At his blog, intellectual freedom campaigner Greg Lukianoff, author of The Coddling of the American Mind (Penguin 2018), warns that in the age of the internet, the free speech battle has changed.

Adobe Stock China censorship

He quotes FIRE’s executive vice president Nico Perrino’s recent memo to the staff of the free expression rights group:

In Congress and the states, there is renewed momentum behind legislation that would regulate constitutionally protected speech and burden access to it through age-verification and other requirements.

In the courts, recent rulings from the Fifth and Sixth Circuits involving laws passed in Texas and Ohio call into question decades of established First Amendment precedent.

And in the court of public opinion, social media and AI remain deeply unpopular. Many people do not think of free speech when they think of these technologies, and they may not instinctively understand how our arguments apply.

“Nico Perrino on the most important free speech fight” since the birth of the internet,” Eternally Radical Idea, June 23, 2026

As Perrino points out, new technologies, whether printing, movies, TV, or whatever, have always been targets of censors, acting from various motives. The motives are often good ones but usually, the main beneficiaries of the suppression of information are corrupt governments or other power centers. And as Lukianoff puts it, “once governments acquire those powers, they rarely surrender them voluntarily. And they always abuse them.”

The pitfalls of age verification laws

Many people, for example, do not realize that age-verification laws, which sound virtuous, require monitoring usage of AI at home.

It’s quite different from most laws enacted to protect minors. For example, government can keep minors out of the liquor store, the pot shop, the casino, and the tobacco stall just by making it illegal to sell to them or even to have them on the premises. (Of course, some kids will sneak in and steal but that’s a baked-in delinquency issue to which legislation is irrelevant.) In no case does prohibition of entry or service to minors in these venues involve monitoring everyone at home.

So far the ban in force in Australia is not keeping kids off social media. Governments have been very economical with information about how effective such monitoring will ever be, except for the purpose of collecting vast amounts of information on citizens that they could not otherwise access. That’s likely to be a new frontier in the battle for freedom of thought.