Rep. Finke Was Right: Age-Gating Isn’t About Kids, It’s About Control

When Rep. Leigh Finkespoke last month beforethe Minnesota House Commerce Finance and Policy Committee to testify againstHF1434, a broad-sweeping proposal to age-gate the internet, she began with something disarming: agreement.

I want to support the basic part of this," she said, the shared goal of protecting young people online. Because that is not controversial: everyone wants kids to be safe. But HF1434, Minnesota's proposed age-verification bill, simply won't protect children." It mandates that websites hosting speech that is protected by the First Amendment for both adults and young people to verify users' identities, often through government IDs or biometric data. As we've discussed before, the bill's definition of speech that lawmakers deemharmful to minors"isnotoriously broad-broad enough to sweep in lawful, non-pornographic speech about sexual orientation, sexual health, and gender identity.

Rep. Finke,an openly transgender lawmaker, next raised a point that her critics have since tried to distort: age-verification laws like the Minnesota bill are already being used toblock young LGBTQ+ peoplefrom exercising their First Amendment rights to access information that may be educational, affirming, or life-saving. Referencing the Supreme Court caseFree Speech Coalition v. Paxton, she noted that state attorneys general have been almost jubilant" about the ability to use these laws to restrict queer youth from accessing content. We know that prurient interest' could be for many people, the very existence of transgender kids," she added, referring to the malleable legal standard that would govern what content must be age-gated under the law.

But despiteyears'worthofevidenceto back her up, Finke has faced a wave of attacks from countlessmediaoutletsand religiousadvocacy groupsfor her statements. Rep. Finke's testimony was repeatedly mischaracterized as not having young people's best interests in mind, when really she was accurately describing the lived reality of LGBTQ+ youth and advocating in support of their access to vital resources and community.

In fact, this backlash proves her point. Beyond attempting to silence queer voices and to scare other legislators from speaking up against these laws, it reveals how age-verification mandates are part of a larger effort to give the government much greater control of what young people are allowed to say, read, or see online.

Rep. Finke was also right that these proposals are bad policy; they prevent all young people from finding community online, and that they violate young people and adults' First Amendment rights.

WhyFSC v. PaxtonMatters

Rep. Finke was similarly right to bring up thePaxtoncase, because beyond thetroubling Supreme Court precedent it produced, Texas's age-verification law also drew eager support from anextraordinarynumber of amicus briefs from anti-LGBTQ organizations (someevendesignatedhate groupsby the Southern Poverty Law Center).

InFSC v. Paxton, the Supreme Court gave Texas the green light to require age verification for sites where at least one-third of the content is sexual material deemed harmful to minors," which generally means explicit sexual content. This ruling, based on how young people do not have a First Amendment right to access explicit sexual content, allows states to enact onerous age-verification rules that will block adults from accessing lawful speech, curtail their ability to be anonymous, and jeopardize their data security and privacy. These are real and immense burdens on adults, andthe Court was wrongto ignore them in upholding Texas' law.

But laws enacted by other states and Minnesota HF 1434 go further than the Texas statute. Rather than restricting young people from accessing sexual content, these proposals expand what the state deems harmful to minors" to include any speech that may reference sex, sexuality, gender, and reproductive health. Butyoung people have a First Amendment rightto both speak on those topics and to access information online about them.

We will continue to fight againstallonline age restrictions, but bills like Minnesota's HF 1434, which seek to restrict young people from accessing speech about their bodies, sexuality, and other truthful information, are especially pernicious.

EFF and Rep. Finke are on the same page here: age verification mandates create immense harm to ourFirst Amendment rights, our right toprivacy, as well as our online safety and security. These proposals also fully ignore the reality thatLGBTQ young people often rely on the internetfor information they cannot get elsewhere.

But thePaxtoncase, and the coalition behind it, illustrates exactly how these laws can be weaponized. They weren't there just to stand up for young people's privacy online-they were there to argue that the state has a compelling interest in shielding minors from material that, in practice, often includes LGBTQ content. Ultimately, these groups would like to age-gate not just porn sites, but also any content that might discuss sex, sexuality, gender, reproductive health, abortion, and more.

Using Children as Props to Enact Censorship

The coalition of organizations that filed amicus briefs in support of Texas's age verification law tells us everything we need to know about the true intentions behind legislating access to information online: censorship, surveillance, and control. After all, if the race to age-gate the internetwaspurely about child safety, we would expect its strongest supporters to be child-development experts or privacy advocates. Instead, the loudest advocates are organizations dedicated to policing sexuality, attacking LGBTQ+ folks and reproductive rights, and censoring anything that doesn't fit within their worldview.

Below are some of the harmful platforms that the organizations supporting the age-gating movement are advancing, and how their arguments echo in the attacks on Rep. Finke today:

Policing sexuality, bodily autonomy, and reproductive rights

Many of the organizations backing age-verification laws have spent decades trying to restrict access to accurate sexual health information and reproductive care.

Groups likeExodus Cry, for example, whofiled a briefin support of the Texas AG in the SCOTUS case, frame pornography as part of a broader moral crisis. Founded by aChristian dominionist"activist, Exodus Cry advocates for the criminalization of porn and sex work, and promotes a worldview that defines sexual immorality" as any sexual activity outside marriage between one man and one woman. Its leadershipdescribesthe internet as a battleground in a pornified world" that has to be reclaimed. Another brief in support of the age-verification law was filed by agroup of organizationsincluding the Public Advocate of the United States (anSPLC-designated hate group) and America's Future.America's Futureis an organization that was formed to revitalize the role of faith in our society" and fiercely advocates in favor oftrans sports bans.

These groups see age-verification laws as attractive solutions because they create alegal mechanismto wall off large swaths of content that merely mentions sex from not only young people but millions of adults, too.

Attacking LGBTQ+ Rights

Several of the most prominent legal advocates behind age-verification laws have also led thecrusadeagainst LGBTQ+ equality. The internet that these groups envision is one that heavily censors critical and even life-saving LGBTQ+ resources, community, and information.

The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), for instance (which isanotherSPLC-designated hate group), built its reputation on litigation aimed at rolling back LGBTQ+ protections-including allowing businesses torefuse serviceto same-sex couples,criminalizingsame-sex relationships abroad, and restrictingtransgender rights.

Then there's other groups like Them Before Us and Women's Liberation Front, bothof whichsubmitted amiciin support of the Texas Attorney General and are devoted to upending LGBTQ+ rights in the United States. Them Before Us says it's committed to putting the rights and well-being of children ahead of the desires and agendas of adults." But it's also running acampaignto End Obergefell," the 2015 Supreme Court case that upheld the right to same-sex marriage, and has been on the cutting edge of transphobic campaigning and pseudoscientific fearmongering about IVF and surrogacy. The Women's Liberation Front, on the other hand, is an organization that has along track recordof supporting transphobic policies such as bathroom bills, bans on gender-affirming healthcare, and efforts to define sex" strictly as the biological sex assigned at birth.

Through cases likeFSC v. Paxton, groups like these three continue to advance a vision of society that creates government mandates to enforce their worldviews over personal freedom, while hiding behind a shroud of concern for children's safety. But when they also describe LGBTQ+ people as evil" threats to children and run countless campaigns against their human rights, they are being clear about their intentions. This is why we continue to say:the impact of age verification measures goes beyond porn sites.

Expanding censorship beyond the internet into real-life public spaces

As we've said for years now, the push to age-gate the internet is part of a broader campaign to control what information people can access in public life both on-andoffline. Many of the same organizations advancing these proposals claim to be acting on behalf of young people, but their arguments consistently use children as props to justify giving the government more control over speech and information.

Many of the organizations advocating for online age verification havealso supportedbook bans, attacks on DEI policies and education, and efforts to remove LGBTQ+ materials from schools and libraries. Two of the organizations who supported the Texas Attorney General,Citizens Defending FreedomandManhattan Institute, haveled campaignsaround the countryto abolish DEI" andban classical bookslike The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison from school libraries. These efforts are not different from the efforts to restrict access to the internet-they reflect a broader strategy to restrict access to ideas or information that these groups find objectionable. And they discourage free thought, inquiry, and the ability for people to decide how to live their lives.

These campaigns rely onthe same core argument,that certain ideas are inherently dangerous to young people and must therefore be restricted. But that framing misrepresents an important reality: if lawmakers genuinely want to address harms that young people experience online, they should start by listening to young people themselves. When EFFspoke directlywith young people about their online experiences, they overwhelmingly rejected restrictions on their access to the internet and came back with nuanced and diverse perspectives. Once that principle-that certain ideas are inherently dangerous-is accepted, the internet, once a symbol of free expression, connection, creativity, and innovation, becomes the next logical target.

This also wouldn't be the first time a vulnerable group is used as a prop to advance internet censorship laws. We've seen this playbook during the debate over FOSTA/SESTA, where many of the same advocates claimed to speak for trafficking victims/survivors and sex workers, while pushing legislation that ultimately censored online speech and harmed the very communities it invoked. It's a familiar pattern: you invoke a vulnerable group, frame certain speech as a threat, and use that as a way to expand government control over the flow of information. Andas we said in the fight against FOSTA: if lawmakers are serious about addressing harms to particular communities, they should start by talking to those communities. This means that lawmakers seeking to address online harms to young people should be talking to young people, not groups who claim their interests.

Rep. Finke Was Not Radical. She Was Right.

ThePaxtoncase, and the coalition backing age verification laws in the U.S., shows us exactly why the messaging around these laws draws superficial support from parents and lawmakers. But we've heard the quiet part said out loud before. Marsha Blackburn, a sponsor of the federal Kids Online Safety Act, has said that her goal with the legislation was to address what she calledthe transgender"in society. When lawmakers and advocacy groups frame queer existence itself as a threat to young people, age-verification laws become ideological enforcement instead of regulatory policy.

In defendingfree speech,privacy, and theright of young peopleto access truthful information about themselves, Rep. Leigh Finke was not radical-she was right. She was warning that broad, ideologically driven laws will be used to erase, silence, and isolate young people under the banner of child protection.

What's at stake in the fight against age verification is not just a single bill in a single state, or even multiple states, for that matter. It's about whether protecting children" becomes a legal pretext for embedding government control over the internet to enforce specific moral and religious judgments-judgments that deny marginalized people access to speech, community, history, and truth-into law.

And more people in public office need the courage of Rep. Finke to call this out.

Republished from the EFF's Deeplinks blog.