1. United States
2. N.Y.
3. Letter

Vote against any age verification mandate for social media in our state. These bills are sold as child protection, but what they actually require is identity verification — the end of anonymous browsing and the creation of a surveillance infrastructure that will outlast any good intentions behind it. The evidence is already in. Discord was hacked in autumn 2025, exposing ID documents of 70,000 users. That's what happens when platforms are forced to collect identity data — they become targets. Meanwhile, the UK arrests 30 people daily for "grossly offensive" online posts, and the US has seen authorities pressure tech companies to unmask identities behind anti-ICE accounts. Anonymous speech isn't a loophole. It's how dissent survives. The slippery slope here is a documented policy trajectory, not a hypothetical. Utah already criminalizes VPN use to bypass these restrictions. The UK House of Commons passed legislation enabling VPN restrictions via secondary legislation. Once our state mandates identity verification, we're one legislative session away from the same. I'm asking you to reject this now, before we build the infrastructure that makes mass surveillance inevitable.