South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT announced on 23 August 2024 that it will expand mandatory age-verification requirements to a wider range of online gaming and social media services, building on the country's existing real-name registration system. Under the updated regulations, platforms must verify the age of all users through government-issued identity credentials, and services deemed high-risk for minors will be required to implement additional parental-consent mechanisms for users under the age of 14. Officials cited rising rates of online exploitation and contact-based abuse as the rationale, while privacy advocates have raised concerns about centralised identity databases and the risk of excluding marginalised young people who lack formal documentation.
Mandatory identity checks determine eligibility to participate but do not govern the interactions that follow. Once a verified user enters a platform, real-time behavioural monitoring is required to intercept grooming, sextortion and the distribution of child sexual abuse material within the message layer. Guardii monitors direct messages across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and Roblox, deploying anti-grooming, anti-sextortion and CSAM detection modules that identify threat patterns as they emerge, block hostile contact before it reaches a child, and surface acute risk to parents or safeguarding teams. By targeting the conduct rather than the credential, pattern-based detection addresses the harm that motivates age verification without imposing a universal identity disclosure obligation on every user, adult or child, and without displacing risk to less transparent channels.
