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The Internet Is Bad and Getting Worse—Especially for Queer Kids

A broad new law will end up erasing vital spaces and resources

The best thing about the internet is finding a world richer than your own. If your hometown is too boring, isolated, or conservative, then community might be better found online, especially if you happen to be queer.

Bill S-209, designed to restrict who can view porn online, is making its way through Parliament

Critics point out it puts few limits on the government’s ability to declare sites inappropriate

Censorship laws often restrict queer content, including vital resources and social spaces

That’s how it was for me as a teen, furtively consuming Tumblr, YouTube, and blogs equal parts sex ed and erotica from my bedroom. Not everything that I came across was wholesome, but the internet, unlike my reality, offered queer culture on tap. It’s a digital path that has been followed by countless others over the past decades, given the explosion of LGBTQ identities against the simultaneous decline of IRL queer social spaces.

Unfortunately for today’s young queers, the internet is bad now. Increasingly, it’s perceived as a sinister place for teenagers, associated more with radicalization and TikTok brainrot than any meaningful self-discovery. One of the biggest identified dangers is porn and its ability to corrupt youth—a concern so politically urgent it has been inspiring legislation with the potential to change the internet completely and censor queer resources en masse.

Age-verification laws, which require internet users to provide proof of age in order to see sites with pornographic or inappropriate content, are popping up all over the world. Canada’s own version, Bill S-209, or the Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act, is currently making its way through Parliament. If it passes, then Canada will join dozens of US states and European countries in requiring websites hosting government-defined obscenity to ask users to show legal ID for access or to upload a selfie so that artificial intelligence can guess at your age. Sites that don’t comply will be fined, which, in Canada, may run up to $500,000.

These laws make an effort to distinguish between what is acceptable for the general public to see and what isn’t, and queerness all too frequently is placed on the prohibited end of that scale. To restrict pornography, you have to define it, and yet lawmakers notoriously approach porn on a “you know it when you see it” basis that allows plenty of room to shove anything deemed societally distasteful under that banner. In proposing a parental lock on the entire internet, age-verification laws reignite an age-old obscenity debate that has historically left queer people on the outs—just as homophobia once again sweeps politics.

We know that young people are at risk of falling into scary digital wormholes of far-right movements and malevolent influencers and generally extreme content, including pornography. The bluntness of the age-verification solution, however, is like making a library an eighteen-plus venue because there is erotica inside.

Though age-verification laws are marketed as focusing on the worst of the violence and pornography online, far larger swathes of content are likely to be flagged as inappropriate, especially given that the laws will apply to social media and search engines as a whole. In the United........

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