Over the past two weeks, the UK has reportedly blocked internet users’ access to everything from SpongeBob SquarePants gifs to Spotify playlists. Information about Joe Biden’s police funding plan has been restricted, along with a post about an up-and-coming political party. Gamers say they have been unable to tweak colours in games such as Minecraft. And it’s all because of a new age verification law.
Since the child safety provisions contained within the Online Safety Act came into effect on 25 July, web service providers have been forced to institute “highly effective” age verification measures to prevent children from accessing “harmful” or “adult” content. The penalty for failing to adequately comply with the act includes hefty fines and potential criminal action.
But while the law and others like it claim to be narrowly focused on pornographic content and material that promotes suicide, self-harm, eating disorders or abusive and hateful behaviour, the subjective nature of the restrictions has led to mass censorship, with the de facto removal of vast swaths of content from the web. Tech companies find it easier and cheaper to simply remove mass amounts of information than have something slip through and be deemed non-compliant.
The Online Safety Act is just the latest in a troubling global trend towards a more censored internet, within which governments and data harvesters have obliterated privacy and everything you do online is logged, tracked and monitored. Australia and Ireland have passed similar age verification measures. Denmark, Greece, Spain, France and Italy have started testing a common age‑verification app, paving the way for potential mandatory EU-wide use.
In the US, 11 states are seeking to pass age verification laws. In 2022, Louisiana passed a law requiring age verification on all websites on which at least a third of the content is of an adult nature. Since then, states including Ohio, Arizona, Wyoming, Pennsylvania and New Jersey , among others, have pursued similar legislation, mandating age verification to access “harmful” or “adult” material. On a federal level, the Kids Online Safety Act, which would prevent all underage users from accessing certain content, was revived last year in Congress and could move forward any day.
While preventing kids from allegedly harmful content online sounds like a great idea, these laws set the stage for authoritarian censorship, violate young people’s core civil liberties, forcibly expose users to significant privacy risks and utterly fail at their goal of “protecting kids”.
Many people mistakenly believe that only children will have to verify their identities online under such laws, but that is false. In order to determine who is a child, all users, no matter who they are, will be forced to turn over vast troves of valuable biometric data and for ever link their offline identity to their online behaviour. The data collected could then be weaponised by the government or bad actors, and put internet users at significantly higher risk of crimes such as identity theft and fraud.
Age verification is a massive gift to big tech. Persona, the leading third-party identity verification platform, recently announced a $2bn valuation after its latest funding round co-led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Additionally, only the largest and most powerful tech platforms have the resources to enact age verification at scale, meaning smaller indie social networks and non-profit driven platforms for services such as patient support groups or online communities for addicts and disabled people could be forced to shut down. The loss of these communities, which are a lifeline for people struggling, will be devastating. “Alcoholics Anonymous has gone,” one Reddit user posted after the UK’s age verification laws went into effect. “As a non tech savvy recovering alcoholic this is a bummer as I used to get some hope and support from the subs.”
Age verification laws are also preventing people in the UK from accessing news and journalistic content. Immediately after the child safety rules came into effect, platforms began classifying breaking news footage, war coverage, investigative journalism and political protest material as harmful content. Even some content on Wikipedia could soon be blocked. The platform is challenging the law due to concerns its anonymous volunteers and readers could have their privacy violated.
This mass gating of information prevents young people from accessing independent reporting and community analysis of breaking news. It removes opportunities for critical thinking and civic understanding, and isolates young people from global perspectives and connections. It ensures we have a less informed public and that young people are fed a steady diet of sanitised, government‑approved narratives until the age of 18.
None of this keeps kids safe or away from harmful material. Use of VPNs has rocketed, raising even more privacy risks and shuffling kids into even more extreme, less regulated corners of the internet.
Despite the disastrous British rollout, US lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle are giddily seeking to replicate the act. Democrats and Republicans are completely aligned on restricting free speech and anonymous use of the internet. Last year, at a summit for content creators at the White House attended by Biden, the then president, his adviser Neera Tanden spoke about the administration’s goal of removing all anonymity from the web. She asked content creators to raise their hands if they wanted to “unmask every troll”.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, has partnered with Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican, to co-sponsor the Kids Online Safety Act, which Blackburn said was necessary to protect kids from “the transgender” in society. The Heritage Foundation, the hard-right thinktank that authored Project 2025, has said openly that the Republican party will use the Kids Online Safety Act to get LGBTQ+ content removed from the web, and suggested it could be influenced to promote “pro-life values” under the guise of child safety.
The public cannot afford to be complacent. We need to do everything in our power to fight for free speech, privacy and open access to information while we still can. Once the infrastructure for online censorship is built, it will be impossible to dismantle it. The era of a free, open and diverse internet that fosters creativity and connection and incubates social justice movements will be over.
We must refuse to allow the government and the media to normalise mass censorship in response to a manufactured moral panic about technology and social media. We need to root out opportunists making the false and hyperbolic claims about the internet that these laws are predicated on. And we need to use our voices to fight back, loudly, against these “child online safety bills” that erode our civil liberties and will destroy the internet as we know it. These laws are not about protecting kids. They are about censorship, control and authoritarianism.
-
Taylor Lorenz is a technology journalist who writes the newsletter User Mag and is the author of the bestselling book Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet.