@cwebber agreed about who would benefit from this.* I'd also add data broker companies (who are big players in age verification), and law enforcement/intelligence agencies/authoritarians (both because of the surveillance aspects and because the logical next step after age verificaiton is to ban VPNs). So it'd certainly be interesting to follow the money.

That said the bipartisan support for this isn't coming out of nowhere, it's been building over multiple years. And at least here in Washington state (where we managed to stop three different age verification bills this last session, incuding one that our Democratic Attorney General Nick Brown was pushing very heavily) I don't think the enthusiasm comes primarily from check-writing.

Legislators are under a huge amount of pressure to do something to protect kids and teens online. A Pew Research survey a couple of years ago reported that nearly half of teens online have been bullied or harassed -- and that most teens don't think tech companies or the government are doing enough about it. Meta is clearly knowingly exploiting teens and hasn't been held accountable under existing law. Testimony at hearings from parents whose kids have committed suicide -- and survivors who have been groomed and exploited -- is searing.

So legislators feel like they need to do something. But what? Advocates for age verification are very good at convincing people that it will help -- and at minimizing the harms that it will cause. After all, it's just like checking an ID at a liquor store!!!! And the results from the Online Safety Act in the UK and Australia's social media ban are great, none of the harms have the nay-sayers claimed have happened!!!!! Of course neither of those are true, but it's hard for legislators (or parents for that matter) who don't deeply understand the technology to understand that.**

And the most obvious harms are to LGBTQIAS+ teens, which most legislators don't particularly (a) relate to emotionally, (b) understand intellctually, or (c) care about. Of course those aren't the only harms; as 90 organizations dedicated to LGBTQ+ rights, abortion access, rights for youth, privacy, and freedom of speech say

"For vulnerable communities, a biometric scan or an ID upload can serve as a huge obstacle, especially for low-income, unhoused, and undocumented people who already have to navigate an increasingly digital world, with less access to tech tools."

And there are also significant accessibility concerns. But guess what, most legislators don't particularly (a) relate to emotionally, (b) understand intellectually, or (c) care about harms to low-income, unhoused, undocumented, or disabled people either.**

Also, big tech is very unpopular these days, and advocates for age verification have done a good job of convincing legislators that this is a way of holding big tech accountable. I know, it doesn't make any sense!!!!!!! But it's certainly been successful, so that's also something that needs to be countered.

How to change the dynamic? In states where LGBTQ+ groups have mobilized effectively, they've almost always been able to get Democrats to oppose age verification for "sexual material harmful to minors" (as far as I know those have only passed in red states). More general age verification bills, though, have been harder to push back on.

Unsurprisingly I have some thoughts here but this post is already long enough, they'll be in the followup.

• Although with tech companies, it depends on what variety of age verification we're talking about. Microsoft and other big tech companies played a key role in killing an age verification bill here in 2025, and also opposed it in 2026 although it was trans- and queer-led groups who took the lead with a lot of support from progressive activists. On the other hand that wasn't an OS-level age verification bill so Microsoft's incentives were different.

** I and others cited EFF's Why Isn’t Online Age Verification Just Like Showing Your ID In Person? in our testimony and shared it with many legislators, several privacy-friendly Democrats and it didn't change any of their minds. And I couldn't find any reporting of the downsides of the Online Safety Act or Australia's social media ban that would resonate -- anecdotal examples are too easy to explain away as one-offs.

*** We also quoted and cited this in testimony and shared it with legislators and it also didn't change any minds.