Mullvad: Age Verification Laws Are Identity Verification in Disguise

Mullvad argues that the global wave of social media age verification laws—now active or proposed across Australia, the EU, UK, US, and dozens of other countries—is really mandatory identity verification dressed up as child safety. The reasoning: platforms already know which users are minors, so politicians could simply order them to block children. Instead, lawmakers are choosing schemes that force every user to prove who they are, which Mullvad reads as the real goal: population-scale control over online speech.

The practical fallout is the end of anonymous browsing and posting on regulated sites, plus a steady drip of breaches like the 2025 Discord incident that exposed 70,000 users’ ID documents. Beyond direct enforcement—UK arrests for “grossly offensive” posts, German raids over insults to politicians, US pressure on platforms to unmask anti-ICE accounts, Canada’s freezing of trucker-protest donors’ bank accounts—the post warns of a chilling effect where users self-censor because the definition of unacceptable speech shifts with whoever holds power.

Mullvad also flags the obvious next step: once VPNs become the standard workaround, governments target them too. The UK has already passed a bill letting ministers impose VPN restrictions through secondary legislation with minimal scrutiny, France’s digital minister has named VPNs as her next file, and Utah has criminalized using a VPN to bypass age gates—putting Western democracies on a regulatory path that until recently was associated with China and Russia.