On June 22, Keir Starmer announced his resignation as British prime minister, ending a government that collapsed under its own unpopularity. One of his parting moves, announced a week earlier, was a plan to bar everyone under 16 from social media and to make the rest of Britain prove its age to stay online. Starmer borrowed the idea from Australia, and the Trump administration had already warned London that it was the wrong road. As similar proposals gain traction in Washington, the White House should hold the line it drew abroad.
The Model Already Failed, and It Put Kids at Greater Risk
Starmer copied Australia, which switched on the world’s first national under-16 social media ban in December 2025. The early evidence points the wrong way for children. Privacy and child-safety experts who examined the rollout found that the ban pushed young people toward less regulated and less safe corners of the internet, away from mainstream platforms with moderation teams and reporting tools, and toward the places where predators and harmful content are hardest to police. A policy sold as protection ended up steering kids somewhere more dangerous.
The verification machinery makes it worse. To keep under-16s out, every new user has to prove their age by uploading a government ID or submitting to a facial scan. That turns every covered platform into a warehouse of government IDs and biometric face scans, and every warehouse is a target. When one of those databases is breached, the children the law claims to protect are the ones whose identities and faces end up in criminal hands, alongside everyone else’s.
The Goal is Control of Online Speech
The child-safety branding is built to obscure a simpler reality. A rule that requires people to prove who they are before they can post hands the government control over the door to online speech, whatever banner it travels under. Britain’s Online Safety Act is the proof of concept. Sold as a tool to protect children, online safety laws are really a general-purpose lever over online speech. The UK’s Ofcom has opened investigations into more than 90 platforms, many reaching well beyond issues of child safety. Trump’s FTC chairman warned in 2025 that Ofcom’s efforts to censor Americans could violate U.S. law.
Age verification is the infrastructure that makes speech control possible. Once a citizen has to present identification to speak, a bureaucrat decides the terms on which that identification is accepted, which platforms must demand it, and which voices are worth the friction. This is the same instinct Vice President Vance condemned at Munich, where he warned that shutting down speech is the surest way to destroy a democracy. The children are the justification for building a system that ultimately puts the state between people and their ability to be heard.
The Trump Administration Got This Right
To its credit, this administration has been the clearest voice in the world against censorship dressed up as safety. In a formal submission to the UK’s consultation on children online, the U.S. government said it strongly opposes rules that compel platforms to collect government-issued IDs, warning that those mandates invite surveillance and chill freedom of speech. The same submission backed a principle NetChoice has defended for years, that parents are the first and best line of defense for their own children. The State Department has separately flagged the erosion of free expression in the United Kingdom, and the administration has pressed the European Union over the speech restrictions buried in its Digital Services Act.
That record is a real asset, and it is worth defending. American officials are telling allies, correctly, that a government forcing its citizens to prove their identity in order to speak ends up building the machinery of control under the banner of safety.
Don’t Bring the Bureaucrats’ Chokepoint Home
Which is why the pressure now building in Washington is so dangerous. The same restrictive instinct is being marketed here under the child-safety banner, with the Kids Online Safety Act at the center of it. KOSA’s core mechanism is a “duty of care” that holds platforms responsible for shielding minors from content the government deems harmful. A platform cannot meet that duty without first knowing which of its users are minors, and the only way to sort minors from adults at scale is to verify everyone. KOSA’s drafters insist it does not mandate age verification, but a duty of care cannot be enforced without it. As pointed out by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, KOSA is modeled after the same anti-speech framework as the UK’s Online Safety Act. The label is just different.
There is real pressure on the White House to put its weight behind KOSA and measures like it. It should not. A government cannot credibly tell London that forcing people to prove their identity before they speak chills free expression, then turn around and build the same checkpoint at home. Endorsing KOSA would hand domestic regulators the exact chokepoint over speech that the administration is fighting abroad, and it would signal to every foreign government that America’s commitment to free expression stops at the water’s edge.
A Better Path
There is a way to keep kids safer that does not require a national identity check to use the internet. NetChoice’s Digital Safety Shield puts real tools in parents’ hands and keeps the government out of the business of identifying every user. It protects children without dismantling the open internet that hundreds of millions of Americans, including teenagers, rely on every day.
The administration drew the right line in London. Defending free expression and free enterprise now means holding that same line in Washington, and refusing to import a failed idea from a failed prime minister.
Image from Bloomberg via Getty