A Sweeping Age Verification Bill Is Heading to Senate — Backed by Project 2025

Key Takeaways

• The SCREEN Act, introduced by Republican Senator Mike Lee, would require every website containing even one piece of content deemed "harmful to minors" to verify users' ages — covering most sites with user-generated content and mainstream platforms like Netflix.
• Unlike existing state laws that target sites where adult content makes up at least a third of material, SCREEN applies to virtually any site — and would also require age verification based on IP addresses, directly attacking VPN use.
• The bill is backed by Heritage Action, a sister organization to the Heritage Foundation that authored Project 2025 — whose stated goal is to redefine pornography as unprotected by the First Amendment and imprison its producers.
• The SCREEN Act heads to the Senate Commerce Committee for markup this week, alongside KOSA, the CHATBOT Act, and the Youth AI Privacy Act.

The SCREEN Act — the Shielding Children's Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net Act, introduced by Utah Senator Mike Lee — heads to the Senate Commerce Committee for markup this week, according to reporting by 404 Media. Of all the age verification bills circulating in Washington right now, this one is the broadest, the most explicitly ideological, and the most directly threatening to online privacy and free speech.

Most age verification laws we've covered — Iowa's adult content law, the KIDS Act, KOSA — target specific categories of platforms or content. SCREEN is different. It would require every website containing even one piece of content deemed "harmful to minors" to verify visitors' ages before granting access. Its definition of harmful content includes material that "appeals to the prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion" — language broad enough to sweep in mainstream entertainment platforms, user-generated content sites, health information platforms, and essentially anything touching on sexuality, reproduction, or human bodies.

Existing state laws generally apply to sites where adult content makes up at least a third of the material. SCREEN removes that threshold entirely. One piece of content is enough to trigger the requirement. As 404 Media's Samantha Cole notes, that means most sites with user-generated content — and platforms like Netflix — would fall under the law.

The VPN Attack Buried in the Bill

There's a provision in the SCREEN Act that deserves particular attention: it would require sites to verify ages based on IP addresses. This is a direct attack on VPN use. One of the most common responses people have to age verification requirements — and a legitimate one, given the privacy risks of submitting government ID to dozens of third-party verification vendors — is to use a VPN. SCREEN appears designed to close that door. If sites are required to verify based on IP addresses, and VPN IPs are associated with non-compliant jurisdictions or circumvention, the bill creates a mechanism to pressure platforms to block or flag VPN traffic as a compliance measure.

We've written extensively about the UK government's proposal to ban VPNs for minors — a proposal the UK ultimately ruled out after its own evidence review found little support for the premise. The SCREEN Act is attempting something similar through the back door of IP-based verification requirements.

Who’s Backing This — and What They Actually Want

The SCREEN Act doesn't have bipartisan support. It was introduced alongside exclusively Republican co-sponsors and is backed by a list of religious conservative and Christian nationalist organizations: the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, the National Decency Coalition, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Family Policy Alliance, and the Family Research Council, among others.

Most significantly, Heritage Action — a conservative lobbying group and sister organization to the Heritage Foundation, which authored Project 2025 — is listed in support. This is important context because Project 2025 is explicit about what it wants to do with pornography: "It has no claim to First Amendment protection," the document states, calling for the imprisonment of pornographers and the shuttering of "telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread." The SCREEN Act's sponsors have stated their goal in similar terms. Senator Jim Banks described internet pornography as having "infected our culture and corroded the vulnerable minds of America's kids." Senator Lee has separately introduced the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act three times — a bill that would make all pornography illegal at the federal level.

The SCREEN Act is not, in other words, primarily a child safety bill. It's a vehicle for a specific moral and political agenda that has been explicit about wanting to eliminate legal adult content from the internet entirely — and that has found, in age verification requirements, a mechanism that can be expanded to accomplish that goal without directly triggering First Amendment challenges.

The Same Mechanism, a More Extreme Destination

I want to be clear about where this sits in the landscape of legislation we've been covering. We've criticized age verification laws across this series — from Iowa to France to Australia — on the grounds that they impose privacy costs on everyone, don't reliably stop determined minors, and build surveillance infrastructure that serves interests beyond child protection. The SCREEN Act makes all of those criticisms more acute, not less.

When a bill with backing from Project 2025 architects defines "harmful to minors" broadly enough to cover mainstream entertainment and requires IP-based age verification in a way that targets VPN use, the child safety framing is doing a lot of work to conceal an agenda that has nothing to do with privacy, proportionality, or the kind of careful balance between protection and freedom that genuine child safety policy requires.

The Senate Commerce Committee is marking up this bill alongside KOSA and three others this week. Each of them has real problems. The SCREEN Act is in a different category — not just flawed policy, but a politically motivated expansion of age verification doctrine that its own sponsors have made clear they intend to use as a step toward criminalizing legal adult content entirely. That's worth saying directly.