Tag: think of the children

Pritzker Signs Law Making Devices Report Every User’s Age Bracket to Apps

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has signed the Children’s Social Media Safety Act, a law that takes the age check off individual websites and builds it into the device.

We obtained a copy of the law for you here.

It gives the state a say in what time minors are allowed to receive notifications. It’s also similar to what California is up to and also to what some senators want to extend nationwide. Starting in 2028, House Bill 5511 requires internet-enabled devices, operating systems and app stores to ask for the primary user’s birth date or age during account setup. The device then tells websites, apps, and online services which bracket that user falls into, whether under 13, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, or 18 and older.

Covered services must use the bracket to set default protections for users under 18. Algorithmic feeds are off for minors without “verifiable parental consent,” and their feeds can show only content they search for, posts from accounts they follow, and direct messages.

Feed notifications are blocked between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m., precise location data is shielded, and minors need parental sign-off for what the bill calls “gifted currency” exchanges.

The governor’s office says the law reaches Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, X and gaming platforms like Roblox. Traditional news media, broadband providers, email services and learning management systems are exempt.

The age declaration happens once, at setup, and then follows the user everywhere. NetChoice testified that Section 10 “mandates that device manufacturers and operating system providers collect birth dates, ages and age bracket data from all users, and share that information with covered developers through digital signals.” All users include adults. An adult setting up a new phone in Illinois states an age so the operating system can vouch for it to any covered service, and the company that ships the operating system becomes the gatekeeper.

Lawmakers passed the bill unanimously and Pritzker made it one of his top priorities for the spring session. “Big social media companies have intentionally designed their platforms to keep kids online for as long as possible,” he said at the signing in Chicago. House sponsor Jennifer Gong-Gershowitz, D-Glenview, said attention spans are shrinking, depression rates are rising and kids are “sacrificing sleep to scroll long past when they should be asleep.”

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UK Committee Hears Calls to Expand the Online Safety Act’s Powers

A row of peers has gathered in Westminster to decide whether the Online Safety Act has been cruel enough to the internet yet. After some hours of evidence, the verdict came back: not nearly.

The Communications and Digital Committee has been quizzing stakeholders about how the law is going, and the charities it called have a grievance: Ofcom is too soft. Andy Burrows of the Molly Rose Foundation put it like this: “I do not get the impression that the companies are quaking in their boots at Ofcom’s enforcement approach.” The boots, by every account, stood steady.

The censorship law, for anyone who missed its arrival, will make Britain the safest place in the world to be online. It says so itself. The maximum fine runs to £18 million ($24M) or a tenth of worldwide revenue, whichever bites harder, which for the biggest platforms would reach into the billions. And still, no boots.

So the room reached for the obvious cure. More of it. Baroness Kidron of the 5Rights Foundation, defending Ofcom and filleting it in the same breath, allowed that “the act is wrong in certain places and does leave certain gaps, and will need some more work.” Some more work. The gaps, you understand, all run in the one direction.

Look at the machinery already bolted on. A platform that performs “Ofcom’s 44 measures, or whichever number it is now” — Kidron’s phrase — is safe. Do the 44 things, claim your safe harbor, go home. Try something cleverer and you forfeit the protection. The law rewards the box-tick over the better idea. A bold design.

And the boxes do get ticked. Nearly two-thirds of daily visits to Britain’s adult sites now pass through an age check. Lord Vaizey told the Lords that Ofcom had begun investigating 47 sites for non-compliance. Ofcom’s own spokesperson said 69. Enforcement is one of those two numbers.

Ofcom says the picture is better than that. Change was already happening, its spokesperson offered; platforms held to account, fast enforcement launched, more protections put forward. Burrows allowed that some of the action already under way might be supervisory, Ofcom working with a firm rather than fining it, though the process is opaque enough that nobody could say how industrious it was.

Meanwhile, the children the whole edifice was raised to protect. On the risk it already knew well, child sexual abuse, Burrows granted Ofcom was doing a good job. His worry was the newer harms. He kept returning to the Com groups; networks largely of teenage boys, whose reported numbers rose sixfold between 2022 and 2024, running a new kind of grooming pointed at suicide and self-harm. The Molly Rose Foundation carries the name of Molly Russell, fourteen, who viewed thousands of images promoting suicide and self-harm before she took her own life.

Rani Govender of the NSPCC laid out the trap: when a platform spots a harm the codes of practice never named, it carries no obligation to act on it. The law covers what the law already wrote down. More scope. More codes. More measures numbered 44, or whichever it is now.

One problem stayed off the agenda. The Act treats two hard engineering questions as things a statute can order into being. The first is reliable age estimation; in the opening days of the new rules, people strolled past the checks using video game avatars to pass as adults. The second is reading encrypted messages without breaking the encryption, which cannot be done, a point Signal made by offering to leave the country rather than build the back door. “If the choice came down to being forced to build a backdoor, or leaving, we’d leave,” its president wrote. A mandate is a wish with a fine attached.

The public has been voting with its downloads. When the age checks landed on July 25, Proton VPN clocked an hourly sign-up increase of over 1,400 percent. Ofcom’s answer was to tell the BBC it would be illegal for platforms to encourage VPN use. To Ofcom, a loophole to close. The verdict in it went unheard.

And the petition to repeal the whole thing has passed 550,000 signatures. Having heard all of this (the avatars, the VPN stampede, the third of a million names) the committee asked whether the age-check regime might also be extended to VPN providers.

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The Left Is Using Kids As A Trojan Horse For Total Online Surveillance

It is the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook. Anytime a Democrat politician looks into a television camera and declares a new policy is “for the kids,” history tells us it is time to do three things: grab your Bill of Rights, lock your wallet, and check your firearms.

The political left has mastered the art of semantic camouflage. Because leftists’ true intentions – total state control and the systematic dismantling of individual liberty – are entirely unpalatable to the average citizen, they must cloak their radical agendas in the warm blanket of public safety.

We are seeing this exact misdirection play out today across two seemingly different battlefronts: the push for Universal Background Checks (UBCs) on firearms, and the sudden, “bipartisan” stampede to pass online child safety legislation. Under the microscope, however, they share the exact same DNA. They were never about protecting children. They are about building lists to target political opponents. Period.

Currently making waves in Congress are the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) in the Senate and the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (KIDS) in the House. On paper, the marketing pitch is flawless. Proponents claim these bills will shield innocent children from online predators, groomers, and illicit adult content.

At face value, it sounds reasonable. Who could possibly oppose protecting children?

The answer lies in the structural mechanics of the legislation. Just as gun control advocates use “safety” to pierce the veil of constitutional privacy, digital regulators are using children as human shields to bypass the First Amendment.

To understand the trap being set online, one must first look at the ongoing battle over Universal Background Checks. Under current federal law, licensed firearm dealers must maintain physical ATF Form 4473. Crucially, under the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act (FOPA) and the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) regulations, the federal government is strictly prohibited from centralizing these forms into a master database. If a firearm is used in a crime, investigators must work backward – from manufacturer to dealer to buyer. It is a localized, investigative process that protects law-abiding gun owners from mass government discovery.

Enter the left’s obsession with Universal Background Checks for private transfers. Proponents claim this keeps weapons out of the hands of criminals – ignoring the obvious reality that criminals, by definition, do not obtain weapons through legal channels.

The real objective is structural. A Universal Background Check law is completely unenforceable unless the state knows who owns every firearm in the country beforehand. The law has no teeth without a mandatory, centralized gun registry. It is the ultimate camel’s nose under the liberty tent.

This brings us back to the digital arena. Changing the law would mean de facto digital ID for every American. The database concept that makes UBCs so dangerous is the exact same mechanism driving KOSA and KIDS.

To enforce age restrictions online and block youth from specific platforms, websites cannot simply rely on the honor system. Platforms must mandate strict age verification. To prove your age, you must verify your legal identity. Proponents make it sound like it’s just the kids who must register.

However, they conveniently fail to mention the rest of the action. In order to prove they are not children, adults will be forced to upload government-issued identification simply to access standard political commentary, religious forums, or independent news sites. Platforms will choose the path of least resistance, implementing blanket identity checks to avoid massive federal fines. The immediate casualty of this regime will be political anonymity.

The author has personally witnessed this phenomenon, having friends in the UK with whom we’ve corresponded for many years. They have become extremely guarded in answering certain political-type questions in the past couple of years, basically avoiding commenting. And we all read now about British subjects being arrested for making comments in public or posting online viewpoints that oppose official positions.

Independent outlets like American Thinker rely heavily on robust, pseudonymous comment sections. Thousands of everyday Americans utilize digital pen names to engage in fierce partisan debates. They do not do this out of cowardice; they do it to protect their careers, their livelihoods, and their families from targeted harassment campaigns by the radical Left. KOSA and KIDS would mean the end of the dissident commenter.

If KOSA and KIDS become law, the era of the pseudonymous internet is dead. Email providers, forums, and social platforms will require positive legal identification just to open an account.

When you strip away the emotional appeals, the underlying architecture becomes clear:

  • Step 1: Force the population into centralized databases (whether via gun registries or digital IDs) under the guise of public safety.
  • Step 2: Eliminate the anonymity that allows for free, uninhibited political dissent.
  • Step 3: Weaponize those databases when political fortunes shift.

If progressive Marxists secure unchecked power over the administrative state and the judiciary, they will no longer need to hunt for dissidents. The compliance architecture currently being built in Washington will hand them a pre-verified list of their political opponents on a silver platter. And since they would have already emptied all the prisons, they’d have plenty of beds to hold us all.

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French Lawmakers Approve Ban on Social Media for Under 15s

French lawmakers on Tuesday adopted a bill banning children under 15 from using social media, making France the first country in the European Union to approve a blanket ban on the platforms as concerns grow worldwide over the harmful effects of digital content on kids.

Both chambers of the Parliament voted in favor of the measure, a flagship initiative of French president Emmanuel Macron’s second term. The bill also bans the use of mobile phones in high schools.

Several families in France have sued TikTok over teen suicides they say are linked to harmful content. Children’s advocates and parents applauded the vote.

“We’ve been campaigning for this bill from the start because, frankly, we have no other option, no other way to counter tech giants,” said Gaëlle Berbonde, a 52-year-old who lives in the Paris region. “The only thing we can do is protect our children, just as we protect our children from drinking alcohol.”

Berbonde told The Associated Press that her daughter was in seventh grade when she got her first smartphone. A parental control app helped monitor what she did online, but Berbonde had no idea what TikTok really was. After a few months, the family realized that the daughter was cutting herself and was suffering from anorexia and depression. She spent a year and a half in hospital but is now 16 and well.

The legislation is one of the final major measures adopted under Macron’s presidency before he leaves office next year. Macron wants the law to take effect at the start of the new school year in September. However, a review to determine whether the bill complies with the French Constitution is likely to take place and could delay its implementation.

The ban won’t cover online encyclopedias, educational or scientific directories.

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Supreme Court won’t block Texas from enforcing a law requiring age verification for app downloads

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to block Texas from enforcing a state law that requires apps stores to verify users’ ages and obtain parental consent for minors seeking to download apps or make in-app purchases on mobile phones.

Justice Samuel Alito, in a pair of one-sentence orders, denied petitions by plaintiffs who claim that the Texas App Store Accountability Act violates users’ constitutional rights to free speech.

Last month, a three-judge panel from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the law can take effect. The panel suspended a district court’s ruling last December that the law is unconstitutional.

The plaintiffs suing to block the law include the Computer & Communications Industry Association and Students Engaged in Advancing Texas. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is a defendant in both cases.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers argued that the law impermissibly seeks to limit access to content protected by the First Amendment, including news and educational material.

“Equity and the public interest support relief because protecting First Amendment rights — and parents’ rights to supervise their children as they see fit, not as the government tells them they should — is always in the public interest,” wrote attorneys for Students Engaged in Advancing Texas.

Attorneys from Paxton’s office argued that the law protects children from “dangerous modern products.”

“A child with access to an app store and a mobile device (such as a tablet or smartphone) can potentially download any number of software applications, potentially agreeing to invasions of the child’s privacy and sale of the child’s data and be exposed to any conceivable content without parental consent or even parental knowledge,” they wrote.

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Democrats Pick Up the Global Digital ID Agenda in Project 2029

A group of operatives gathers every few years to write the document that will supposedly save the party, and this season’s entry comes from Project 2029, a “liberal” outfit built as the mirror image of the conservative Project 2025.

One side wrote a blueprint that ended up staffing part of a presidential administration. The other would like the same result, but opens with the safest subject in American politics, the welfare of children.

What it has actually picked up is a global digital ID agenda, a policy spreading through Australia, Britain, and the European Union, the government-backed age check, increasingly a digital ID, that decides who gets onto a platform.

As first reported by Semafor, Project 2029 wants to make it the opening pitch of the next Democratic campaign, sold under the same banner every other global elite is using, child protection.

The first product off the line is called “Kids Over Clicks.” It would ban social media accounts for anyone under 16, trim the liability shield in Section 230, cap data collection on minors, and outlaw the targeted ads that follow them around the web.

The group’s executive director, Chad Maisel, a former adviser to Joe Biden and Cory Booker, frames the rollout as a contest of nerve. “We’re going to see many people running for president…and we want to set the standard in terms of the type of ambition that we want to see when it comes to solving these problems,” he said.

The pitch arrives wrapped in the language of a public-health crusade. Project 2029 calls this the “tobacco moment” for social media, and the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, one of its boosters, supplies the closing argument. “We are at the ‘tobacco moment’ for social media. The science is in, the lawsuits are succeeding, and public support is overwhelming. This agenda gives policymakers no excuse not to act,” he said.

It’s a clean story, complete with a villain and a rescue. It also runs on something its authors rarely say out loud.

To keep children off a platform, somebody has to check the age of everyone who shows up. At the scale of a national social network, there is no gentle way to do that. You confirm identity. A birth year typed into a box proves nothing, so the check hardens into a government ID, a face scan, or a digital credential tied to a real person.

The under-16 rule, sold as a wall around children, becomes a turnstile that adults have to badge through too. The framework keeps this in the footnotes. Once a platform must verify ages, the anonymous account stops being possible, and the pseudonymous handle that lets someone speak without surrendering a legal name turns into a verified record, logged and stored, waiting for the next breach or subpoena.

Not all of Kids Over Clicks pulls in that direction. Banning surveillance ads and capping data collection on minors would shrink what companies hoard, the rare provisions that take something from the platforms rather than from the user. The age gate sits awkwardly beside them, demanding the one thing the rest of the document is trying to protect, a person’s identity.

The countries already running it offer a preview, and not all of them are democracies. Australia switched on its under-16 ban in December 2025.

Britain’s Online Safety Act now greets users of Reddit and X with a demand for a passport or a face scan before they reach ordinary content, a regime broad enough that the Wikimedia Foundation went to court arguing it could force identity checks onto the people who edit Wikipedia.

The European Union is folding age verification into a continent-wide Digital Identity Wallet. The United Arab Emirates bars under-15s outright and requires digital identity checks to enforce it. Saudi Arabia, which already runs one of the most heavily policed internets on earth, shows where the road ends, in a country where the link between a citizen and every word they post is permanent and state-held.

That is the recurring shape of age verification as a genre. It is sold on its effect on children and judged, eventually, on its effect on everyone else.

The bet is that no candidate will want to be filmed arguing against protecting children, which is almost certainly correct. The price of winning it is a Democratic Party that runs, in 2028, on the same instrument Britain, Brussels, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh are each building for their own reasons, a standing check on who gets to speak without a name. Australia has already shown how the story goes. The kids find the workaround but the ID requirement stays.

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The House Just Voted for KOSA, a Privacy and Free Speech Disaster

The House voted Monday night to build the machinery of online identity checks into federal law, packaging the mandate inside a bundle of kids online safety bills that cleared the chamber 267-117, with 47 members not voting.

It marks the first time any version of the Kids Online Safety Act, known as KOSA, has escaped the lower chamber, and the version that survived carries a structure that pushes platforms to figure out who you are before you can use them.

The legislation, called the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act, or KIDS Act (H.R. 7757), stitches together more than a dozen separate bills, including KOSA, the SCREEN Act, the SAFE BOTs Act, COPPA 2.0, and the SPY Kids Act, plus data broker rules and research initiatives.

House leaders rushed it to the floor under suspension of the rules, a fast-track path requiring a two-thirds majority. Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie and ranking Democrat Frank Pallone, who announced their agreement a week earlier, said the bill would “hold Big Tech accountable” and described months of cross-aisle work toward what Guthrie called a “workable compromise.”

If you’ve been following our updates, you’ll know the accountability positioning hides the actual design. The bill defines “know” or “knows” to mean “to know or should have known,” and that phrase runs through sections covering platforms, AI chatbots, and gaming services.

A company that fails to spot a minor faces legal exposure, which gives every platform a reason to gather more information about everyone who shows up. The text tries to defuse this, stating that nothing in it may be construed “to require the provider of a covered platform to implement an age gating or age verification functionality on the covered platform.”

The reassurance collapses on contact. A platform forbidden from ignoring a user’s age, yet liable the moment it “should have known” someone was a minor, has one move left. It starts checking ages, deploying age-estimation tools, demanding ID, or watching behavior closely enough to guess. The law does not order surveillance outright, it engineers the incentive and lets companies build the rest.

That is the First Amendment problem dressed as a child-safety provision. Verifying age means verifying identity, and identity checks sit between a person and ordinary protected activity, whether that is reading, watching, posting, or speaking. Adult websites would face explicit age-verification requirements under the package, which functionally means every visitor proves who they are before viewing lawful content. Anonymous and pseudonymous speech, the kind the Supreme Court has shielded for decades, gets harder to find the more platforms lean on identity to limit their liability.

The bill tightens how data brokers handle children’s information and updates the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act to widen its reach.

But, to do that, it would require platforms that know a user is a minor to offer controls that limit communications, restrict geolocation sharing, cut compulsive-use features, and let users opt out of personalized recommendation systems, with default settings for minors set to what the bill calls “the most protective level of control with respect to privacy and safety.”

These are strong protections on paper and would be good if they applied evenly to all users, but they all depend on the platform identifying minors first, which loops straight back to the same question of how much data gets pulled from users, adult or not, to sort out who the children are.

The encryption language carries the same gap. The bill says platform requirements may not override encrypted communications and that companies must comply in ways that “do not compromise the integrity of strong encryption.” That could read as a shield until you notice that regulatory pressure to monitor behavior or flag certain users can hollow out encryption without ever formally banning it. Compliance routes around the protection the text claims to offer.

Getting the package across the floor cost the duty of care provision, the piece many child-safety groups and KOSA’s Senate authors consider the heart of the bill. The text now states that nothing in it may be construed to “impose a duty of care on a provider of a covered platform.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a KOSA co-author, wrote that “KOSA without a duty of care isn’t KOSA,” and said last week that the House version is “dead in the Senate.” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), the other co-author, agrees the provision was central. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, told reporters he stays open to negotiating with the House.

That stalemate is the most encouraging thing about this whole fight.

The Senate’s standalone KOSA (S.1748) keeps the duty of care, which would legally require platforms to “exercise reasonable care” to prevent broad categories of harm to minors. On the free speech axis, that is the more dangerous of the two bills, not the safer one. A duty of care over vaguely defined harms compels companies to police or re-engineer recommendation algorithms for lawful, constitutionally protected content, under threat of liability so open-ended that the rational corporate response is to over-remove anything that might draw a lawsuit.

So neither chamber holds the civil-liberties high ground. The Senate bill compels platforms to suppress protected speech, while the House bill conscripts them into identity verification, and a conference committee tasked with reconciling the two could just as easily graft the worst of each onto a single law as split the difference.

The good news for anyone who values either anonymity or free expression is that the two chambers, each representing a different type of civil liberties disaster, do not appear close to agreement.

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Government’s latest attempt to censor online discourse is grave threat to free speech

The government’s latest censorship Bill C-34 is framed as legislation necessary to protect children. However, it incorporates some of the worst elements of Bill C-63 – the government’s previous “Online Harms Act” that failed to pass – and adds new censorship powers.

The bill proposes regulating social media, online services, and AI chatbots through the creation of a Digital Safety Commission. The Commission will have broad discretionary power to force compliance from online services and compel the removal of any harmful or “hateful” material.

Controversially, the bill weakens the legal definition of hatred presently used by the courts, reducing the requirement from both vilification and detestation to only one of either vilification OR detestation. The result will be increased censorship and a substantial chill on controversial speech.

Importantly, existing laws capture almost all of the conduct outlined in the bill. This includes cyberbullying and non-consensual distribution of intimate images, terroristic or violent threats, hate speech under the Criminal Code, counselling self-harm (Criminal Code s.241), and possession and distribution of CSAM material.

The bill requires online service providers to create an age verification system. Though the bill doesn’t specify age verification methods, it will undoubtedly require service providers to collect biometric and/or behavioural information from both adults and children, engaging privacy rights and raising fears of security breaches. The effect will be to create a database of personal identifying information and to destroy online anonymity 

Digital services that fail to comply with directives of the Digital Safety Commission will face substantial fines based on a percentage of global revenue.

“Laws protecting children from online harm and abuse are vital. However, for the most part, they already exist. All digital services like YouTube, X, Facebook, and TikTok have reporting and takedown policies and mechanisms for illegal or egregiously harmful material. Criminal charges for hateful or threatening posts are already commonplace. Of course, laws should be enacted to address any gaps, but online age verification for children will require age verification for everyone. So while the government frames the bill as a law to protect children, its effect will be to control digital access, comprehensively surveil and punish adults for online dissent. Together with Bill C-22, it establishes an online surveillance architecture that will negatively impact every Canadian’s right to free expression. Parliament should pursue targeted child-protection measures without undermining privacy, anonymity, and freedom of expression.”

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The KIDS Act: A Bipartisan Mass Surveillance Megabill

Just weeks after Americans criticized the United Kingdom for imposing intrusive and heavy-handed social media rules, Congress is now advancing legislation that raises strikingly similar concerns about government overreach, privacy erosion, and the expansion of online surveillance.

A bipartisan agreement on children’s online safety legislation unveiled by House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders would impose new obligations on social media platforms, while creating powerful incentives for companies to end online anonymity.

The proposal is part of the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (KIDS Act), an omnibus package that bundles together multiple bills, including the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), the SCREEN Act, the SAFE BOTs Act, COPPA 2.0, the SPY Kids Act, and more, as well as data broker provisions and research and education initiatives.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie and ranking Democrat Frank Pallone announced Monday that they had reached agreement on the legislation, which would require social media companies to provide additional safeguards and parental tools for minors. The lawmakers said it would “hold Big Tech accountable.”

“We worked across the aisle for many months and have now found common ground on policies to significantly improve the digital environment for kids,” Guthrie and Pallone said in a joint statement.

As always, under that framing lies a familiar and deeply controversial approach: imposing broad obligations on platforms that hinge on whether companies know a user is a minor, without clearly defining how that knowledge is supposed to be obtained.

Congress has tried for years to set national rules for social media and youth safety. Those efforts have repeatedly stalled, in part because of unresolved tensions between child protection goals and fundamental privacy rights. In the absence of federal action, states have moved ahead with their own laws, often pushing even more aggressive requirements.

One of the main disputes appears to have been resolved in favor of House Republicans. According to a committee spokesperson, the agreement does not include a “duty of care” provision, a requirement backed by many child-safety advocates and several Senate lawmakers.

The bill text states that nothing in it may be construed to “impose a duty of care on a provider of a covered platform.”

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Federal Appeals Court Allows Ohio to Enforce Social Media Law Requiring Parental Consent for Minors

A federal appeals court has ruled that Ohio can enforce legislation requiring children under 16 to obtain parental consent before using social media platforms, marking a significant development in state-level efforts to regulate minors’ online activity.

TechSpot reports that the Cincinnati-based 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals issued a 2-1 decision overturning a lower court ruling that had previously blocked Ohio’s Social Media Parental Notification Act from taking effect. The law mandates that websites reasonably likely to be accessed by children under 16 must verify users’ ages and secure parental approval before allowing minors to create or use accounts.

The legislation was originally passed in 2023 and took effect in January 2024. However, it faced an immediate legal challenge from NetChoice, a technology industry advocacy group representing major platforms including Meta, TikTok, YouTube, Snap, and X. A federal judge initially found the law unconstitutional and blocked its implementation, but the appeals court has now reversed that decision and sent the case back with instructions to lift the block.

In the majority opinion, Judge Eric Clay acknowledged that the law does impose some burden on speech but argued it is narrowly tailored to address what Ohio identified as a compelling state interest. According to Clay, the legislation aims to protect children from online harms and prevent them from agreeing to platform terms of service without proper supervision.

“At bottom, the Act imposes a parental consent requirement,” Clay wrote. “That requirement constitutes a marginal burden that precisely targets the multi-faceted problem that Ohio has identified: Children’s unsupervised assent to terms and conditions for use of platforms that take advantage of and harm them.”

The decision represents a rare victory for state efforts to restrict minors’ access to social media platforms, as similar laws in other jurisdictions have been blocked on free speech grounds. Ohio Attorney General Andy Wilson praised the ruling as a win for families, stating it provides parents with necessary tools to monitor and control what their children view online.

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