Freedom House In the United States, a patchwork of state-level laws illustrates the tension between age-assurance laws and protections for freedom of expression. Nineteen of 50 states had passed a social media age-gating law as of June 2026, though implementation of most of them was paused in response to lawsuits. In most cases, district courts found that socialmedia-focused age-assurance laws would likely violate the First Amendment on the basis that they require differential treatment for different forms of online content (that is, the laws create a burden for websites featuring certain kinds of content, like social networking, and exempt others, like professional networking). In contrast, the Supreme Court ruled in the June 2025 Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton case that a Texas law mandating age verification for websites hosting “speech that is obscene to minors” did not violate the First Amendment. The court’s ruling in Paxton affirms the many state-level age-gating requirements for adult content. In March 2026, Utah passed a law that required adult website hosts to analyze traffic to determine whether Utah-based visitors had employed VPNs to evade the state’s law mandating age assurance for adult content. The technology used by commercial VPNs is deployed widely for privacy and security, and the Utah law poses serious risk that website hosts would be forced to treat encrypted internet traffic as suspect. Age-assurance laws also open a new potential vector for abuse, with identification requirements enabling bad actors and repressive governments to create a footprint of people’s online activities. Turkey’s parliament passed a bill in April 2026 that would restrict children under 15 from social media platforms, though it was not fully approved by the end of the coverage period. The bill would enforce age-gating for social media platforms solely through the e-Devlet portal, a government-run digital identity system, effectively tying all social media accounts to individuals’ real names. People in Turkey are routinely arrested and imprisoned over their online expression, particularly for criticism of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and the proposed e-Devlet age-assurance framework poses significant risks for Turkish citizens who turn to the internet to discuss problems in their country. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has adopted the language of child protection in its long-standing efforts to erode anonymity on the Chinese internet. Chinese authorities have mandated real-name registration for internet services since at least 2012 as part of the CCP’s repressive censorship regime. In June 2025, Chinese officials promulgated a draft regulation that sets out a laundry list of “harmful” information that internet services should be required to suppress for minors, largely aligned with the maintenance of CCP narratives about its own governance and China’s place in the world. The speedy adoption of age-assurance social media bans represents the most significant live experiment in internet regulation in years, and the consequences for internet freedom demand due consideration. The current state of age-inference and age-verification technology, for example, cannot mitigate the privacy and security risks introduced by their large-scale use; further technical research is needed to advance age-assurance methods that are truly privacypreserving. Meanwhile, children have evaded age-assurance mechanisms at considerable scale, remaining connected to social media platforms that are still rife with problems of the digital age. A rights-respecting pursuit of child safety requires action by policymakers and the private sector to resolve the long-standing problems of the social internet. Age-assurance laws open a new potential vector for abuse, with identification requirements enabling bad actors and repressive governments to create a footprint of people’s online activities. freedomhouse.org 9