1. United States
2. Ohio
3. Letter

I am writing to urge you to oppose the SCREEN Act, which would further entrench the dangerous trend of privatized censorship and financial gatekeeping over lawful digital content. This legislation, like the reintroduced Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and growing international efforts to impose ID verification, uses moral panic to restrict access to speech and art that powerful interests find uncomfortable. The SCREEN Act would pressure online platforms and payment processors to act as content police, forcing them to cut off access to creators and users who have done nothing illegal. We have already seen Mastercard and Visa strong-arm platforms like Steam and Itch.io into removing entirely legal adult games and artwork. These decisions are rarely transparent, and they disproportionately affect independent developers, LGBTQ artists, and small creators who lack corporate backing. No single company should have the power to decide what people are allowed to create, view, or buy online. Yet the SCREEN Act encourages exactly that. It invites financial institutions to act as unelected regulators, under threat of legal risk, all in the name of consumer protection. This follows a disturbing international pattern. In the United Kingdom and European Union, governments are advancing mandatory age verification and ID requirements for online content. These measures are intrusive and undermine digital privacy. If adopted in the United States or used as models, they would expose users to surveillance and data breaches, while pushing creators off the internet entirely. We cannot let vague and emotional appeals to safety become a pretext for silencing lawful voices. The SCREEN Act, KOSA, and related proposals weaponize concern for children and consumers in order to force through legislation that would never survive public scrutiny on its own. I urge you to reject the SCREEN Act and to oppose any law that empowers financial institutions or tech platforms to suppress legal content. Please stand for free expression, digital privacy, and the rights of all people to access and create without fear of being silenced by banks, payment processors, or government agencies.