Sponsor
Gus Bilirakis
Representative · R-FL
Representative · R-FL
The bill strengthens federal protections, parental controls, transparency, and enforcement to reduce online harms to minors, but does so at the cost of substantial compliance burdens, potential privacy tradeoffs, preemption of state/local flexibility, and risks to competition and lawful access to information.
Children and teens: platforms must adopt stronger default privacy and safety measures and curb specific addictive design features, reducing minors' exposure to harmful content, contacts, and age-inappropriate advertising.
Parents and families: receive clearer controls and transparency — verifiable parental consent, default parental controls, purchase/screen-time limits, conspicuous ad labels, and audit reports that increase parental oversight of minors' accounts and platform practices.
Consumers and harmed users: gain stronger federal enforcement tools (FTC full powers) plus state attorneys general can obtain injunctions and restitution, improving ability to stop unfair/deceptive practices and secure remedies.
Platform users, taxpayers, and small businesses: the Act imposes substantial compliance costs (verifiable consent, audits, design changes, enforcement) that are likely to be borne by users through higher prices, reduced features, or fewer competing services.
State and local governments: lose flexibility to adopt different or stronger rules because the Act preempts local regulation, limiting tailored community responses and state-level policy innovation.
Children, teens, and young adults: parental visibility into accounts and auditors' access to platform systems raise privacy and autonomy concerns and increase the risk that sensitive minor data could be exposed during compliance or audits.
Based on analysis of 22 sections of legislative text.
Requires covered online platforms to implement default safety/privacy settings, parental tools, time limits, reporting, audits, and FTC enforcement to protect minors.
Official title: To protect the safety of minors on the internet, and for other purposes.
Introduced December 5, 2025 by Gus Bilirakis · Last progress December 5, 2025
Requires social media and similar online platforms to adopt default safety, privacy, time-limit, parental‑control, reporting, and audit measures for users the platform knows are minors. Gives the Federal Trade Commission enforcement authority, allows state attorneys general to bring parens patriae suits (with FTC notice/overlap rules), creates a Kids Online Safety Council at Commerce, and preempts state/local laws on the same subject. Key features include definitions of covered platforms and minors, a suite of required safeguards and parental tools, annual independent audits with data reporting to the FTC, notice/consent and ad‑labeling rules, and an 18‑month delayed effective date. The bill preserves COPPA and clarifies it does not change §230 or require affirmative new age‑data collection by platforms.