Congress's Crusade to Age Gate the Internet: 2025 in Review

In the name of 'protecting kids online,' Congress pushed forward legislation this year that could have severely undermined our privacy and stifled free speech. These bills would have mandated invasive age-verification checks for everyone online—adults and kids alike—handing unprecedented control to tech companies and government authorities.

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle introduced bill after bill, each one somehow more problematic than the last, and each one a gateway for massive surveillance, internet censorship, and government overreach. In all, Congress considered nearly twenty federal proposals.

For us, this meant a year of playing legislative whack-a-mole, fighting off one bad bill after another. But more importantly, it meant building sustained opposition, strengthening coalitions, and empowering our supporters—that's you!—with the tools you need to understand what's at stake and take action.

Luckily, thanks to this strong opposition, these federal efforts all stalled… for now.

So, before we hang our hats and prepare for the new year, let’s review some of our major wins against federal age-verification legislation in 2025.

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)

Of the dozens of federal proposals relating to kids online, the Kids Online Safety Act remains the biggest threat. We, along with a coalition of civil liberties groups, LGBTQ+ advocates, youth organizations, human rights advocates, and privacy experts, have been sounding the alarm on KOSA for years now.

First introduced in 2022, KOSA would allow the Federal Trade Commission to sue apps and websites that don’t take measures to restrict young people’s access to certain content. There have been numerous versions introduced, though all of them share a common core: KOSA is an unconstitutional censorship bill that threatens the speech and privacy rights of all internet users. It would impose a requirement that platforms “exercise reasonable care” to prevent and mitigate a sweeping list of harms to minors, including depression, anxiety, eating disorders, substance use, bullying, and “compulsive usage.” Those prohibitions are so broad that they will sweep up online speech about the topics, including efforts to provide resources to adults and minors experiencing them. The bill claims prohibit censorship based on “the viewpoint of users,” but that’s simply a smokescreen. Its core function is to let the federal government sue platforms, big or small, that don’t block or restrict content that someone later claims contributed to one of these harms. 

In addition to stifling online speech, KOSA would strongly incentivize age-verification systems—forcing all users, adults and minors, to prove who they are before they can speak or read online. Because KOSA requires online services to separate and censor aspects of their services accessed by children, services are highly likely to demand to know every user’s age to avoid showing minors any of the content KOSA deems harmful. There are a variety of age determination options, but all have serious privacy, accuracy, or security problems. Even worse, age-verification schemes lead everyone to provide even more personal data to the very online services that have invaded our privacy before. And all age verification systems, at their core, burden the rights of adults to read, get information, and speak and browse online anonymously.

Despite what lawmakers claim, KOSA won’t bother big tech—in fact, they endorse it! The bill is written so that big tech companies, like Apple and X, will be able to handle the regulatory burden that KOSA will demand, while smaller platforms will struggle to comply. Under KOSA, a small platform hosting mental health discussion boards will be just as vulnerable as Meta or TikTok—but much less able to defe