To cover American tech policy over the past few years has been to watch a series of individually dangerous waves of regulation and political operations roll toward an inevitable convergence. To cover American tech policy over the past few months is to watch those waves collide invisibly beneath the surface and head squarely in the direction of the nearest population center, with no storm warning in sight.
At the end of June, the Supreme Court torched a two-decades-old precedent protecting the right to online anonymity. It declared that requiring age verification for adult websites posed a negligible speech burden and was permissible under the First Amendment, allowing such laws to proceed in nearly half of US states, including America’s second-most-populous state, Texas. While it’s easy to get behind the idea of keeping 13-year-olds off Pornhub in theory, the decision brushed off real concerns about throwing up barriers to legal speech.
In mid-August, the court went even further: it at least temporarily allowed Mississippi to extend this age verification to social media, which is to say, the vast majority of spaces where people communicate with each other in 2025. Numerous other states have similar designs on the internet. South Dakota and Wyoming have started enforcing their own laws that demand services with any sexual content verify ages, covering not only sites like Pornhub but Bluesky and other all-purpose web platforms that don’t outright ban porn. New York just proposed rules that could see age-verification rules implemented on social media within the next couple of years. Texas and Utah passed rules that will soon require app stores to verify users’ ages; a similar bill awaits California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature.
This is even more problematic. Civil liberties advocates have warned for years that there’s essentially no way to verify ages without eroding privacy or chilling speech to some extent. The response from politicians has largely been that the downsides are minimal and justified to keep children safe. Early chaotic results of the UK’s Online Safety Act — which requires age-gating for a variety of content — suggest otherwise.
And over the past week, things have gotten yet markedly worse. The US government — including immigration authorities, the military, and the Department of Justice — has barreled into the business of sniffing out people who made social media posts it finds objectionable and threatening them with the force of the law. They’re riling up a snitch state that will hunt down targets for them to prosecute or strip visas from, a process that could be made infinitely easier by inevitable Tea-style data leaks from social media sites.
While all this is happening, Donald Trump’s administration is directly coordinating the transfer of one of the biggest social media platforms to administration-friendly tech moguls. A monthslong negotiation process has produced a tentative deal to spin off TikTok from its Chinese parent company; the rumored buyers include Larry Ellison-owned Oracle and Andreessen Horowitz, and the whole process has given Trump tremendous leverage over the service. That adds TikTok to the stable of businesses owned by heavily conservative-aligned figures, following X, owned by Elon Musk — who is currently doing his part to ferret out online undesirables too.
These businesses are highly unlikely to resist demands for information on users, even if verification laws are written with privacy protections built in — someone like Musk might well dox users without being asked. They’re also, incidentally, the ones with the most resources to comply with age verification laws or escape legal penalties for flouting them, while smaller services like Bluesky and Mastodon struggle. And increasingly, big platforms are the ones least sympathetic to vulnerable minority groups targeted by Trump.
To sum up, in several parts of the country, the government would like websites to collect an unprecedented amount of identifying information about their users. In the whole country, the government would like to track down and prosecute those users if they are rude, while holding direct leverage over big online platforms and placing disproportionate burdens on smaller independent ones. It doesn’t take a mastermind to see the risks.
But it apparently takes more savvy than many politicians can muster. Democrats are the direct target of this latest political crackdown, but the party has been a driving force behind killing the right to be let alone online — New York and California are hardly red states. Former President Joe Biden signed the TikTok divest-or-ban law after a ginned-up bipartisan moral panic that has now been conveniently forgotten. (Not all Democrats, in fairness: Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), for instance, has been one of Congress’ most stalwart defenders of privacy and speech.)
I’ve seen the argument that social media services are already a privacy nightmare, so what does one more erosion matter? But there’s a huge difference between the default experience discouraging anonymity and users being entirely unable to preserve it. In areas without age verification, it’s still possible to sign up for several social media services with email addresses from privacy-protecting providers like Proton Mail using Tor or anonymizing VPNs, creating a reasonable if not perfect amount of friction against easy identification and insulating yourself from leaks. (A new proposed law in Michigan would ban VPNs too, by the way.) The average person may not find this worth the inconvenience, but trans people and non-citizens — or anyone who wants to criticize powerful conservatives, at this point — could find it increasingly necessary if they want to speak online.
I’m not even getting into the way that tech companies are using augmented reality and AI to push for a totalizing physical and psychological surveillance state, aided by Congress’ total inability to pass privacy protections that might rein them in.
If we ever pull ourselves out of this mess, privacy protections are one of the countless policy fixes Americans should demand. Add in stricter scrutiny and punishments for companies that fail to protect users’ data, and close the loopholes that have given Trump’s administration (like those of Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush in decades prior) carte blanche to trample civil liberties in the name of national security.
Anonymity is not, contrary to much public discourse, a newfangled and short-lived phenomenon created by the “Wild West” of the internet. As argued in Jeff Kosseff’s book The United States of Anonymous, anonymous pamphleteering was foundational to the formation of the country — used by advocates of American liberty to freely “persuade the masses and criticize the powerful” and later protected by US law. Despite its tradeoffs, it’s a right worth fiercely defending, now more than ever.
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