22 October

When a website or app asks you to verify your age, you often have to hand over a credit card, an ID document or other information that identifies you. On 22 October 1998, 17 plaintiffs including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation went to the federal court in Philadelphia to challenge the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), signed the day before, arguing that its age verification and identification requirements would stop readers from accessing speech anonymously. COPA made commercial providers of material harmful to minors on the web criminally liable, though restricting minors' access through means such as a credit card or an adult access code could be raised as a defense. COPA was blocked by court injunctions from 1999 and never took effect, and in 2025, in a case about a Texas law, the US Supreme Court upheld a requirement for pornography sites to verify that visitors are at least 18. In Asia-Pacific, Australia's under-16 social media rule has applied since 10 December 2025 and requires information collected for age checks to be destroyed after use, while Malaysia's child protection code, which took effect on 1 June 2026 with a grace period for providers to complete verification, bars children under 16 from registering social media accounts.