A growing number of U.S. politicians are condemning a new British law that requires some websites and apps — including some based in the United States — to check the ages of users across the pond.
A bipartisan group of members of Congress visited London recently to meet counterparts and air their concerns about the U.K.’s Online Safety Act, which went into effect July 25. Vice President JD Vance has been criticizing the law for months, as have privacy advocates who argue that the law infringes on free expression and disproportionately hurts vulnerable groups.
Vance criticized the U.K. again on Friday, this time in person at the start of a visit to the country. Sitting alongside British Foreign Secretary David Lammy and speaking to reporters, Vance warned the U.K. against going down a “very dark path” of online “censorship” that he said was trod earlier by the Biden administration.
The U.K. Online Safety Act is aimed at preventing children from accessing potentially harmful material online, and internet companies are now asking British users to verify their ages in a variety of ways, including with photos of their IDs, through a credit card provider or with selfies analyzed via age-check software.
But the sweeping nature of the law has caught some Britons by surprise. They’re being asked to prove their age not only for pornography websites but also before they can listen to songs with explicit lyrics or access message boards to discuss sensitive subjects. Reddit, for example, is restricting access to various pages including r/stopsmoking, r/STD and r/aljazeera.
Reddit said in a post about its enforcement of the law that for people in the U.K., it was now verifying ages before they can “view certain mature content.” A spokesperson for the company said r/STD — a message board focused on questions of sexual health — is restricted because of explicit images. They said r/stopsmoking is restricted because it deals with harmful substances and that r/aljazeera — which is not affiliated with the news organization of the same name but deals with similar topics — is restricted because it depicts serious injury or violence.
To get around the new law, the use of virtual private network software that can mask a person’s location, also known as VPNs, has surged in the U.K.
The primary argument of U.S. politicians who oppose the law is that they don’t want American tech companies to have to comply, even if they’re serving British customers.
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said he raised his objections with U.K. government officials during meetings in London at the end of July. In a statement after his return, he said the law and other European regulations “create a serious chilling effect on free expression and threaten the First Amendment rights of American citizens and companies.”
“We absolutely need to protect children and keep harmful, illegal content off these platforms — but when governments or bureaucracies suppress speech in the name of safety or regulation, it sets a dangerous precedent that threatens the core of Western democratic values,” Jordan said.
The issue may come to a head in a couple of different venues. That could be the courts if any tech companies file lawsuits over the law, or it could come up in trade negotiations if President Donald Trump decides to press the issue with British politicians, although they say it’s not open to debate in trade talks.
Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist and Meta board member with close ties to the Trump administration, recently called U.K. leaders to complain about the law, the Financial Times reported Friday. A spokesperson for Andreessen said the report was not true.
The U.K.’s Online Safety Act is one of the most comprehensive national laws that any democracy has ever passed to try to curtail potentially harmful content online in the name of children. Parliament passed the law in 2023, and the government went through two years of writing detailed rules before putting the law into effect last month.
The law is notable for a combination of reasons: the variety of content it applies to, the potential fines and the possible international reach.
A wide array of content is at issue. While the “primary” focus of the law is online material such as pornography and suicide, it also requires websites to age-gate content with bullying, serious violence, “dangerous stunts” and “exposure to harmful substances.” That has covered relatively mainstream services such as Spotify and Microsoft’s Xbox gaming system.
Companies that don’t comply face potential fines of up to 10% of their global revenue, which for the biggest companies could be billions of dollars. The British regulator Ofcom, short for Office of Communications, says companies must use “highly effective age assurance” to restrict the riskiest types of content.
And the U.K. has not been adamant that it won’t allow international borders to stymie enforcement. Ofcom says it plans to apply the law to services with “a significant number” of U.K. users, services where U.K. users “are a target market” and services that are “capable of being accessed” by U.K. users with a “material risk of significant harm” to such users.
The law appears to retain strong support among the British public. About 69% said they supported the new rules in a YouGov poll taken after implementation began, and 46% said they supported it “strongly.” But 52% said they do not think the law will be very effective at preventing minors from accessing pornography.
The law was passed during a previous, Conservative-led government and took effect under the current, Labour-led government.
But the far-right party Reform U.K. is pushing for a repeal of the law. Party leader Nigel Farage, a former member of Parliament, has called it “state suppression of genuine free speech,” and his party is running high in polls.
“Millions of people have noticed that what they’re getting on their feeds is different to what it was,” Farage said at a recent news conference.
Farage also met with visiting members of Congress last week, and the talks turned heated with Farage and Democrats exchanging insults, according to Politico, although the dispute appeared to be more about Trump’s free speech restrictions than about the U.K. law.
Most U.S.-based tech companies say they are complying with the new law. Microsoft said in a blog post that Xbox users in the U.K. would begin seeing notifications “encouraging them to verify their age” as a “one-time process,” with actual enforcement starting next year. If users don’t comply, Microsoft warned, they’ll lose access to social features of Xbox but will still be able to play games.
Discord said it was implementing new default settings for all U.K. users, in effect treating everyone like a minor with heavy content filtering unless they verify that they’re adults. Discord says users can choose to verify their age either with a face scan or an ID upload.
Elon Musk’s X has also restricted posts, including information about the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, according to the BBC. X and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
But a few services are not complying. The far-right social media site Gab, which allows white supremacist views and other extremist content, said in a notice on its website that it had received notices from Ofcom and, rather than comply, decided to block the entire U.K. from accessing its site. The company said in the notice: “We refuse to comply with this tyranny.”
Preston Byrne, a U.S. lawyer who specializes in technology issues, has said on X that he plans to file a lawsuit soon on behalf of an unnamed client seeking to quash possible enforcement of the British law within the United States.
The subject has been simmering for months ahead of the law’s implementation, and it came up in February when British Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited the White House.
In an Oval Office meeting, a reporter asked Trump what he thought of the U.K. approach to free speech, and Trump tossed the question to Vance, who expressed concern.
“We do have, of course, a special relationship with our friends in the U.K. and also with some of our European allies. But we also know that there have been infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British — of course, what the British do in their own country is up to them — but also affect American technology companies and, by extension, American citizens,” he said.
Starmer defended his government’s approach.
“We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom, and it will last for a very, very long time. Certainly, we wouldn’t want to reach across U.S. systems and we don’t, and that’s absolutely right,” he said.
British Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy later said the U.K. would not make any changes to the Online Safety Act as part of trade negotiations with the Trump administration.
American privacy advocates are watching the debate play out with alarm, concerned that similar age verification laws — like new state laws targeting the Apple and Google app stores — would upend the internet closer to home.
“Young people should be able to access information, speak to each other and to the world, play games, and express themselves online without the government making decisions about what speech is permissible,” wrote Paige Collings, a senior speech and privacy activist at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a blog post Tuesday.
