Sponsors (2)
The bill strengthens parental controls, message persistence, federal enforcement, and encryption protections to increase child safety and privacy, but does so at the cost of substantial compliance burdens for platforms, reduced minors' privacy/autonomy, potential data-privacy risks for parents, and limits on state or law-enforcement flexibility.
Parents and children: The bill creates standardized, discoverable parental-safety tools (verifiable parental consent, default disabling of DMs for under-13s, clear controls and app-store warnings) so parents can approve or block who messages their children and manage minors' messaging settings.
Children and teens: The bill restricts ephemeral messaging for minors and requires greater message persistence, reducing untraceable harassment and sexting and making it easier to preserve evidence for safety or abuse investigations.
Consumers and the public: The FTC is given stronger federal enforcement powers (treating violations as unfair/deceptive), and State attorneys general can recover money for residents and seek injunctive relief, improving ability to stop harmful platform practices.
Platform operators, app stores, developers, and ultimately consumers: The bill imposes significant compliance, engineering, and administrative costs across many provisions (parental-consent systems, UI changes, encryption-safe adjustments), which may raise prices, reduce investment in features, and strain smaller or niche platforms.
Minors (especially teens) and families: Restricting ephemeral messaging and increasing parental oversight reduces minors' privacy and autonomy, may push teens to less-regulated apps or offline channels, and can discourage youths from seeking help or sharing sensitive issues.
Parents and families: Requiring verifiable parental consent and related verification systems could collect additional personal data about parents, increasing privacy risks and potential misuse of that data.
Based on analysis of 10 sections of legislative text.
Bans ephemeral messaging for users under 17, requires parental direct-message controls and app-store warnings, enforces via the FTC, and preempts state laws.
Introduced November 21, 2025 by Neal Patrick Dunn · Last progress November 21, 2025
Bans ephemeral (self-deleting) messaging for social media users under 17, requires parents to be given easy-to-use controls over their child's direct messages (including the ability to disable direct messaging and approve or block contacts), and mandates app-store warnings to parents when a child tries to download apps with direct messaging. The Federal Trade Commission enforces the law, states are preempted from making their own rules on the same subjects, and the law preserves strong encryption and user privacy while setting staggered compliance deadlines for platforms.