May 30, 2021
The Age-Verification Trade-Off: What Democracies Are Giving Up for Online Safety
The fastest-growing threat to anonymous speech this year isn’t a censorship law. It’s a child safety law that almost everyone, free speech advocates included, wants to see succeed, which is exactly what makes its side effects so hard to argue against. That tension is the actual story of free expression policy in 2026. A wave of age-verification requirements has moved from proposal to enforcement across a range of jurisdictions, aimed at a genuinely serious problem: minors accessing harmful content and predatory platforms with no meaningful friction in the way. The friction point worth examining is what these laws require of
