Illinois Just Passed a Law That Puts Linux on the Hook for Age Verification
Ranked #1 on Hacker News with 63 points and 49 comments.
HB5511 is officially about TikTok and Instagram. Read past the press release and it’s also about your operating system.
Governor JB Pritzker’s press release on HB551 1 is thick with quotes from legislators and advocacy groups, and it names Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, X, Facebook, and Roblox specifically. Device setup gets one mention, framed as something a parent configures during setup. Nowhere does it explain that the law also creates a separate legal category called an operating system provider , with its own 2028 deadline and its own civil penalties, that has nothing to do with what any parent chooses to click.
Set the operating system question aside for a second, because the social media half of this bill is fairly standard for 2026. Platforms built around algorithmic feeds, plus platforms where kids can be contacted by strangers (Roblox is the named example), now have to default minors into chronological, follow-only feeds instead of an engagement-optimized one. Notifications get cut off overnight. Adult strangers can’t see a minor’s profile, message them, or see their location. News sites, email providers, broadband companies, and school software are all carved out by name.
It passed the General Assembly on June 1 without a single no vote, 57-0 in the Senate and 113-0 in the House concurrence. Pritzker signed it July 31, flanked by quotes from Attorney General Kwame Raoul and groups like Common Sense Media and Mothers Against Media Addiction. Nothing about that rollout mentions your desktop.
Here’s what actually set off the Reddit thread: a post claiming Illinois now requires operating system providers, open source projects included, to build age verification by 2028. It wasn’t universally believed. On at least one mirror of the discussion, a commenter argued the framing was misleading and that the post should be corrected. So instead of trusting a screenshot either way, we went and read the bill on the Illinois General Assembly’s own tracker.
It holds up. Separate from the social media rules, HB5511 creates duties for an operating system provider and folds device makers, OS vendors, and app stores together under the term covered manufacturer . Legislative trackers that follow this exact category of bill across states file this piece under its own name: Digital Age Assurance , the same bucket Colorado’s and California’s versions land in.