Co-authored with Cynthia Conti-Cook and Pratika Katiyar and published in User Mag, this piece unpacks how age verification laws serve Big Tech profits and political theater while undermining rights for everyone online.
In August 2025, Cynthia Conti-Cook, Pratika Katiyar, and I wrote for User Mag about Who Age Verification Laws Really Benefit & How to Resist. Age verification mandates are safety theater: they don’t achieve their stated goals of protecting children, but they do expand censorship, surveillance, and data collection. We showed how these laws create new risks for both adults and young people, while handing moral panic legislators headlines and tech companies lucrative new markets in biometric and ID data.
Specifically, we examined how age verification laws: (1) concentrate power in big tech while forcing smaller platforms like Wikipedia into impossible compliance choices, (2) fuel censorship and chill expression, from blocking political forums to eroding online anonymity, (3) require invasive data collection that puts children and adults at heightened risk of profiling and breaches, and (4) discriminate disproportionately against marginalized youth and communities.
The piece also highlights strategies of resistance: users in the UK petitioning to repeal the Online Safety Act, satirical campaigns exposing its absurdity, and global reliance on VPNs to route around restrictions. In the U.S., litigation, organizing, and legislative advocacy are critical to stopping these systems before they become entrenched. We argue that resisting age verification and digital ID mandates is essential to protecting free expression, privacy, and the possibility of open, democratic digital spaces.