winds up destroying humanity because all those resource-needy people are an impediment to paper clip production. His more recent book, Deep Utopia, reflects a shift in his focus. Bostrom, who leads Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, dwells on the “solved world” that comes if we get AI right.
STEVEN LEVY: Deep Utopia is more optimistic than your previous book. What changed for you?
NICK BOSTROM: I call myself a fretful optimist. I am very excited about the potential for radically improving human life and unlocking possibilities for our civilization. That’s consistent with the real possibility of things going wrong.
You wrote a paper with a striking argument: Since we’re all going to die anyway, the worst that can happen with AI is that we die sooner. But if AI works out, it might extend our lives, maybe indefinitely.
That paper explicitly looks at only one aspect of this. In any given academic paper, you can’t address life, the universe, and the meaning of everything. So let’s just look at this little issue and try to nail that down.
That isn’t a little issue.
I guess I’ve been irked by some of the arguments made by doomers who say that if you build AI, you’re going to kill me and my children and how dare you. Like the recent book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Even more probable is that if nobody builds it, everyone dies! That’s been the experience for the last several 100,000 years.
But in the doomer scenario everybody dies and there’s no more people being born. Big difference.
I have obviously been very concerned with that. But in this paper, I’m looking at a different question, which is, what would be best for the currently existing human population like you and me and our families and the people in Bangladesh? It does seem like our life expectancy would go up if we develop AI, even if it is quite risky.
In Deep Utopia you speculate that AI could create incredible abundance, so much that humanity might have a huge problem with finding purpose. I live in the United States. We’re a very rich country, but our government, ostensibly with support of the people, has policies that deny services to the poor and distribute rewards to the rich. I think that even if AI was able to provide abundance for everyone, we would not supply it to everyone.
You might be right. Deep Utopia takes as its starting point the postulation that everything goes extremely well. If we do a reasonably good job on governance, everybody gets a share. There is quite a deep philosophical question of what a good human life would look like under these ideal circumstances.
The meaning of life is something you hear a lot about in Woody Allen movies and maybe in the philosophers community. I’m worried more about the wherewithal to support oneself and get a stake in this abundance.
The book is not only about meaning. That’s one out of a bunch of different values that it considers. This could be a wonderful emancipation from the drudgery that humans have been subjected to. If you have to give up, say, half of your waking hours as an adult just to make ends meet, doing some work you don’t enjoy and that you don’t believe in, that’s a sad condition. Society is so used to it that we’ve invented all kinds of rationalizations around it. It’s like a partial form of slavery.
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