Everyone knows, or should, that perfect (balanced, targeted, transparent, swift and swiftly appealable) content moderation at scale is impossible. That doesn’t mean powerful social platforms don’t have to try to get at least reasonably close, especially when access to good information can have a profound effect on political participation and speech.

That’s why so many people, including the Meta Oversight Board, criticized Meta for suspending a major political Instagram account for hours during a huge early voting push on October 17; and for allegedly boosting one candidate in Brazil’s recent presidential election. Meta denies deliberate interference in either instance, blaming “mistakes” in its automated content moderation systems (including AI tools that can’t tell the difference between enthusiastic follower engagement and a bot attack).

Mistakes or not, with early voting in the U.S. midterms already underway, these events serve as a stark reminder that all major social media platforms need to have stronger systems in place to ensure that they serve, rather than impede, democratic communication.

Access to good information can have a profound effect on political participation and speech.

This is not inherently an “AI” problem: automated systems can process content at a scale that humans never could, potentially enabling better moderation at scale and alleviating the psychological load on ill-paid moderators whose jobs require them to view incredibly disturbing content. But automated systems also reproduce existing biases, struggle to understand context, and often make mistakes that disproportionately affect journalists, activists, artists, and other vulnerable and marginalized communities. And moderation errors are even more likely when the language is spoken principally by the global majority. In 2020, leaked documents showed that Meta’s algorithms incorrectly deleted nonviolent Arabic-language content 77 percent of the time, while failing to detect hate speech under the company’s own policies in many instances. Where these systems are faltering in Arabic, they’re positively failing in less-resourced languages. As a 2025 report from the Center for Democracy and Technology found, labeled datasets in certain languages and dialects such as Maghrebi Arabic and Kiswahili contain inconsistencies, bias, and inaccuracies due to the limited hiring of annotators who actually speak the languages as well as shifts in the languages themselves. An investigation into ChatGPT’s outputs in several low-resource languages demonstrates the depth of problem.

But language disparities are just one of several concerns as automated moderation becomes more widespread. From the systemic suppression of content from Palestine to the repeated misclassification of LGBTQ+ content as adult or explicit material, these varied examples demonstrate the risks of overreliance on automated moderation—and the need for stronger safeguards.

Fortunately, there is a great deal companies, policymakers, and civil society can do to help ensure that highly automated systems operate in ways that respect human rights, minimize predictable harms, and provide meaningful accountability when they fail. If companies are going to continue relying on automation to moderate users’ speech—and there is little reason to believe they won’t—then accountability must evolve alongside these technologies.

That work should start with publicly committing to the Santa Clara Principles 2.0. Specifically:

1. Automated technologies should help, not replace, human moderators. For example, automated systems can help flag and prioritize content for review, while humans can interpret context, handle sensitive cases, and refine system performance. This investment is particularly important during the weeks immediately before and after an election.
2. Companies must be transparent about when and how automation is used in content decisions.
3. Companies must regularly audit their automated systems for bias, with particular attention to low-resource languages, vulnerable and marginalized communities, and conflict zones.
4. Companies should strengthen personal data protection guarantees and policies. Automated content moderation often relies on personal data and profiling, so companies should think carefully about what data these systems use, what's necessary and proportionate and how their systems shape moderation outcomes.
5. Users must have the ability to appeal, and to provide context when they believe human or automated moderation decisions have wrongfully removed their content. Appeals should be promptly evaluated and decided by human moderators.
6. Companies should regularly assess the human rights impact of their moderation decisions, and issue public statements of the results
7. If they rely on third-party vendors, companies should carefully (and regularly) audit those vendors for compliance with these same principles
8. Lawmakers should avoid promoting and passing legislation that effectively or explicitly mandates automated moderation systems
9. Policymakers should also refrain from attempting to dictate platforms technical and design choices to favor or disfavor particular expression.
10. Policymakers should work to educate the public about how their personal data may be collected and used in electoral contexts.

These recommendations understand that automated content moderation isn’t just a technical problem for clever engineers and product teams to solve. Because content moderation shapes public discourse and fundamental rights, its design and oversight must respond to the concerns of policymakers, civil society, independent researchers, and the communities most affected by these systems.

One other distinct and enduring problem makes transparency, checks, and accountability all the more urgent: too few companies have far too much power over our political communication and organizing. Social media gave people the ability to wrest some control over political messaging away from media oligopolies. But we’ve met the new boss and while it’s not the same as the old boss, the song is pretty familiar. The real promise of the web to democratize communication is not likely to be met by social media oligarchs, no matter how sophisticated their content moderation practice.

The Brazilian National Data Protection Agency (ANPD) plays a pivotal role in the regulation of digital platforms according to new legislation approved in Brazil. Throughout this year, EFF has presented comments, filed submissions, and met with the agency to emphasize crucial guardrails that the enforcement of new regulations should ensure. 

ANPD is responsible for detailing and applying obligations set in Law n. 15.211/2025, which established rules for the protection of children and adolescents in the digital space. While some provisions establish important privacy safeguards, like prohibiting advertising based on profiling of underage users, the law created mandatory age assurance mechanisms for accessing digital products and services. 

We have raised alarms on the privacy and free expression issues around age-gating the internet. Age verification technology is often inaccurate and privacy-invasive. Examples also show how it’s prone to enforcement overreach, resulting in sites blocked beyond legal requirements. In the UK, providers disproportionately restricted several counseling, support and mental health sites under the Online Safety Act. Current age assurance methods risk wrongly walling off adults with no valid IDs, facial differences, physical disabilities, among others. 

We highlighted these concerns in our comments and submissions underscoring that ANPD should avoid a blanket approach to age assurance obligations. Following the legislation, restrictions should apply only to products and services that are inadequate or prohibited to children and adolescents according to categories already set in regulation, with robust protections against subjective and overbroad interpretations. Guarantees such as access to information, freedom to participate in society and meaningful access to technologies also compound what constitutes the best interests of the child.  

Moreover, we stressed that zero knowledge proofs alone fail to ensure strong user privacy, including safeguards that the law itself sought to secure. Our submission explains why other requirements, such as unlinkability, selective disclosure, batch issuance and processing on device, are crucial for achieving greater levels of protection and mitigating privacy harms. Minimum information being shared to the verifier and no “phoning home” to the issuer of a user’s accepted credentials are conditions that prevent actions like collusion and data sharing about the user. 

We also shared inputs about the scope of the law, asking more clarity on which providers are covered by its obligations and the importance of treating differently non-dominant players like federated networks and free software applications. Without that clarity, this could negatively impact beyond gaming and major platforms that are the main target of these regulations. We elaborated on the agency’s regulation of prevention duties, the relevance of modulating them according to the type and structure of providers, and alerted them that their interpretation should not result in general monitoring obligations. 

On another but related front, we sent comments regarding Brazil’s new internet intermediary rules. Here too, ANPD has a critical regulatory role after a Supreme Court’s decision and presidential decrees changed the liability regime initially set in the law known as “Marco Civil.”  

With the turn to notice and takedown mechanisms and duty of care obligations, we emphasized measures to prevent censorship of protected content. These involve ensuring solid means for appeals of restricted posts, avoiding overreliance on AI-based content moderation, strictly tailoring the application of concepts like duty of care and systemic failure, and not normalizing the blocking of platforms and websites.  

We raised concerns about a trend reflected in the new regulation requiring platforms to proactively report user to authorities with unclear guarantees. Finally, we urged the agency to advance essential transparency and accountability measures for enabling greater public oversight over the application of the new regime. 

As we said before, platform accountability under the new rules ultimately hinges on how accountable its enforcement will be by platforms and state institutions. Rigorous commitment to fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, privacy and data protection, is required so that intended protections don’t instead lead to harms. ANPD must uphold this commitment and make sure that new regulations don’t backfire. 

No one should have to choose between speaking freely and protecting their immigration status. Yet that’s precisely the choice the Trump administration’s mass surveillance of online speech forces on noncitizens living in the U.S.   

Last fall, we sued on behalf of three major labor unions to stop this surveillance program. And just this month, we won our first major ruling: A federal district court denied the government’s motion to dismiss our lawsuit. This means the case can move forward—a win for free speech and a critical step in protecting our First Amendment rights online. We’ve already explained why this is a big deal for our clients, so let's take a closer look at the court’s reasoning.  

Our Lawsuit 

 Since taking power, the Trump administration has used AI and other automated tools to broadly surveil the social media and online speech of visa and green card holders, with the goal of identifying and punishing people who express views it opposes. The government is targeting a broad range of views, including criticism of the Trump administration; support for Palestine or criticism of Israel; “rationalizing or making light of” Charlie Kirk’s murder; and anything nebulously “hostile” to American culture, founding principles, “traditional American views,” or “our way of life.”  

It has paired that surveillance with a public intimidation campaign. High-ranking officials have explicitly threatened to punish noncitizens for their online speech, then followed through with a series of terrifying viewpoint-driven enforcement actions. This has led to a significant chilling effect on speech, not just for noncitizens, but also for their families, coworkers, and friends. 

In response, three major labor unions—the United Auto Workers (UAW), the Communications Workers of America (CWA), and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)—sued the Departments of State and Homeland Security alleging that this viewpoint-based surveillance program violates the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).  The unions are represented by EFF, Muslim Advocates (MA), and the Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic (MFIA). 

The government moved to dismiss our lawsuit, arguing first that federal immigration law prevents federal district courts from hearing the case, and second, that the unions don’t have “standing” to sue. Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York rejected both arguments and allowed the case to proceed. At this stage in the litigation, the court accepted all of the facts in our complaint as true and analyzed the law based on those facts. We will now prove these facts as the case proceeds. 

Federal Immigration Law Doesn’t Block Our Lawsuit 

 The government first argued that the court had no power to hear our case at all. It pointed to three provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) that restrict when federal courts can review immigration matters. The district court disagreed and rejected each provision in turn. 

The first provision, 8 U.S.C. § 1252(b)(9), is often called the “zipper clause.” It bars federal courts from hearing challenges that arise from efforts to deport someone, except through review of an individual’s final removal order. The government claimed the zipper clause applies here because our lawsuit is really an effort to stop it from initiating adverse immigration actions. 

 The district court wholly rejected this argument. Relying on the Second Circuit’s decision in Ozturk v. Hyde, it held that the zipper clause bars only challenges to a particular individual’s removal proceedings, not a lawsuit like ours that challenges the constitutionality of the surveillance program itself. That the surveillance program might affect someone’s immigration proceeding down the line doesn’t turn our lawsuit into a removal challenge. 

 The court similarly rejected the government’s argument that § 1252(g) and § 1252(f)(1) prevent federal courts from hearing this case. Our suit, the court explained, “challenges the constitutionality of a government policy that is collateral to any active removal proceedings,” so § 1252(g) doesn’t apply. And § 1252(f)(1) only limits what kind of relief a court can give. So while the court may not be able to stop a particular person’s removal proceedings, it can still block “an unlawful surveillance program that suppresses free speech.” 

 The Unions Have Standing to Sue 

 To sue in federal court, a plaintiff must show that it has “standing” to bring its claims. This requires a plaintiff to show an “injury in fact” that is, among other things, “concrete.” That’s often a high bar in surveillance cases, where plaintiffs can’t easily see what the government is doing behind the scenes. And the Supreme Court has held that a person’s mere subjective fear of surveillance is too speculative to confer standing.  

Even so, our plaintiffs cleared the bar. The court held that the unions alleged concrete injuries, including a chill on members’ speech that is objectively reasonable, not just subjectively felt. It found that the unions had established standing in two ways: “organizational standing,” based on the unions’ own injuries, and “associational standing,” based on injuries the unions’ members have suffered. 

Organizational Standing 

The court first held that our plaintiffs had successfully alleged an injury to the unions themselves (injury was the only aspect of organizational standing the government disputed). The surveillance program has harmed the unions’ ability to carry out their core responsibilities, including “organizing their members and advocating for the unions’ goals.” The court made two key points: 

1. Unions Are Injured When Members Go Silent 

As we explained in our complaint, the surveillance program has caused members to step back from union leadership roles; stop participating in union activities online and in person; remove their names from union webpages; and avoid filling out bargaining surveys. Members who might otherwise spread the unions’ message and raise awareness of union issues are staying quiet, hampering the unions’ ability to organize. The court said this amounts to a concrete injury for purposes of standing. 

2. Surveillance Doesn’t Need to Target Pro-Union Speech  

 The court also rejected the government’s claim that members’ retreat from union activities was “essentially an overreaction,” because the surveillance doesn't target pro-union views. The court said this misunderstands the issue: “the question is whether the Government’s conduct would deter a person of ordinary firmness from engaging in protected activity, not whether the specific expression a member forgoes is itself among the viewpoints the Government disfavors.” 

Here, the surveillance program monitors noncitizens’ online activity indiscriminately, and members “cannot reliably predict which of their activities will be captured” and attributed to a disfavored viewpoint. What’s more, the court noted, the unions’ organizing often happens alongside the very advocacy the government is alleged to target, “including pro-Palestine and anti-ICE activism on college campuses.” That makes members’ retreat from union activity a foreseeable consequence of the program. 

Associational Standing  

 The court also held that the unions established associational standing to sue on behalf of their members. Of the three requirements for associational standing, the government challenged only two. It argued that members lacked sufficiently concrete injuries to sue in their own right, and that the claims aren’t “germane” to the unions’ purpose. 

The court disagreed and found associational standing for every claim but one: members’ right to receive information. That claim survives anyway, because the unions’ organizational standing covers it. Along the way, the court made several important rulings. 

 1. The Ongoing Surveillance Is a Present Injury 

 As a threshold matter, the government argued that our case is a “pre-enforcement challenge,” meaning we sued before the government actually punished anyone. That would trigger a different test, and the government argued we failed it because we hadn’t alleged a sufficiently imminent threat of prosecution. 

The court disagreed, explaining that “Plaintiffs’ allegations are of an ongoing surveillance program that is actively chilling the speech of their members and otherwise causing harm.” That chilling effect is a First Amendment injury even if there isn’t a direct prohibition on speech. And when government conduct is actively chilling speech right now, a challenge to it isn’t pre-enforcement. 

 2. Surveillance + Public Threats Reasonably Chills Speech 

 The court rejected the government’s argument that we alleged only a generalized, subjective, speculative fear of surveillance, explaining that “the chilling effect” of the program can “itself be an injury when the plaintiffs are surveilled.” Here, plaintiffs have alleged that their members are under active surveillance, which has had objective chilling effects on their speech. And the government is targeting certain disfavored viewpoints, making it “viewpoint discrimination” that is “presumptively unconstitutional.” 

The chill is also objectively reasonable, the court held, because the government has extensively publicized the surveillance program through public statements and social media posts, making clear that noncitizens who post disfavored views will be targeted for removal. Notably, the court agreed with us that the “threat of adverse immigration consequences, under a government whose harsh immigration crackdowns has been heavily publicized and reported on, is certainly enough to deter a person of ordinary firmness from the exercise of First Amendment rights.” This is a concrete injury sufficient for standing. 

3. Demanding Social Media Handles Also Causes Harm 

Under the surveillance program, applicants for certain immigration benefits must disclose all social media handles they have used during the preceding five years and, in some instances, maintain public social media accounts. The district court held that this too amounts to a First Amendment injury, undermining the rights to anonymity and freedom of association.  

The judge pointed to one CWA member we identified, a lawful permanent resident with a pending naturalization application who is subject to the five-year disclosure requirement. The member has deleted one social media account, set another to private, and removed past posts expressing disfavored views. These allegations, the court said, show an actual and objectively reasonable injury due to the government’s surveillance program.

4. General, Public Threats Can Still Be Coercive 

We also argued that the Trump administration is waging a campaign of coercive threats to suppress disfavored speech, which the First Amendment prohibits. The court agreed that this campaign can be an actionable injury of its own. 

Notably, the court held that it didn’t matter that the government’s statements were not specifically targeted at certain individuals, and were instead made on social media or to the public. In this case, the court explained, “the number, severity, and high-profile examples of action upon those threats are such that a reasonable person would perceive the communication as coercive.” 

That means it’s reasonable that the unions’ members “would, and did, limit their public speech on disfavored viewpoints” in response. That the threats were made to the general public “does not diminish this injury,” as the very purpose of the challenged surveillance program is to intimidate noncitizens into silence.  

5. Free Speech is Central to Union Functioning 

The court also found that the unions met the second prong of associational standing. It held that the unions’ interests in protecting their members’ rights to speak freely, organize, and advocate, are “germane” to the unions’ missions. The court put it plainly:

The freedom of Plaintiffs’ members to speak, associate, and appear publicly is not incidental to union work, but rather is the mechanism through which unions recruit, organize, communicate, and bargain. A program alleged to silence members and drive them from the unions’ rolls therefore strikes at the unions’ representational function itself.

Next Steps 

When the government surveils what people post online and threatens to punish them for their viewpoints, the result is exactly what our clients have experienced. Members have deleted their accounts, scrubbed posts, and withdrawn from union activities. 

The government must now answer our complaint and we will move forward with the discovery process, in which we anticipate getting more information from the government about its surveillance program. We look forward to continuing to prove our case. 

EFF strongly condemns Turkey’s state-led discriminatory, oppressive attacks on feminist and LGBTQ+ organisations, media platforms, student groups, and rights defenders and activists within the country.

Since mid-September, access to the websites and social media accounts of a dozen organizations have been blocked by court order, while over 60 members and activists have been detained, their offices and homes raided, mobile phones, laptops and other digital devices seized, and judicial proceedings launched against them. 

These actions threaten the very existence of the LGBTQ+ organizations targeted, limiting their ability to carry out legitimate human rights work, deterring participation and support, and chilling the free speech rights of not just these groups, but any organization that even reports on LGBTQ+ oppression.

A little over a week ago, an Istanbul court shut down the website and social media accounts of T24, Turkey’s longest running independent digital news organization—which has covered government-backed campaigns against and earlier crackdowns on gay rights groups—alleging it had aired “LGBT propaganda” over the past year. 

It’s all part of Turkey’s efforts to portray LGBTQ+ groups and support networks for those living with HIV as criminal organizations that must be suppressed, purportedly to protect family values. Homosexuality is not illegal in Turkey (unlike Uganda, Nigeria, and Egypt, where it is criminalized), but LGBTQ+ organizations and activists have in recent years faced increased government oppression, including criminal proceedings on allegations related to obscenity and violations of Turkey’s Law on Associations, which regulates the activities of nonprofits.

In its new crackdown, the government is targeting LGBTQ+ groups’ websites and social media channels for alleged obscene posts accessible to children. Kaos GL, Turkey’s oldest gay rights organization, said investigations are being led by the Cyber Crimes Bureau of the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, which took members of its Board of Directors into custody, raided their homes, and searched the organization’s offices, where electronic devices were seized. 

According to Human Rights Watch, prosecutors in Istanbul said those targeted were suspected of “founding, leading, or being a member of a criminal organization,” as well as sex work and drug-related offenses. Publicly available law enforcement and judicial documents about the investigation reportedly don’t say which publications or posts are alleged to be obscene.

The prosecutor’s office launched an investigation of the organization and others under Article 226 of the Turkish Penal Code, which regulates the offense of “obscenity” (without clearly defining it), while the overall operation, dubbed “My Family is Safe” and launched as part of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s “Decade of the Family” program, is being brought under Article 220 of the code. Justifying the crackdown by invoking family values and child safety suggests that the government is trying to enforce a moral code on society based on intolerance of and discrimination against LGBTQ+ people.

New Low for Turkey

Framing the activities of LGBTQ+ rights organizations as violations of organized crime provisions is a new low for Turkey, where free speech and press freedoms have long been under attack. The implication from these raids and investigations is that the organizations’ legitimate civil society work advocating for the rights of queer people—monitoring human rights violations, offering legal aid, running news portals, sponsoring cultural events such as symposiums and film screenings, publishing an online magazine and supporting LGBTQ+ refugees—is suspected of being criminal threatens the basic human rights of the LGBTQ+ community in Turkey.

These actions send a dangerous message to people and organizations exercising freedom of speech and association in support of queer people. Under the penal code, directing a criminal organization is punishable by five to ten years in prison, while merely being a member carries a sentence of two to five years. 

EFF joins hundreds of human, civil, LGBTQ+, and digital rights organizations around the world in calling for the immediate release of all those detained for exercising their rights to freedom of expression, association and legitimate human rights work, and the unblocking of all websites and social media accounts of affected organizations. 

For many LGBTQ+ individuals the world over, the internet can be a safer space for exploring identity, finding community, and seeking support. The anti-LGBTQ+ crackdown in Turkey is not happening in a vacuum—unfortunately we are seeing anti-LGBTQ+ bills restricting free expression and privacy, content moderation decisions that disproportionately impact LGBTQ+ users, and other forms of intolerance around the world. 

We urge international civil society and diplomatic partners to raise awareness of and to speak out against the crackdown, and to publicly show support for the legitimacy of Turkey’s LGBTQ+ organizations and the important work they do to ensure that queer people are safe and free.

This post was co-authored by Sheila B. Lalwani, a doctorate student and recent COMPASS Fellow hosted by EFF.

Age verification proposals are often presented as a simple tradeoff: sacrifice a little privacy to better safeguard children online. But that framing overlooks a more fundamental question. What happens to people who cannot verify their age at all? This is particularly a problem when users are required to prove their age with identity documents.

Age-related restrictions are developing quickly around the world. While they differ radically across jurisdictions, in the past year, we’ve witnessed a sharp uptick toward mandatory age assurance for social media access but also for other high-risk digital services.

For example:

• In late 2025, Australia became the first country to implement a minimum age requirement for prohibiting children under age 16 from creating or holding social media accounts. 
• India passed the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act that includes mandatory verifiable parental consent and has undertaken ongoing discussions for social media restriction.
• The United Kingdom passed the Online Safety Act requiring age verification across a swath of services hosting content considered harmful to users under 18. More than half the states across the U.S. have enacted age verification laws. 
• An EU Commission’s expert report recommends a ban on social media access for users under 13. It also recommends mandatory age verification for platforms to ensure that users are ‘age appropriate.’ 

The Access Problem 

Age verification laws that are predicated on the necessity of users possessing a current passport, driver’s license, credit card, or similar documents proving their identity exclude critical sections of populations.  And this problem is global in nature: Millions of people lack government-issued identification or encounter regular challenges to obtaining or updating it. 

Roughly 15 million adult U.S. citizens lack a driver’s license, and a further 2.6 million lack any government photo ID; leaving large groups blocked from online content or services. The UK has a similar predicament: proof-of-age checks are often reliant on passports, driver’s licenses, or other recognized alternatives, which can pose unique challenges to people without these documents.

Much of the advocacy around age verification discusses the privacy harms of age verification. Yet these measures also threaten something more fundamental: equal access to information and the ability to exercise the right to freedom of expression. 

Unfortunately, age verification systems foster unequal access to information and provide an asymmetric solution to find essential information, build community, and weigh in on public discourse. As governments and companies increasingly require users to prove their age before accessing online services, these individuals risk being excluded from large parts of the internet altogether. 

Effects on Global Majority Countries 

Age verification laws reshape who can speak, who can access information, and who gets excluded from the digital public sphere. In other words, age verification is not a neutral safety measure: it presents a structural barrier to disproportionately exclude certain groups—particularly those in the global majority—and alters the architecture of global online expression. Some of these groups are already marginalized offline, and age verification extends that exclusion into digital spaces.

For instance, 850 million people globally do not have ID. Most of these individuals exist in primarily low and middle income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The World Bank points out that many are members of marginalized groups and more than half of those lacking access to identity documentation also have children whose births have not been registered. Women are particularly vulnerable and are 8% less likely than men to have an ID. Other vulnerable groups, such as adults in low income countries, are less likely to have an ID when they fall below 25 years, as are those with a primary school education or less or those in rural areas. 

A policy paper from EDRi points out that age verification laws provide quick tech solutions but overlook longstanding structural challenges and undermine the universality of the internet. The analysis finds that age verification laws have serious human rights implications and ironically harm the very individuals they deem to protect. Moreover, these laws depend on the collection of harmful mass data that human rights organizations, including EFF, is fighting against—and has for decades. 

For example:

• In Morocco, a push to restrict children’s access would ban under-13s from creating accounts on gaming platforms. This could potentially create challenges for those with IDs that have incomplete information concerning the year of birth. In addition, this push would also impact those who attempt to leave Morocco.
• In Egypt, the lack of ID cards has created challenges for minority groups such as the Baha’i.
• Stateless individuals would also struggle under age verification laws. The Rohingya, the world’s largest population of stateless people, often lack IDs. 
• Kuwait’s Bidoon population also lacks proper identification materials. According to Amnesty International, this leads many to rely on standard civil identity cards, which can be restrictive.  
• Nigeria launched a national program to provide ID cards to its population in 2007. Since then, 64.4 million have registered, but that represents just over 30% of the national population.
• The Kafala system, a practice in several countries across the Middle East, also introduces challenges for age verification laws. Under this legal framework, migrant workers’ legal residency and employment status are bound to a specific employer. This potentially leaves stateless persons or migrant workers vulnerable to forced labor and restricted movements. 

No ID, No Access

Age verification laws are less about confirming the age of a user and more about creating barriers to online participation that many people cannot reliably scale. The net result is reduced access, more data collection, and an increased chance of unequal or mistaken exclusion from accessing information online. 

Nobody doubts the importance of protecting children online. While proponents assert that age verification laws protect minors from harmful material, online harassment, and digital addiction, these laws are not the solution. They subvert fundamental freedom of expression rights and pose significant privacy risks.  

EFF has long warned against age-gating the internet. Age verification technology itself is often inaccurate and privacy-invasive, and as more countries considering implementing ID-based checks, the risks move beyond censorship and surveillance toward excluding some people entirely. That’s why we’re working with groups in the U.S. and around the world to push back against these laws, and why we hope you join our effort.

For more information on how to fight back against dangerous age verification laws, visit our resource hub at eff.org/age