SUMMARY
- British campaign group 5Rights has become one of the leading organizations promoting UK-style online child-safety regulation in the United States.
- The organization was founded by Baroness Beeban Kidron, a Crossbench peer who helped create Britain’s Age Appropriate Design Code and has separately introduced legislation regulating age-assurance technology.
- 5Rights has involvement in at least 42 bills across 18 US states, with 11 legislative vehicles becoming law.
- 5Rights says it directly sponsored California’s Age Appropriate Design Code and now works through a coalition active in 16 states to spread similar legislation.
- Although 5Rights argues that age assurance need not require conventional ID checks, its preferred regulatory model creates pressure for online services to establish whether users are children or adults through verification, estimation or behavioral analysis.
A British campaign group founded by a member of the House of Lords has quietly become one of the leading forces behind efforts to introduce online age verification systems across the United States.
The 5Rights Foundation, founded by Beeban Kidron, has spent more than a decade campaigning to force ID checks on technology companies. Kidron is a non-party aligned member (“Crossbencher”) of Britain’s House of Lords, the appointed upper house of the national legislature.
The Foundation’s influence is already deeply embedded in Britain. Kidron was instrumental in creating the UK’s Age Appropriate Design Code, while 5Rights has campaigned heavily around the Online Safety Act and now describes Britain as a “key testing ground for policy innovation and implementation.” The organization is now exporting that model abroad.
5Rights says that it is “leading the charge” on children’s online regulation in the United States and openly acknowledges that it sponsored California’s Age Appropriate Design Code in 2022. Its Kids Code Coalition is now active in 16 states.
According to an investigation by Effort, 5Rights has had involvement in at least 42 bills across 18 US states, 11 of which the investigation recorded as becoming law. Its evidence ranges from direct sponsorship and lobbying to testimony, bill-specific advocacy and support through allied coalitions.
At the centre of the model lies an unavoidable question. If children and adults are to be treated differently online, how does a website know which is which? Increasingly, the answer is age assurance.
5Rights grew largely out of Kidron’s personal campaigning. Before entering politics, she spent around three decades as a film director. She entered the House of Lords as a life peer in 2012 and sits as a Crossbencher rather than representing a political party.
According to 5Rights, the project began as a campaign in 2012 after Kidron started investigating children’s relationship with technology. She published the original 5Rights Framework the following year, arguing that children’s existing rights should apply equally in the digital environment. The campaign was formally established as the 5Rights Foundation in 2018.
The original framework asserted five principles: children’s rights to remove material they had created, know how their information was being used, receive safety and support, make informed use of technology, and receive “digital literacy education.” The organization now describes its mission more broadly in terms of five rights: privacy, safety, development, agency and participation.
FFO has previously exposed how “digital literacy” curricula have smuggled ideological, pro-censorship lessons into American schools under the guise of keeping kids safe online:
‘Media Literacy’ and ‘Digital Citizenship’: Smuggling Censorship and Indoctrination Into Schools
5Rights describes itself as an internationally active non-governmental charitable organization, with offices in London and Brussels. Its American operation is run as a joint project with Reset, while its wider work extends through Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America and international institutions.
Its activities include lobbying and advocacy, research, monitoring companies for regulatory compliance, developing technical standards and certification systems, and youth campaigning. It also jointly operates the Digital Futures for Children research center with the London School of Economics.
The organization’s influence extends well beyond national governments. Kidron chaired the drafting committee that supported the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s General Comment No. 25 on children’s rights in the digital environment, while 5Rights says its work has influenced policy in countries including Rwanda and international standards developed with IEEE.
Its latest accounts underline the scale of the operation. For the year ending March 2025, 5Rights reported income of £1.81 million, including £1.77 million in grants and donations, with £1.47 million of expenditure.
Its current executive director, Leanda Barrington-Leach, previously worked for the European External Action Service, where 5Rights says she advised the Secretary General on strategic communications and the “fight against Disinformation.” Former NSPCC chief executive Sir Peter Wanless became chairman in 2025, while Kidron moved into the role of founder and honorary president.
Kidron’s most important domestic victory came during the passage of the Data Protection Act.
In 2017, she introduced an amendment requiring the Information Commissioner’s Office to develop an Age Appropriate Design Code governing online services likely to be accessed by children. The resulting Children’s Code became enforceable in 2021. The principle was straightforward but far-reaching. Rather than simply removing particular illegal material, companies would be expected to design services differently where children might use them.
As FFO has revealed, exerting influence the design of platforms (as opposed to just content moderation policies) has become a key goal of pro-censorship nonprofits:
Censorship Through Lawfare: Knight-Georgetown’s ‘Litigating Platform Design’ Project
5Rights subsequently pushed the approach further through the Online Safety Act. The organization has described itself as unusual among campaign groups in seeking an “upstream” regulatory settlement focused on platform design rather than simply individual pieces of harmful content.
Kidron also introduced a separate Age Assurance (Minimum Standards) Bill in the House of Lords in 2021. The proposed legislation would have required any age-assurance system used by British digital services to meet statutory standards established by Ofcom.
5Rights soon carried the British model across the Atlantic.
In 2022, it helped design and sponsored California’s Age Appropriate Design Code Act, AB2273. Documents later filed with the US Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act make the intended policy transfer even clearer.
A jointly branded statement involving 5Rights and California lawmakers Buffy Wicks and Jordan Cunningham said that AB2273 was workable because it drew upon Britain’s Age Appropriate Design Code. At a press conference promoting the legislation, Wicks made the broader ambition clear: “We like to say as California goes, so goes the nation.”
5Rights hired California lobbying firm Capitol Connection to work on the legislation. According to FARA disclosures, the foundation paid the firm $50,000 between May and September 2022. The registration was not filed until 2024, after AB2273 had already passed.
The California bill subsequently became the template for a nationwide campaign. 5Rights says Maryland became the second state to adopt legislation modelled on Britain’s Children’s Code. Nebraska’s Age-Appropriate Online Design Code took effect in January 2026, while Vermont and South Carolina have also enacted versions of the model.
Its own 2025 annual report said it was continuing to “educate, inspire and support US efforts to advance age appropriate design,” highlighting legislation in Maryland, Nebraska and South Carolina and engagement with the Uniform Law Commission.
According to Effort’s report, there have been at least 42 legislative vehicles involving 5Rights across California, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont and Wisconsin.
Variants of its Age Appropriate Design Code model have now been enacted in five states: California, Maryland, Nebraska, Vermont and South Carolina.
The organization uses “age assurance” as an umbrella concept encompassing numerous ways of determining or estimating someone’s age. These can range from straightforward verification to less obvious methods.
Research published through 5Rights states that age assurance can include age estimation, age verification and behavioural detection designed to judge whether a user falls within the age range they claim. It acknowledges that such methods can create data-protection risks through excessive or intrusive collection.
Technical material associated with 5Rights and IEEE defines age verification as using physical identifiers or verified sources of identification, while age-estimation systems can analyze behavioral and environmental data, how somebody interacts with a device, or other characteristics.
A 5Rights parliamentary briefing has gone further, listing potential age-estimation signals including gait, voice, facial features and keystroke dynamics. 5Rights argues that privacy-preserving approaches are possible and notes that companies could avoid identifying ages altogether by simply applying child-friendly protections to every user. But that presents companies with a choice. Either apply children’s restrictions to adults as well, or establish which users are children.
Once legislation requires different online experiences depending upon age, there is inevitably demand for an infrastructure capable of sorting users accordingly. The issue is therefore broader than whether someone literally uploads a passport. A system can preserve a user’s name while still requiring him to prove or establish an attribute about his identity before accessing lawful material.
That is why age-assurance legislation increasingly overlaps with the wider debate over digital identity and online anonymity. 5Rights views the transformation as necessary to give children the protections to which it believes they are entitled.
Its critics see something else: the gradual replacement of an internet where adults can access lawful material anonymously with one in which users increasingly have to establish what they are before they can enter.
After Britain pioneered that regulatory model, 5Rights is now attempting to make it an American one too.
