May 30, 2021
The Age-Verification Trade-Off: What Democracies Are Giving Up for Online Safety
A civil liberties lawyer put it to me plainly: the fastest-growing threat to anonymous speech right now is not a censorship law. It is a child safety law that everybody, including her, mostly wants to see succeed. 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 adults in the process
