Senate Bill Would Require Social Media Age Verification for Everyone
Social networks might get a little more antisocial for kids under a new Senate bill.
The Protecting Kids on Social Media Act(Opens in a new window) would make it harder for anybody under 18 to open a social-media account and would ban services from serving up algorithmic content recommendations and ads to those under-18 users.
Introduction of the bill by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI)—with Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Katie Britt (R-AL)—follows years of concern among parents about the effects of social media on teenage brains (although kids themselves seem more positive about their online time), and the passage of multiple state laws restricting how social apps operate for kids.
The bill text (PDF(Opens in a new window)) leads off with a strict age-verification requirement: “A social media platform shall take reasonable steps beyond merely requiring attestation, taking into account existing age verification technologies, to verify the age of individuals who are account holders on the platform.”
There’s no ceiling on this rule: Senior citizens would still get carded upon opening social-media accounts, and social networks would have to verify the age of existing users starting two years after the bill’s enactment, a year after the provision takes force for new users. They could not, however, use data gathered for age verification “for any other purpose.”
The bill, unlike many legislative proposals targeting “Big Tech,” also doesn’t waive these rules for services below a certain size, although its definition of “social media platform” excludes email and private messaging and videoconferencing apps as well as video-game services.
Social platforms could not accept anybody under 13, something many already do,
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