1. United States
2. Colo.
3. Letter

Vote no on the SCREEN Act and the other age verification and child safety bills coming out of the Senate Commerce Committee markup this week. The SCREEN Act in particular is a First Amendment disaster dressed up as child protection. It would require age verification on virtually every website with user-generated content — Netflix, forums, social media — based on a vague "harmful to minors" standard that could swallow enormous amounts of lawful speech. The bill's backers include Heritage Action, the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation, which authored Project 2025. That playbook explicitly calls for stripping First Amendment protections from pornography and shutting down tech companies that host it. Senator Lee has introduced versions of this agenda repeatedly — the SCREEN Act, the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act — and this markup is the latest attempt to push it through. The SCREEN Act also attacks VPNs by mandating IP-based age checks, forcing people to hand over IDs and biometrics to third-party sites just to access legal content online. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is right: when platforms face liability for broad, loosely defined harms, they over-censor lawful speech to protect themselves. That's not child safety — that's government-backed censorship with religious conservative fingerprints all over it. Kill these bills.