As of today, about half of all U.S. states have some form of age verification law around. Nine of those were passed in 2025 alone, covering everything from adult content sites to social media platforms to app stores.
Right now, California’s Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043) is all the rage right now, which targets not only websites and apps but also operating systems. Come January 1, 2027, every OS provider must collect a user’s age at account setup and provide that data to app developers via a real-time API.
Colorado is also working on a near-identical bill, which we covered earlier.
The EFF’s year-end review put it more bluntly: 2025 was “the year states chose surveillance over safety.” The foundation’s concern, which I concur with, is, where does this stop? Self-reported birthday today, government ID tomorrow? There appears to be no limit to these laws’ overreach.
Let’s be absolutely clear here: The explosion of people being comfortable coming out as some stripe of LGBTQ+ has everything to do with an open internet where youth were not restricted from finding out about information related to how they felt inside. Instead of being made to feel like strangers in their own skin, with a world telling them that people like them didn’t or shouldn’t exist, they instead found community and self-love through internet forums and information which allowed them to pursue full, healthy lives as adults.
This “protect the children” malarkey is one more way for the religious groups who oppose LGBTQ+ culture to “protect the children” by restricting access to this kind of information, reducing their ability to find it in their formative years, in the name of protecting them while actually stunting their personal growth.
It extends beyond sexuality as well, although that is the most obvious since many religions are deeply censorious regarding sex.
It also affects subjects like atheism, as the various religious cultures generally do not want people contemplating the idea that there isn’t a god, especially not while they’re young, they want you long indoctrinated into belief before you can explore different ideas.
Further, when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, everything I knew about drugs was literally old wives tales meant to scare kids away from drugs, and then the internet came around and suddenly there was a boom of actual, verifiable scientific information about drugs so if you wanted to experiment with drugs, you knew what you were getting into. I once had a conversation with a girlfriend who was a bit older than me about her experiences with LSD as a teen, and she admitted that at the time she really didn’t understand on any scientific level what was happening or what the nature of hallucination was, she just knew she was having fun and seeing crazy shit.
This is a backdoor to restricting access to important information that youth need to have access to for making healthy decisions for themselves sexually, religiously, and in terms of what substances they put in their bodies.
The birth of the internet gave us a beautiful period where people could grow up with access to accurate, verifiable, worthwhile information that helped them navigate and understand the world they were growing up in and who they were within that world.
This kind of legislation intends to snuff out that openness and accessibility which led to increased openness and acceptance of LGBTQ+, atheism, and safe drug use (including the understanding that some illegal drugs like marijuana and LSD are probably safer than legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco).
Well said, thank you.
It also affects subjects like atheism, as the various religious cultures generally do not want people contemplating the idea that there isn’t a god, especially not while they’re young, they want you long indoctrinated into belief before you can explore different ideas.
This reminds me of a Pakistani person I don’t personally know, but someone I know talks to them.
In their hometown, people recite verses from the Quran as part of their religious activities. There’s only one problem: the Quran they use is written in Arabic, but everyone there speaks Urdu. People don’t actually know what the passages say, just how to say them.
So this person asked them once what the passages say. Why do we read the passages in Arabic instead of Urdu? People here don’t know Arabic.
Anyway, he got belted shortly after that.
Wasn’t it Vatican II that finally allowed Catholic services in local languages instead of Latin? That really wasn’t long ago in the grand scheme.
Hell yea
In my youth I was taught that democracy meant that the government served the people.
What do any of these laws have to do with serving the people? Do they have anything to do with the will of the people?
The government serves the class that controls production and right now that class is really really concerned about what everyone does when they aren’t slaving away for them.
Billionaires are people.
They have the will to fuck everything that moves.
Billionaires certainly are people, but these laws don’t even serve billionaires in any meaningful sense, so that’s hardly an explanation without more elaboration.
I’m assuming you’re in the USA. If this a correct assumption, then you’re not in a democracy, strictly speaking; but a republic.
I am not. I am from a country whose constitution starts with the statement that it is a democratic republic.
this is the pipeline to fully
trustedrestricted computing.Linux couldn’t possibly comply properly with these new restrictions? Consumer grade prebuilts and laptops now only run “certified” operating systems, just like most mobile devices.
Surveillance and censorship are the ends, “age” (identity) verification is the means.
One should be able to skip it when creating an account and then it should default to Jan 1st 1970 on all open source OS’s to provide anonymity.
Wait, so instead of me telling every website I’m 90, I’ll tell my OS I’m 90 and the sites will query that, and this somehow works better? I’m not 90 btw, so all I’m doing is just changing who I’m lying to from zyn.com to Fedora? Great plan.
They know people will do this. It’s only stage 1. After this system is integrated, they will complain that people are misusing the feature and it needs to be upgraded to ID or biometrics. Boiling the frog.
The very day I hear that my os is asking people their age is the day I find a different one.
Age verification today. What other BS surveillance info tmr?
This is not going to work people will distribute linux distros on mesh networks like libremesh or meshtastic networks.
I don’t think Meshtastic would work for that with a 200char limit.
Usenet and torrents otoh, already can’t stop that. Not to mention lying is still a thing. I’m 136 years old so I should know.
Me and the other 99% of Steam users allegedly born on January 1st agree with you
I said that people would use mesh networks like meshtastic or libremesh. Not those exact mesh networks.
Fair enough
No, it mightn’t. Err, won’t.
Unfortunately, it falls right into the whole authoritarian taking control, surveillance, and manipulation push that became not only pretty open in activities but also pretty transparent through published findings and contextualized previously published materials. Seems likely that it’s all connected.
