In the past few days, UK-based VTuber and artist Mimi Yanagi (also known as Timing Yanagi) was arrested for possessing her own fictional anime-style artwork. Her devices were seized, she was forced to create a new public account using her real name, and bail conditions restrict her to SFW content only. This stems from UK laws treating certain drawn, non-photographic fictional images as illegal — even when created by and depicting an adult artist’s own virtual character.
Simultaneously, Utah’s Senate Bill 73 (Online Age Verification Amendments) takes effect May 6, 2026. While aimed at age-gating adult content, it explicitly targets VPN use to bypass those checks and restricts sites from even discussing or facilitating VPNs. This is the first U.S. state law of its kind, raising serious concerns about privacy erosion, compelled ID/biometric verification for adults, and overbroad enforcement.
Both cases illustrate the same troubling pattern: governments invoking “protect the children” to justify expanding control over private adult expression, fictional art, and digital privacy tools.
Real child protection requires targeting actual abuse and grooming — not policing drawings or forcing adults to surrender anonymity on legal adult platforms. Parents, not the state, are primarily responsible for what children access. Sweeping laws like these risk normalizing surveillance, chilling legitimate speech and art, and creating new vulnerabilities to data breaches and government overreach.
Privacy is a right. Artistic expression is a right. Consensual adult sexuality and fiction are not crimes.
When platforms fail children, investigate and punish those failures directly — don’t punish everyone else with blanket censorship and surveillance.
This is why we need Digital Civil Rights.
One person becomes the victim of a government bent on controlling speech — made an example of, labeled as less than human — and laws are passed to silence a population while exposing everyone to a borderless prison of surveillance.
We have seen this pattern before.
This is the same behavior that emerged during the rise of the Nazis, Fascists, Jim Crow laws, and the targeting of homosexuals — if you do not fall in line in a prescribed way, you are told you do not deserve rights, that you are less than human.
And those claiming to “protect children” are using them as justification to pass laws that will ultimately strip those same children of their rights once they become adults.
They are not preserving freedom.
They are conditioning a generation to believe those rights were never necessary in the first place.
That is not protection.
That is grooming.
We must push back before these precedents spread further.
Sign and share if you value digital freedom.