US age verification and online safety event leans heavily toward Christian nationalism

Is age verification the future of the internet? It depends who you ask – and who gets a chance to answer. An all-day event hosted by the Federal Trade Commission aims to hear arguments in favor of online protections for children. But a close look at the list of speakers reveals how the event – in effect a workshop on online privacy – reflects the views of the Trump administration and the conservative entities that support it. As such, it is a strong reminder how easy it is for the age assurance discussion to be hijacked by specific political interests, to the disadvantage of the ecosystem as a whole.

Beginning with a greeting in absentia from First Lady Melania Trump, “The Attention Economy: how Big Tech firms exploit children and hurt families” minces no words about where it stands in relation to Silicon Valley titans like Google and Meta. Discussion ostensibly centers on the recently signed Take It Down Act, which sets rules around posting and removing deepfakes; on COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act; and on the smoldering issue of how to regulate adult content without infringing on First Amendment rights. It also features a panel specifically dedicated to age verification.

Laurie Schleigel, of the Louisiana House of Representatives, is responsible for the U.S.’ first age assurance law, in Louisiana. She explains how the pop musician Billie Eilish inadvertently kicked off the age assurance movement in the states: it was after hearing Eilish tell podcaster Howard Stern that she’d been watching porn since age eleven, and how it had damaged her, that Schleigel started working on her age assurance law.

There are dozens of stories of harm caused by social media or pornography, and hints of good intention wafting about. Yet in the main, the speakers embody the kind of ambiguous space that deepfake detection firms often warn about – in which it is impossible to know what is real and what has been generated to serve a particular interest. Panelists include representatives from the American Principles Project (APP), the Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA) and the Family Policy Alliance (FPA). All are identified as socially conservative think tanks: FPA is the lobbying arm of the evangelical organization Focus on the Family, APP has an affiliated Super PAC to finance conservative politicians, and the DCA is a conservative group that includes authors of Project 2025, the controversial blueprint for government under a second Trump presidency. More than one speaker mentions church; the DCA’s Melissa McKay identifies as “a very religious mom”.

Given this, it’s no surprise that the speakers do not at all approve of pornography, and want more control over what their kids see. They align with modern movements around pronatalism, “tradwives,” homesteading (Schilling notes that he has seven kids) and a nostalgia for an idealized America that celebrated the nuclear family. Yet, in public, their arguments tend to hew to the centrist idea that parts of the internet are bad for kids, and that efforts to restrict them are noble, because pornographers are bad people doing bad things.

Terry Schilling of the APP claims that age verification is “exceptionally popular,” and frames the issue as “authentically and completely bipartisan.” Joseph Kohm of the FPA calls the pornography industry “the most nefarious actors on this planet,” who “profit off of lies, off of misery, off of addiction, taking advantage of kids and leaving them broken.” He contends that “it is a parent’s fundamental right to direct the upbringing of our children, especially when it comes to sexual intimacy and romance.” Kohm, who identifies as an “originalist when it comes to jurisprudence,” says he wants to chip away at the idea that pornography is covered under the First Amendment. He says brain scans show that porn is as bad for you as heroin.

The talking points among panelists paint a grim, threatening picture of a world that has lost control of its digital territory. There are facts and truth to support the argument that pornography and social media can harm kids – but in this case, they are being wielded under the banner right-wing Christian nationalism.

Among speakers in other panels at the event are representatives from rightwing think-tank the Heritage Foundation; the National Center on Child Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), founded as a Catholic organization for the religious right and fond of denouncing sexual content of any kind; and the Family First Technology Initiative, a project of the Institute for Family Studies – a pronatalist think tank that has campaigned against same-sex marriage. (U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn, sponsor of COPPA, is also on hand to spew some fire at Mark Zuckerberg and Meta, as well as TikTok’s addictive algorithms, pedophiles on Discord, drug dealers on Telegram, “the list goes on and on.”)

Although Joseph Kohm accuses big tech and big porn of being bad actors who rely on dishonest arguments, the question must be asked about what is motivating certain sections of the U.S. age assurance lobby – and whether, they, too, are operating in bad faith. Especially when the picture they paint is of a huge leviathan rising from the depths of the internet to consume the nation’s children in great gulps, and their call is framed as a summons to the righteous to confront the beast before it has a chance to sink its fangs into kids’ small, tapping fingers.

A common theme at gatherings like these (accompanying the constant refrain of “save the children”) is the fundamental importance of trust. The age assurance industry cannot work without a certain threshold of trust in digital transactions.

Good faith is a key component of trust; one relies on the other.

As such, when discussions on online safety and age verification are shepherded by individuals making arguments based not on their trust in data, but on a particular religious and moral framework, there is the risk of trust between the user and the digital world being eroded.

And, in this case, trust is already low. There is ample fear among human and digital rights groups that the Take It Down Act and its accompanying righteousness are a Trojan horse in which to disguise tighter controls on immigrants, LGBTQ resources, and other content that does not serve the political agenda of organizations like the Heritage Foundation or the Digital Childhood Alliance.

So when right-wing religious voices make statements like, “kids’ data is in danger from agents of cancel culture,” or say that big platforms “need to design with wellness in mind, with parental rights in mind,” there are big questions to be asked about the sincerity of their stated motives. God is never far from arguments about what’s dirty and what’s pure, and the age assurance sector should be cautious of hitching its trust to an administration that is shredding trust and breeding paranoia as a core tenet of government.

At the Attention Economy event, there is much discussion about the forthcoming decision on Paxton v. Free Speech Coalition, the Texas case before the Supreme Court, which will rule on the constitutionality of age assurance laws. Tomorrow is an opinion day for the Court, and there is an expectation it may hand down a ruling on the case.

The decision will do much to clarify how age assurance in the U.S. will hash out. What has already become clear is that, beyond the legitimate arguments based in data, when discussing age assurance in the U.S., it is no longer the same as discussing it in a secular nation like France or the UK – but increasingly akin to how the debate might unfold in Iran, where strict religious dogma dictates government policy, and acceptable versions of freedom.

Article Topics

age verification  |  children  |  COPPA  |  data privacy  |  digital ID  |  FTC  |  U.S. Government  |  United States