Want to check a Discord message, comment on a Reddit thread, or visit a porn site? Well, if you live in the U.K., all of those things are possible, as soon as you hand over some ID. The Online Safety Act, which went into effect there on July 25, requires any website that might have adult content to conduct age-verification checks. According to the U.K.’s Office of Communications, or Ofcom, users must provide proof of age in the form of photo IDs, credit cards, photos for facial recognition software, and other so-called age gates, or else be denied access. Though often heralded by parents as a way to keep kids from accessing sexually-explicit material, the law has raised significant concerns around rights to privacy and free speech, open access to information, and the dominance of big tech. And it’s not just a problem across the pond: The U.K.’s Online Safety Act is a blueprint for what could be happening in the U.S. soon, too.

While U.S. officials such as Vice President J.D Vance and House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan have derided the Online Safety Act as a path to censorship, at least 19 states already have laws on the books with similar requirements. States including Arizona, Iowa, Texas, Ohio, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming all require ID before a resident can access porn sites or other platforms that could contain sexually explicit material. And there are at least six more states that have introduced comparable bills. Civil rights advocates are raising the alarm.

“One of our longest and strongest norms about the internet is not to reveal your most sensitive, most private information to strangers,” Molly Buckley, an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells Rolling Stone. “And here we are with these bills trying to protect kids by asking them to share their face and ID, and possibly their parents’ faces and credit cards, to the biggest tech companies out there.” 

“There’s a ton of First Amendment issues here”

Businesses are unhappy, too. Many of the age-verification laws both being discussed and implemented in the U.S. are vague about what constitutes sexually explicit material, forcing a wide range of sites to either comply and hope for the best, or shut down operations entirely in a given state. And some sites are already trying to fight the Online Safety Act provisions in the courts. On Aug. 23, 4chan and KiwiFarms, message boards that pride themselves on their anonymity, filed a federal lawsuit against Ofcom, 404 Media reported, claiming the age-verification fines they’ve received do not comply with the Constitution — specifically, its provision on free speech. 

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“There’s a ton of First Amendment issues here that are well recognized,” says Shoshana Weissmann, digital director and fellow at policy think tank R Street Institute.  And if it’s all in the service of protecting children, Weissmann says, well, they have rights that need to be guarded, too. “Kids have First Amendment rights. They’re a little bit more limited than adult First Amendment rights, but generally, kids have the right to access free speech. And these laws prevent that.” 

Weissmann notes that many age-verification bills, which are justified as a way to keep minors from accessing content that is sexually explicit, have language that could easily restrict educational or medical content — like info on menstruation, safer sex, or gender affirming care.  She says this becomes especially concerning in the U.S. when age-verification laws meet right-leaning state governments. Many of the bills require websites and platforms to introduce age gates if a “substantial portion” of the content is “sexual material harmful to minors.” For most laws, this is defined as at least 33.3 percent of content, but there is little to no guidance on what exactly constitutes as harmful content to minors.The lack of nuance in the legislative language means anything from LGBTQ-centered information to diverse authors could be considered explicit. In Florida, the same argument has been used to justify statewide book bans. 

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In Texas, a Supreme Court decision in the Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton case upheld the state’s age-verification law, saying that it “only incidentally burdens the protected speech of adults.” Experts say the decision could inspire several other states to debut similar laws. Vera Eidelman, a staff attorney at the ACLU, tells Rolling Stone that this decision and the wave of similar age-verification laws harken back to historical responses to other content deemed threatening or dangerous for kids, like dime novels, radio dramas, comic books, TV, movies, video games, and explicit music. But even the best intentions — like protecting kids — can’t overrule Constitutionality. 

“In order for people to verify their ages using the kinds of processes currently required or recognized by state laws, people have to identify themselves. That means we can’t browse online anonymously; we risk creating a record of what we’re looking at—whether it’s researching particular political views or watching specific kinds of pornography; and we also open ourselves to security harms by potentially creating a record of financial or other identifying information that can get hacked,” Eidelman says. “The government imposing its views about what content is dangerous or harmful is exactly what the First Amendment exists to guard against.” 

‘These laws will further line the pockets of the biggest platforms’

So what would widespread age-verification laws look like in the U.S.? Think lots of privacy concerns and a whole lot of lawsuits. “There’s sort of a popular misconception that age-verification mandates are going to be the best way to rein in big tech and hold them accountable,” Buckley says. “Really, these laws will just further line the pockets of the biggest platforms.”

None of the proposed bills or passed laws have consistent messaging as to what companies are required to do with the personal data they collect from their users — and there’s no plan to check if companies are deleting data when they say they are. Weissmann points to the Tea app as an example of a breach that could easily happen with age-verification laws. The app was meant to be a tool to let women give feedback on dates, using I.D. verification to confirm their details and then allowing them to discuss and search potential dates to discover any criminality or sketchy behavior. But after the app soared in popularity earlier this year, hackers released over 72,000 users’ information — including I.D. cards and driver’s licenses. 

Adding age gates to websites can be a cost-prohibitive ordeal on its own, and that doesn’t begin to cover the potential fines companies can accrue for mistakes: Some states are enforcing rolling fines up to $10,000 for every time a minor slips through the protective measures to view explicit material, a cost that can rise with each additional infraction. For major tech outfits like Meta and X, that kind of money is a drop in the bucket. But the same can’t be said for independently operated sites or smaller social media companies. In Mississippi, where an age-verification law passed and was upheld after the Supreme Court declined to intervene, social media app Bluesky blocked access to the entire state, calling the legislation a financial risk to smaller apps. “The Supreme Court’s recent decision leaves us facing a hard reality: comply with Mississippi’s age assurance law — and make every Mississippi Bluesky user hand over sensitive personal information and undergo age checks to access the site — or risk massive fines,” the company said in an August statement. “The law would also require us to identify and track which users are children, unlike our approach in other regions. We think this law creates challenges that go beyond its child safety goals, and creates significant barriers that limit free speech and disproportionately harm smaller platforms and emerging technologies.”

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If more states add age-verification requirements, it could mean the loss of immediate access for hundreds of thousands of people. But for Buckley, one of the biggest concerns is what a loss of privacy means in the hands of a national government that’s been clear about its willingness to use data to target citizens —  its and what the internet looks like without its greatest offering: anonymity.  

“Imagine if  Texas had a database of everyone who looked at LGBTQ resources, or a form of everyone who looked up how to get an out-of-state abortion. Imagine if ICE had information about which users could not provide a form of ID,” she says. “The internet as we know it was built up to be a place where anybody thrives. Anonymity online is going to die if we allow age verification to become the future of the internet.”