An investigation has identified five organizations with ties to Britain’s Online Safety Act that are now involved in age-verification or digital ID legislation across 21 U.S. states and Congress, including groups that helped shape similar policies in the United Kingdom and California.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
A network of mostly British organizations that supported the United Kingdom’s sweeping online safety law has expanded its activities into the United States, backing age-verification and digital identity proposals across 21 states and in Congress, according to a new investigation examining the groups’ lobbying, funding and policy activities.
The organizations include 5Rights Foundation, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, the Age Verification Providers Association and Reset Tech. Four are British, while Reset Tech operates internationally and maintains a U.K. branch.
Their activities raise questions about the degree to which policies developed in Britain are influencing U.S. legislation governing online identity, age verification and access to digital services.
Investigative outlet Effort identified the five organizations as groups that supported Britain’s Online Safety Act and have subsequently become involved in related American legislative efforts.
The organizations’ connection to British policy is particularly significant because the Online Safety Act established extensive government regulation of online platforms, including requirements affecting how companies handle user safety and access to certain content.
One of the clearest examples of the policy transfer can be found in California.
5Rights Foundation, a British nonprofit chaired by Baroness Beeban Kidron, sponsored California’s Age Appropriate Design Code in 2022. In a joint statement concerning the legislation, two authors of the California measure and 5Rights explicitly pointed to British policy as a model.
“The Bill is practicable and realistic, drawing as it does on the UK’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC),” the statement said.
5Rights has since participated in legislative activity involving 42 bills across 18 U.S. states, with 11 of those measures becoming law.
Its California lobbying also involved paid representation.
The organization paid Capitol Connection $50,000 to lobby the California Legislature in 2022. The work was not disclosed as lobbying on behalf of a foreign principal until 2024, more than a year after the legislation passed.
The subsequent disclosure stated that 5Rights was not “supervised, owned, directed, controlled, financed, or subsidized by a foreign government, foreign political party, or other foreign principal.”
The filing left blank an item that would have detailed the amount of control Kidron, who founded the organization and was then serving as a director, exercised over it.
Kidron has also advocated expanding age-verification systems to address the use of virtual private networks, or VPNs, which can allow users to route their internet activity through another location.
Social media restrictions that do not account for VPNs are “for show and headlines, not for children,” Kidron has written.
The push to apply verification requirements to VPN users is shared by another organization in the network — the Age Verification Providers Association.
Unlike the other advocacy organizations, AVPA is a trade group representing businesses that sell age-verification and age-estimation technology.
The British association backed the Online Safety Act and has also advocated requiring additional age checks when users access regulated websites through VPNs.
That commercial role distinguishes AVPA within the broader policy campaign because its member companies provide the technology that could be required under age-verification mandates. Reclaim the Net highlighted that relationship while examining the organizations involved in the U.S. legislative efforts.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate, another British organization active in the debate, has publicly described its involvement in developing the U.K. regulatory framework.
CCDH chief executive Imran Ahmed told Baroness Jones of Whitchurch that his organization had “championed the Online Safety Act since its inception” and that he was the “first witness before the draft bill committee” that examined the legislation.
CCDH has subsequently become part of a broader U.S. debate over foreign organizations and online speech. Civil liberties organizations have called for scrutiny of U.K.-U.S. cooperation involving online censorship policies.
Its influence has extended beyond Britain as well.
According to findings from the House Judiciary Committee, a European Commission handbook concerning borderline online content “contained platform ‘policy recommendations’ from the biased, left-wing pseudoscience group Center for Countering Digital Hate.”
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue has also operated at the intersection of government funding, online-content policy and technology companies.
ISD has received funding from the U.S. State Department for work intended to “advance the development of promising and innovative technologies against disinformation and propaganda.”
The organization also participates in Spotify’s Safety Advisory Council and YouTube’s Trusted Flagger program. Google says reports from Trusted Flaggers are prioritized.
Effort calculated that ISD’s contracts involving the State Department, European Union and multiple U.K. ministries have exceeded $17 million.
Those relationships have attracted attention on Capitol Hill.
“In July 2025, to gain a better understanding of how European regulators interact with third party organizations to censor online speech, the Committee requested and obtained documents from two CSOs, Access Now and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue,” the House Judiciary Committee stated in documents examining foreign influence over online speech regulation.
The committee’s investigation has also examined European efforts to influence content-moderation practices at major technology companies.
Reset Tech, meanwhile, provides another direct connection between British online regulation and current U.S. lobbying activity.
In its submission to U.K. communications regulator Ofcom, Reset Tech argued that super complaints “must become a meaningful structural accountability tool.”
The super-complaint system allows designated organizations to raise systemic concerns with Ofcom involving regulated online services.
Reset Tech Action, the group’s U.S. affiliate, spent $1,352,800 lobbying Congress and state legislatures between 2024 and the middle of 2026. Four of the six bills on which it lobbied were also measures involving 5Rights.
The overlap illustrates how the same organizations have repeatedly appeared around legislation dealing with online identity, children’s internet access and platform regulation in multiple jurisdictions.
The controversy extends beyond individual state bills because members of Congress have increasingly treated foreign digital regulation as an issue affecting Americans rather than solely a matter of domestic European policy.
The House Judiciary Committee has characterized Britain’s Online Safety Act as “perhaps the most notable foreign attempt to imitate” the European Union’s Digital Services Act.
The committee wrote that the British law “paves the way for Ofcom, the UK’s relevant regulatory authority, to regulate how social media platforms ‘should deal with [so-called] disinformation and misinformation.’”
The Online Safety Act has consequently become part of a wider Washington debate about whether foreign regulatory systems can indirectly affect speech and privacy protections for U.S. users.
Similar concerns have surrounded the European Union’s Digital Services Act, particularly where global technology companies apply policies developed to satisfy European regulations across international platforms.
The U.S. campaign now involves a separate but related issue: requiring internet users to prove their age or identity before gaining access to certain services.
Supporters generally present such measures as protections for children online, while critics have raised privacy and free-speech concerns surrounding systems that can require users to provide identifying information before accessing lawful content.
The activities identified across 21 states show that the current debate is not developing independently in every legislature.
Several of the organizations advocating U.S. policies previously participated in creating, supporting or administering similar regulatory structures in Britain. One — the Age Verification Providers Association — represents companies whose services could be used to satisfy the resulting verification mandates.
Meanwhile, 5Rights has explicitly invoked Britain’s Age Appropriate Design Code as the foundation for California legislation and has participated in dozens of bills around the country.
The result is an increasingly interconnected policy campaign in which regulatory ideas first developed or promoted in the United Kingdom are now appearing in statehouses across the United States, as Congress simultaneously investigates the role foreign governments and outside organizations have played in shaping online speech and technology policy.
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