Across state capitols from Sacramento to Springfield, a legislative movement is accelerating with remarkable speed. Dozens of age verification bills are advancing through committees, picking up bipartisan sponsors, and generating the kind of political consensus that rarely forms around technology policy. The pitch is simple: protect kids from harmful online content. The mechanism is anything but.
A growing body of evidence suggests that the very companies these laws claim to regulate — Meta chief among them — are quietly shaping, funding, and benefiting from the legislation. And the politicians championing these bills, many of whom have built careers railing against Big Tech’s power, appear to be handing their targets exactly what they want: a liability shield dressed up as child safety reform.
That’s the central finding of The BOTE Project, a research initiative that has been systematically tracking, analyzing, and cross-referencing age verification legislation in all 50 states. BOTE — which stands for Back of the Envelope — has assembled what may be the most comprehensive public database of these bills, their sponsors, their language, and the lobbying networks behind them. The picture it paints is disturbing.
According to the project’s findings, the legislative language across many of these bills is not just similar. It’s nearly identical. Template provisions appear in state after state, suggesting coordinated drafting by outside interests rather than independent lawmaking. The bills share structural DNA: broad definitions of “covered platforms,” age verification mandates that apply not just to social media giants but to any website or application that could be accessed by minors, and — critically — safe harbor provisions that protect platforms from liability if they implement approved verification systems.
That last element is the tell.
If the goal were truly to hold Big Tech accountable for exposing children to harmful content, the legislation would strengthen liability, not weaken it. Instead, these bills create a compliance framework that functions as an escape hatch. Implement an age gate — any approved age gate — and your legal exposure shrinks dramatically. For a company like Meta, which is currently facing a landmark trial over allegations that its platforms knowingly harmed minors, this isn’t a regulatory burden. It’s a gift.
The trial in question, unfolding in federal court, involves claims from hundreds of school districts and families alleging that Meta and Google designed their platforms to be addictive to children and failed to remove content they knew was damaging. A verdict against Meta could establish precedent that fundamentally reshapes how social media companies are held responsible for their design choices. But if age verification laws pass first and include safe harbor language, Meta could argue it has already complied with the legislative standard. The timing is not coincidental.
WebProNews first reported on this dynamic when System76, the Denver-based Linux hardware and software company, publicly called out the real agenda behind these bills. Carl Richell, System76’s CEO, argued that the legislation was never designed to protect children — it was designed to protect platforms. By shifting the compliance burden onto every website operator, app developer, and open-source project, the bills effectively outsource content moderation to the entire internet while letting the companies that actually profit from children’s engagement off the hook.
The irony is thick enough to cut.
Consider the political theater. Senators and state representatives hold press conferences denouncing Mark Zuckerberg. They wave printouts of Instagram posts that harmed teenagers. They invoke the names of children who died by suicide after exposure to online content. And then they vote for legislation that Meta’s own lobbyists helped draft — legislation that, once enacted, would give Meta a statutory defense against the very lawsuits those same politicians claim to support.
This isn’t speculation. The BOTE Project’s methodology traces the lobbying connections directly. The project cross-references bill sponsors with campaign contributions, identifies the trade associations and advocacy groups that testified in favor of the legislation, and maps the relationships between those groups and their corporate funders. Meta, through various industry coalitions and direct lobbying, has fingerprints on a significant portion of the bills now moving through state legislatures.
But the problems extend far beyond corporate influence. The technical implications of these laws threaten to reshape how the internet works — and not in ways their sponsors seem to understand.
California’s AB 1043 is a case study. The bill mandates age verification for any online platform accessible to minors, with a compliance deadline of 2027. As WebProNews has detailed, the law’s definitions are broad enough to encompass not just social media but forums, blogs, open-source software repositories, and any website with user-generated content. A Linux distribution’s community forum would be covered. A GitHub repository with a comments section could be covered. A small nonprofit running a WordPress site with a contact form could be covered.
The compliance cost for Meta? Trivial. The company already has identity verification infrastructure, billions in revenue to fund implementation, and an army of lawyers to manage regulatory filings. The compliance cost for a two-person open-source project? Potentially fatal.
This asymmetry isn’t a bug. It’s the feature.
Age verification mandates, by their nature, favor incumbents. They create barriers to entry that large platforms can absorb and small operators cannot. They push the internet toward a model where every interaction requires identity disclosure — a model that benefits companies whose business is built on collecting personal data and disadvantages those who believe the internet should remain open, anonymous, and decentralized.
The firestorm around AB 1043 brought this tension into sharp relief. Linux distributions, privacy-focused browser projects, and open-source communities suddenly found themselves in the crosshairs of legislation they had no role in creating. These projects don’t serve ads. They don’t algorithmically promote content. They don’t profit from children’s engagement. Yet under the plain text of the law, they’d face the same obligations as Instagram.
The situation in Illinois mirrors California’s overreach. SB 3977, which WebProNews described as “the Midwest’s quiet attempt to build an age-gating machine,” applies its mandates with similar breadth. The bill’s definitions don’t distinguish between a social media platform designed to maximize engagement and a community-maintained wiki. Both would need to verify users’ ages. Both would face penalties for noncompliance.
Colorado, to its credit, has at least acknowledged the problem. As WebProNews reported, the state considered exempting open-source software from its age verification mandates — a carve-out that recognizes the fundamental difference between volunteer-maintained community projects and billion-dollar advertising machines. But Colorado’s approach remains the exception. Most states have shown no interest in distinguishing between the two.
The BOTE Project’s verification page invites independent researchers, journalists, and the public to check its work. The raw data — bill texts, sponsor lists, lobbying disclosures, and contribution records — is available for review. This transparency stands in stark contrast to the legislative process itself, where model bills arrive pre-drafted, committee hearings last minutes, and the loudest voices in the room belong to paid advocates.
And the surveillance implications are real. Every major age verification system currently on the market requires either government-issued ID submission, biometric scanning, or third-party identity attestation. Each method creates a record. Each record can be subpoenaed, hacked, or sold. The result is a system where every American’s browsing habits become linked to their verified identity — not by the choice of users, but by the mandate of legislators who may not grasp what they’re building.
As WebProNews previously detailed, this amounts to Big Tech building surveillance infrastructure while avoiding accountability. The platforms get their liability shield. The age verification vendors — many of which are funded by or partnered with the same tech giants — get a guaranteed market. And the public gets a new layer of identity tracking layered on top of an internet that was designed to function without it.
The political dynamics make this particularly difficult to oppose. No legislator wants to be the one who voted against “protecting children.” The framing is deliberate and effective. Critics of these bills are immediately cast as defenders of Big Tech or, worse, indifferent to child safety. The actual policy details — the safe harbors, the surveillance mandates, the crushing burden on small operators — get lost in the emotional shorthand.
But the facts are stubborn. Meta spent more than $20 million on federal lobbying in 2024 alone, according to OpenSecrets. Its state-level spending, distributed through trade associations and issue-specific PACs, is harder to track but no less significant. When a company under active litigation for harming children is simultaneously funding legislation that would reduce its legal exposure for harming children, the conflict of interest isn’t subtle. It’s structural.
So what would real child safety legislation look like? The BOTE Project and its allies suggest starting with the platforms themselves. Require algorithmic transparency. Ban engagement-maximizing design patterns for accounts belonging to minors. Impose strict data minimization requirements. And — this is the critical part — strengthen, don’t weaken, the liability framework. If a platform’s recommendation algorithm pushes self-harm content to a 14-year-old, the platform should face consequences regardless of whether it checked the user’s ID at the door.
That approach would actually cost Meta something. Which is precisely why it’s not what Meta is lobbying for.
The current wave of age verification bills represents something more insidious than bad policy. It represents the successful capture of a populist impulse by the very interests that impulse was directed against. Politicians who genuinely want to protect children are being handed a tool that protects corporations. And they’re wielding it with conviction, unaware — or unwilling to acknowledge — whose hand is on the hilt.
The BOTE Project continues to update its database as new bills are introduced and existing ones move through committees. As of mid-2025, more than 40 states have active age verification legislation in some stage of the process. The template language continues to spread. The lobbying networks continue to operate. And the window for meaningful opposition continues to narrow.
For the open-source community, for privacy advocates, for small website operators, and for anyone who believes the internet should not require a government ID to access, the stakes are existential. Not in the dramatic, overblown sense that word often carries. In the literal sense. These laws, if enacted as written, would make it legally impossible for many of them to operate.
And Meta would be just fine.
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