For years, Meta cast itself as the reluctant holdout against the Kids Online Safety Act, the one company that just could not bring itself to endorse a bill that was, at least on the face of it, written to protect children, but has an ulterior motive.
That resistance lasted right up until the Senate sweetened the pot. Once lawmakers bundled KOSA with a federal block on state AI laws and a national digital ID push, two measures Meta has spent millions lobbying to win, the company located its conscience and decided the bill was tolerable after all.
POLITICO reported that the conversion arrived the moment the Senate paired KOSA with the App Store Accountability Act, a digital ID bill aimed squarely at app stores. Meta now sits beside Microsoft, Apple, X, Snap, and Pinterest, all of them cheering for the legislation. It makes for an awkward look; a law sold to the public as a leash on the biggest platforms, when most of the biggest platforms turn out to be holding the leash.
As we’ve said many times before, and it seems we’re having to now say on a daily basis, verifying how old you are means proving who you are. The systems that estimate your age want a government ID, a face scan, or enough surveillance of your behavior to make an educated guess. None of them confirm your age and nothing else; they confirm your identity and keep a copy, so the platform that once let you be a username now wants your legal name on file.
So why would a company that lives off your data fight to make you surrender more of it? The App Store Accountability Act would order Apple and Google to verify ages at the store, which would load the cost and the legal risk onto the two companies that run the stores. Its own apps pick up no new obligation at all. Meta collects the identity-checked internet it has wanted for years and gets to look like a bystander while Apple and Google play the heavy.
The deeper payoff is older than this bill. Meta has dreamed of a real-name internet since Facebook’s early days, back when it enforced an authentic-identity rule until the public revolt made the policy too expensive to keep.
“Age verification” revives that dream by statute and applies it to everyone, with the invoice mailed to somebody else. A network of confirmed, identity-linked humans is also a network where the bots that annoy advertisers thin out, and ad space attached to real people fetches a premium. Protecting children is the version for the cameras; the version that moves the company sits on the balance sheet.
The less advertised half of the package lives in the preemption language. A handful of states have started writing their own AI rules, some governing how companies grab biometric data and let algorithms make decisions about residents. A federal block would bulldoze those efforts and erase one of the few places ordinary people can still object to how these systems treat their information.
Meta strolls away with a single, gentler national standard while residents lose the local protections they had started to build and the whole trade gets filed under everyone wins, as long as “everyone” means Meta.
The bundle also tucks in the NO FAKES Act and this is where the child-safety wrapping paper comes off completely. The bill would let anyone sue over an “unauthorized digital replica” and would hit platforms with heavy penalties for failing to obey its demands, among them fast removal of flagged content and policies to cut off repeat offenders.
A company staring down those fines for guessing wrong on a hard case will pull lawful speech first and worry about the details later. What the bill builds is a takedown machine, with the lever handed to whoever complains the loudest.
The actors’ union SAG-AFTRA has been pushing the bill hard from the other side, gathering more than 16,000 signatures on an open letter that frames it as a shield against deepfakes used in scams, fake endorsements, and the replacement of human performers. “Unchecked AI can ruin lives,” union president Sean Astin said and on that narrow point, he has a fair case. The trouble is what the rest of the bill does and how it curbs satire and parody.
The latest version came back last month from a bipartisan group that includes Senators Marsha Blackburn, Chris Coons, Thom Tillis, and Amy Klobuchar, with OpenAI, YouTube, and IBM applauding from the wings. The Senate Judiciary Committee takes it up Thursday.
Keep reading
Hellbound and Down 
You must be logged in to post a comment.