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Over the summer, there were two major developments in the social media laws protecting children.
First, in July, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced the final rules for the SAFE for Kids Act designed to protect children from the harms of social media addiction. The final rules have both age assurance and parental consent requirements. For users above the age of 17, social media companies must determine that the user is an adult before allowing them to access algorithmic feeds and/or nighttime notifications. Companies may confirm a user’s age using any existing method, as long as the methods are shown to meet accuracy benchmarks and protect users’ data. For minors to access the algorithmic feeds and/or nighttime notifications, minors must receive parental consent.
Second, Illinois enacted the Children’s Online Social Media Act. Similar to the SAFE Kids Act, the Illinois act also has age assurance requirements. The Illinois law also requires operating systems to provide an age signal to covered platforms. Covered platforms are defined broadly to include: online services that are used by a minor to connect and to socially interact and enable a user to (A) construct a public or semi-public profile for the purposes of signing in to and using the service or application; (B) populate a public list of other users with whom the user shares a social connection within the service or application; or (C) post content that is viewable by other users, and that presents the user with content generated by other users.
If the signal from the operating system indicates that the user is a minor, then the covered platform is required to have default privacy settings including limitations on displaying the existence of a minor's account, the display of media posted by a minor, adult users providing feedback on a minor’s media, direct messaging between minors and adults, sharing of precise geolocation information and receiving or sending gifted currency. The covered platform also must disable search engine indexing of the covered minor’s account profile. The parent of a covered minor or a covered minor over the age of 16 may override the default privacy settings. Only the parent of a covered minor may override default privacy settings for a minor under the age of 16.
There are additional requirements for “addictive social media platforms” or covered platforms that provide multiple pieces of media generated or shared by users of an online service either concurrently or sequentially, are recommended, selected or prioritized for display to a user based, in whole or in part, on information associated with the user or the user’s device. . . “
In the past, these types of social media laws and regulations have been challenged by technology companies, but it is unclear whether these challenges will continue after the influx of decisions and settlements in social media addiction cases. If these most recent regulatory developments are not challenged, then the New York rules will go into effect on January 25, 2027, and the Illinois law will go into effect on January 1, 2028.
