• by Wendy Davis , Yesterday

A new Senate bill would require social platforms to take "reasonable steps" to verify users' ages and obtain parental consent before allowing anyone under 16 to create or maintain an account.

The Parental Approval for Youth Social Media Act, introduced Tuesday by Senator Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona), also would require platforms to give parents tools to supervise their children's social-media usage.

"Every study tells us the same thing: social media is poisoning our kids’ developing minds," Gallego said this week in a post on X. "When unsupervised online, they can be exposed to explicit material, recruited by drug or sex traffickers, or cyber bullied. Meanwhile, Big Tech is profiting off of that very screen time."

The bill comes as at least 12 states have passed measures aimed at regulating social media.

Some of those statutes drew legal challenges -- mainly from tech industry groups, which argue that the laws violate the First Amendment and threaten privacy by effectively requiring all social-media users to verify their ages.

The tech groups largely base their arguments on a 2011 Supreme Court ruling that struck down a California statute that would have prohibited the sale of violent video games to minors, without parental consent. The Supreme Court said in that ruling that the law violated minors' First Amendment rights.

So far, the results in court have been mixed.

Many district court judges blocked all or parts of those laws, but at least three appellate courts have lifted the injunctions and allowed the restrictions to take effect.

For instance, last month a panel of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that Ohio can enforce a law that prohibits some web services with social functionality from allowing minors under 16 to create accounts without parental permission.

Circuit Judge Eric Clay said in a written opinion that the law's parental consent 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."

That ruling reversed a decision by U.S. District Court Judge Algenon Marbley, who found the law unconstitutional and issued an injunction blocking enforcement.