Who Decides What You Can Say

Age gates, filters and the new gatekeepers.

Nobody votes for the rules of online speech. They are written in draft bills, platform policies and technical guidelines, usually in response to a genuine problem, and almost always with side effects that land on people who were never the target.

This series looks at four of those rules as they were being made: an age-verification law, a European flagging scheme, automated moderation at scale, and a bill aimed at web crawlers. The pattern that emerges is worth watching, because it repeats.

Read the series

1. California Steps Back From Dangerous Expansion of its Age-Gating Law
   July 15, 2026 — Age checks for the whole internet, and the moment lawmakers hesitated.
2. EFF and ARTICLE 19 Submission to the European Commission on the DSA Trusted Flagger Guidelines
   July 16, 2026 — Who gets to be an official flagger of illegal content in Europe, and on what terms.
3. Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay—Accountability Must Keep Pace
   July 20, 2026 — Machines already decide what stays online; the safeguards have not caught up.
4. “Stealth Crawlers” Are Not a Threat to the Open Web. Bills Targeting Them Would Be.
   July 22, 2026 — A proposed cure for AI scraping that would do more damage than the disease.

The series continues

New articles are added to this series as they are published. You can also follow the full Who Decides What You Can Say archive, or browse all our series.