Mandatory identity verification and speech controls? That hardly sounds “Western” — yet mere regulation does not seem capable of solving the root problem.
Imagine that you’re about to register for a social media account.
The platform asks you to provide a mobile phone number.
Then, it may require you to prove your age.
If you want to access certain content, you may even need to undergo further authentication.
Meanwhile, your comments may be automatically identified, downgraded, or deleted by AI. You don’t even necessarily know which rule, algorithm, or reviewer decided your content was “unappropriate.”
This kind of internet doesn’t seem quite like the internet we used to imagine.
Especially when these things happen in Britain, the European Union, or Australia, it can even give people a strange feeling: this doesn’t sound like what we used to understand as the “Western Internet.”
But the problem may not be that “the West is becoming unlike the West.”
This article argues that strengthening government regulation is now a clear trend in Western countries, and political polarization may drive Western internet governance closer to the Chinese model. However, regulation alone cannot solve the fundamental problem. Compared to state regulation, community autonomy is more important for rebuilding a healthy internet.
The Internet of the past emphasized open, anonymous, and free expression. The Internet of today increasingly relies on platforms, data, authentication, algorithms, and regulation. Authentication and speech control are just the two most visible results of this massive transformation.
The Internet once promised: You can speak freely here
The internet vision of the 1990s was very different from today.
John Perry Barlow, in his 1996 Declaration of Cyberspace Independence, even directly demanded that industrial-age governments “leave” cyberspace. What he envisioned was a new space that was not controlled by traditional national boundaries and shaped by web users themselves.
This vision was also linked to the legal environment in the United States at the time.
In Reno v. ACLU (1997), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Internet has different expression characteristics from traditional broadcast media and conducted a rigorous review of laws that excessively restrict Internet speech.
Therefore, the early Internet was often imagined as an open public space:
Anyone can enter.
Anyone can express.
You can even not tell others who you are.
This is an important component of internet culture. But this didn’t last long.
The early internet was imagined as an open and decentralised space. Image: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Early_internet_(cropped).png
When the Internet begins to ask, “Who are you?”
Platformization further brings another change:
Identity.
In the past, anonymity may have been part of the internet culture. Now, age verification, mobile phone number verification, account authentication, and even identity verification are increasingly entering the online space.
Australia is a very obvious example.
Beginning on December 10, 2025, Australia requires reasonable measures to be taken by platforms identified as age-restricted to prevent Australian residents under the age of 16 from creating or continuing to own related social media accounts. Currently affected platforms include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, Reddit, etc. This is different from platform governance in China. While Australia focuses on age restrictions and platform responsibilities within the framework of liberal law, China combines real-name registration, government regulation, platform self-discipline, and content review. In China, platforms are not only providers of services, but also quasi-governmental actors responsible for maintaining order. The Australian case shows that Western countries are moving toward stronger regulation, but not necessarily emulating China. Nevertheless, both cases reveal a common trend: countries are reentering platforms.
3NewsGH. (2025, December 5). Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/3newsgh/
The platform began to take on the responsibility of determining whether you were eligible to enter. X’s own explanation of age assurance shows how age verification is becoming part of the platform experience.
Obviously, the so-called “Western network” model no longer exists.
From Platform Self-Governance to Government Beginning to Enter the Platform
So, why do governments increasingly want to regulate the internet?
Part of the answer comes from what has happened over the past decade.
Events such as Cambridge Analytica, cyber hatred, false information, violent content, and election interference constantly challenge the assumption that “plattforms manage themselves.”
Thus, the platform began to build large Trust & Safety teams to use human and AI to review content.
At the same time, governments began demanding more responsibility from platforms.
This formed a new kind of governance structure:
The platform makes the rules.
The algorithm enforces the rules.
Government monitoring platform.
Users accept the rules.
The DSA illustrates how this relationship is changing: platforms are increasingly required to provide transparency and mechanisms through which users can challenge certain decisions.
Gillespie’s research on content censorship is particularly important because it reminds us that censorship is never just about “deleting bad content.” The platform is actually deciding what can be said, what is worth seeing, and what needs to be hidden.
Suzor further points out in Lawless that the internet is no longer a completely lawless space. The internal rules of technology companies themselves have a huge impact on user behavior and rights.
But can regulation really solve the problem?
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Here arises a more difficult problem.
Regulation can certainly address some specific problems.
It can require the platform to conduct risk assessments. It can require transparency reporting. A user complaint mechanism can be established.
TrollWall. Censorship and free speech signpost. https://trollwall.ai/article/how-social-media-moderation-differs-from-censorship
But they don’t necessarily solve the deepest problems of the internet.
Instead:
We can see that in countries like China and Russia, sensitive comments and topics are quickly deleted. But the users with these dangerous ideas still exist, and the roots of these ideas are not threatened at all, and may even be exacerbated by tough controls.
The deeper reason is the business model of the platform is highly dependent on data, advertising, attention, and user behavior prediction. Zuboff summarizes this model as surveillance capitalism, emphasizing that companies predict and even influence behavior by collecting and analyzing user behavior data.
Even if the government requires the platform to delete hate content, if the platform’s recommendation system still rewards high interaction, high emotion, and high controversial content, then the mechanisms that generate problems may still exist.
Therefore, today’s problem is no longer:
“Should the internet be managed by governments or by platforms?”
And it increasingly becomes:
“How exactly should governments, platforms, and users jointly govern the internet?”
So what possible solutions might there be?
Unfortunately, in the various social systems we have today, the operation models of the platforms are all very limited.
We lack sufficient samples to demonstrate exactly what kind of platform operation model can fundamentally solve the problem of the increasingly radicalization of the current network environment.
However, by referring to the operation of other global institutions, we can still draw quite reliable conclusions.
For instance, Thorsten Benner mentioned in his article that many people believe that the current global governance is leading towards a world where there is an increasingly overlapping governance structure taking on a form of private oligarchy.
The key to solving these problems lies in eliminating the traditional dialogue models centered on the state and purely inter-governmental multilateralism. To form a truly diverse negotiation model, public and private resources should be pooled in a collaborative manner, which can enhance the overall problem-solving ability.
These problems are actually similar to those faced by the online world, especially by platforms nowadays. Therefore, we can reasonably believe that the key to truly resolving the increasingly polarized issue of platform speech in the present era is not achievable simply by the government raising review standards or platforms and companies adding some age restrictions.
It requires the participation of platforms, governments, users, and even the market. To form a mature autonomous space.
Conclusion: Regulation is not the end, but part of the internet transformation
Therefore, mandatory authentication and speech control do not simply mean that “the West is becoming unlike the West.”
More precisely, they reflect the transformation of the internet itself:
Open network → Platformized network
Anonymous participation → Identified participation
User self-governance → Platform governance
Regulation is very important in this process.
But regulation itself is not the answer.
The key is whether users and communities can manage themselves, not just be managed by countries and platforms.
If we only ask the platform to delete more content and authenticate more identities, without discussing the platform’s business model, algorithm recommendations, data collection, and centralization of power, then we may only be managing the surface of the Internet, without touching why it generates these problems.
References
Barlow, J. P. (1996). A declaration of the independence of cyberspace. Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Benner, T., Reinicke, W. H., & Witte, J. M. (2004). Multisectoral Networks in Global Governance: Towards a Pluralistic System of Accountability. Government and Opposition, 39(2), 191–210.
eSafetyCommissioner. (2025). Social media age restrictions and your family.
European Commission. (2026). Digital Services Act: Questions and Answers.
European Commission. (2026). How the Digital Services Act enhances transparency online.
Ofcom. (2026). Protection of children duties under the Online Safety Act.
Suzor, N. P. (2019). Lawless: The secret rules that govern our digital lives. Cambridge University Press.
U.S. Supreme Court. (1997). Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997).
Zuboff, S. (2023). The age of surveillance capitalism. In Social theory re-wired (pp. 203–213). Routledge.
Image References
Michael C. (2010). Early internet (cropped) [Photograph]. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA [version]https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Early_internet_(cropped).png[accessed 25 September 2026]
3NewsGH. (2025, December 5). Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/3newsgh/
TrollWall. Censorship and free speech signpost. https://trollwall.ai/article/how-social-media-moderation-differs-from-censorship
Social Media References
X. (2026). Age Assurance on X . https://help.x.com/en/rules-and-policies/age-assurance
