Democrats picking up Republicans’ digital ID agenda in Project 2029
Just one week after Republicans passed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act — legislation that will ultimately advance their digital ID agenda — Democrats have announced a plan to take things up a notch with the soon-to-be released Project 2029 in a project called “Kids Over Clicks.”
During every presidential election cycle, party operatives gather to write the document that will supposedly save the party, and this election season’s entry comes from Project 2029, a liberal Democrat agenda built as the mirror the “conservative” Republicans’ Project 2025. The Republican blueprint staffed the Trump administration, and the Democrat version will do the same thing if their party wins in 2028, beginning with the so-called welfare of children. (via Reclaim the Net):
As first reported by Semafor, Project 2029 wants to make it the opening pitch of the next Democratic campaign, sold under the same banner every other global elite is using, child protection.
The first product off the line is called “Kids Over Clicks.” It would ban social media accounts for anyone under 16, trim the liability shield in Section 230, cap data collection on minors, and outlaw the targeted ads that follow them around the web.
The pitch arrives wrapped in the language of a public-health crusade. Project 2029 calls this the “tobacco moment” for social media, and the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, one of its boosters, supplies the closing argument. “We are at the ‘tobacco moment’ for social media. The science is in, the lawsuits are succeeding, and public support is overwhelming. This agenda gives policymakers no excuse not to act,” he said.
It’s a clean story, complete with a villain and a rescue. It also runs on something its authors rarely say out loud.
To keep children off a platform, somebody has to check the age of everyone who shows up. At the scale of a national social network, there is no gentle way to do that. You confirm identity. A birth year typed into a box proves nothing, so the check hardens into a government ID, a face scan, or a digital credential tied to a real person.
The under-16 rule, sold as a wall around children, becomes a turnstile that adults have to badge through too. The framework keeps this in the footnotes. Once a platform must verify ages, the anonymous account stops being possible, and the pseudonymous handle that lets someone speak without surrendering a legal name turns into a verified record, logged and stored, waiting for the next breach or subpoena. (Emphasis mine)
The Republican/Democrat duopoly pushing the KIDS Act and Kids Over Clicks claim that our rights and constitutional protections will be safe, but there is evidence from other countries already running such programs that proves otherwise . . . and not all of them are western democracies. For example:
- Britain’s Online Safety Act now greets users of Reddit and X with a demand for a passport or a face scan before they reach ordinary content, a regime broad enough that the Wikimedia Foundation went to court arguing it could force identity checks onto the people who edit Wikipedia.
- The European Union is folding age verification into a continent-wide Digital Identity Wallet.
- The United Arab Emirates bars under-15s outright and requires digital identity checks to enforce it.
- Saudi Arabia, which already runs one of the most heavily policed internets on earth, shows where the road ends, in a country where the link between a citizen and every word they post is permanent and state-held.
The KIDS Act is a revised version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) — a pet project of Republican Senator and current candidate for Governor of Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn, and Democrat Richard Blumenthal — combined with a collection of other internet bills, study bills, reporting requirements, and new regulations. (via Electronic Frontier Foundation):
The package of cobbled-together bills is a mess, with different age-gating schemes for different services, using different standards. It’s a lot of complexity, and a lot of legal risk. Faced with that, many companies will conclude that the safest option is restrictive age-checking practices across their entire platforms.
Buried inside the KIDS Act are provisions that will push online services to verify all users’ ages, require government-directed moderation policies for online speech, and even create new rules about private and encrypted communications. While supporters continue to claim this bill protects minors online, its requirements come at the expense of privacy, free expression, and the ability of people of all ages to use the internet without revealing sensitive data. (Emphasis mine)
According to Blackburn, KOSA — first introduced in 2022 — was necessary because only government could be trusted to “protect” children from internet harm (via USA Today):
By now, it ought to be crystal clear that Big Tech cannot be trusted to regulate itself. It cannot even be trusted to tell the truth about the way its products harm young users. Parents are rightfully outraged. In a survey released Feb. 17 by the Tech Oversight Project, 86 percent of Americans said they want tech companies to be held accountable for their role in the social media addiction crisis.
To my fellow legislators, I have one simple question: Will you side with moguls like Mark Zuckerberg? Or will you side with the 86 percent of Americans who are demanding we stand up to Big Tech for preying on our children? (Emphasis mine)
Based on the Democrats’ 2029 Project, it would appear that Blackburn’s “fellow legislators” are ready to answer the call to “protect the children” using digital ID, which has been a part of the Republican/Democrat duopoly’s agenda ever since 9/11.
Even Big Tech is admitting the inevitability of digital ID, at least that’s what META CEO Mark Zuckerburg implied during his February trial on charges that he designed social media to be addictive to children (via The Free Thought Project):
The trial is framed as a child safety case. What it is actually doing, especially through Zuckerberg’s own testimony, is laying the political and legal groundwork for mandatory identity verification across the internet. And Zuckerberg, rather than pushing back on that outcome, offered the court his preferred implementation plan.
Multiple times during his testimony, Zuckerberg argued that age verification should be handled not by individual apps but at the operating system level, by Apple and Google. He told jurors that operating system providers “were better positioned to implement age verification tools, since they control the software that runs most smartphones.”
“Doing it at the level of the phone is just a lot cleaner than having every single app out there have to do this separately,” he said. He added that it “would be pretty easy for them” to implement. (Emphasis mine)
Under KIDS Act, your identity will be exposed to Big Tech at a whole new level. Every app on your phone. Every website accessed. Every communication sent through an app on your phone. And in case you haven’t noticed, Big Tech hasn’t been all that keen on protecting your privacy and they’ve been quick to hand over user’s data to the government on a whim — just ask former-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.
If the KIDS Act reaches his desk, Donald Trump is very likely to sign it since mandatory digital ID has been part of his border security agenda, an agenda that has received a big boost courtesy of his AI Stargate Project” — a government/private sector partnership with Big Tech’s Larry Ellison. Ellison has been instrumental in the UK’s roll out of a mandatory AI-based digital ID, and using his status as a big-money donor to Tony Blair’s Global Institute of Change, Ellison is positioned to make millions of dollars from centralizing the data of every internet user into, as Ellison himself put it, a “single, unified data platform” where government can get “all of that data in one place.” (Emphasis mine)
According to soon-to-be-former Prime Minister Keir Starmer, mandatory digital ID provides safer borders and stronger national security. What Starmer conveniently left out, however, is how digital ID will eventually give his government full control of nearly every aspect of daily life (via Times Now News):
The digital ID will include residency status, name, date of birth, nationality, and a photograph. Employers and landlords will be required to verify the ID before hiring or renting to someone, replacing paper-based checks like National Insurance numbers.
Ministers say the digital ID will eventually simplify access to services such as driving licenses, childcare, welfare, and tax records, while making government processes more efficient and reducing fraud. (Emphasis mine)
The KIDS Act and/or the Kids Over Clicks Act won’t only bring us mandatory digital ID, mass surveillance, and government control, it will also equip Republicans and Democrats to eliminate free speech and other God-given, constitutionally protected rights. Another example of this can be found in Australia, another country already in the digital ID camp (via CATO.org):
Whenever discussing age verification, it is essential to recognize that this doesn’t just mean that children will need to prove their identity. Everyone will need to prove their identity because platforms don’t know if a user is 6, 16, or 61. And while the law demands that platforms provide multiple ways to authenticate the age of a user, the reality is that it may be very difficult to distinguish between a 15-year-old and a 16-year-old without essentially requiring ID checks for all or many users. The point is that this age assurance regime will require users of all ages to provide platforms, some of which previously allowed anonymous or pseudonymous accounts and speech, with some significant degree of personal information and documentation. (Emphasis mine)
But requiring such information immediately puts anonymous speech at risk. (Emphasis mine
As I make clear in my book, The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty, partnerships between Republicans and Democrats to destroy free speech, seize control of the internet, and keep children “safe” aren’t unique.
For example, Lindsey Graham (a man with a long history of favoring government-controlled speech) co-sponsored a bill with Blumenthal in 2022 called the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT) Act — a bill they claimed would protect children from online sexual predators but would have, instead, furthered government’s insatiable desire to control the internet and destroy free speech.
The KIDS Act and the Project 2029 Kids Over Clicks Act is supposed to be necessary for the “safety” of children, but the reality is that it will become the backdoor to digital ID, mass surveillance, government control, and the end of digital free speech.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative and the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.
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