Sponsors
The bill substantially strengthens privacy, safety, parental controls, and federal oversight to reduce online harms to minors, but it does so at the cost of increased compliance burdens, potential reduced competition and innovation, federal preemption of local rules, and risks to teen autonomy, privacy, and lawful speech.
Children and teens: Platforms must adopt design limits, content protections, prevention resources, and restrictions on certain targeted ads, reducing minors' exposure to addictive features, harmful content, and exploitation.
Parents and families: New verifiable‑consent rules, default parental controls, account visibility, purchase restrictions, and clearer labeling give families more control and transparency over minors' accounts and data.
Regulators and consumers: The FTC is named as the primary enforcer and is given stronger enforcement tools while audits and reporting improve oversight and platform accountability.
Users, taxpayers, and small platforms: Broad definitions, mandatory features, audits, and enforcement will raise compliance costs that are likely passed to users, reduce product investment, and disproportionately burden smaller or new entrants.
State and local governments: The Act's federal preemption reduces local policy flexibility and may shift implementation and compliance costs to state and local governments or private parties.
Children, parents, and speech stakeholders: Platforms may over‑remove or over‑restrict lawful content to avoid liability and ambiguous 'reasonable/feasible' standards, chilling speech and limiting access to resources for minors despite First Amendment safeguards.
Based on analysis of 22 sections of legislative text.
Requires covered online platforms to implement child-focused safety defaults, parental tools, limits on certain ads, reporting and annual third-party audits, with FTC enforcement.
Introduced December 5, 2025 by Gus Bilirakis · Last progress December 5, 2025
Requires public online platforms that host user-generated content and rely on personalization/advertising to adopt child-focused safety measures: default protective settings for minors, parental tools, time‑limits, limits on communications to known minors, bans on facilitating advertising for drugs/tobacco/alcohol/gambling to minors, reporting channels for harms, and annual independent audits. The Federal Trade Commission enforces the law as an unfair or deceptive practice, state attorneys general may also sue, and a Commerce Department advisory council will study risks and issue recommendations; the law takes effect 18 months after enactment.