02/06/2026
The dominoes are falling. And they are falling fast.
*Australia banned under-16s from social media.
*The EU mandated platform accountability under the Digital Services Act. *Vietnam now requires social media profiles to be tethered to a national identity number.
*The UK's Online Safety Act places enforceable duties of care on platforms where harm is foreseeable.
And this week, the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Texas Senate Bill 2420 ... the App Store Accountability Act ... ruling that platforms must verify who their users actually are.
Texas is not leading this movement. Texas is joining it.
The question for every platform still dragging its feet on identity verification is no longer "will we be required to do this?" It is "how much longer can we pretend we won't?"
Three years ago, we filed our Social Media Identity Securitization (SMIS) patent built on exactly this premise. Our SMIS architecture places verified identity at the account layer, not as an afterthought, not as a compliance checkbox, but as the structural foundation that makes a platform trustworthy in the first place.
We designed a purpose-limited data lifecycle: identity is verified, used for its defined purpose, and not held as a surveillance asset. That is now the framework Texas has written into law, and it mirrors what Australia's eSafety Commissioner has been driving through and what the Dating Code of Practice and the broader Online Safety Act obligations should be doing.
We weren't early because we got lucky. We were early because the logic was always inescapable.
The people who resist identity verification on platforms where trust is the entire product are, by definition, the people that every other user needs protection from!
Platforms have always known this. The argument that "users don't want verification" was never about users. It was about not wanting to lose the anonymous traffic that drives engagement numbers, regardless of what that traffic was doing to real people.
That argument is running out of countries willing to accept it.
Australia acted. The EU acted. Vietnam acted. The UK acted. Texas just had its law upheld by a federal appeals court. The eSafety Commissioner's jurisdiction continues to expand. The Online Dating Code of Practice exists because the Australian government directed it into existence, it was never a voluntary industry gesture.
At Securely, we have spent six years building the infrastructure that makes verified identity workable at scale for social platforms, without turning platforms into surveillance engines, and without creating the friction that gives platforms their excuse to stall.
The dominoes are falling. We built the table they're falling on.
