Pew asked nearly 10,000 American adults in mid-2026 what social media companies should be required to do. Eighty-five percent backed parental consent before a minor creates an account. Seventy-eight percent backed age verification of users, and the same share backed time limits on minors. Support for an outright ban on under-16s reached 56 percent.
The partisan gaps are unusually small. On the under-16 ban, Republicans and leaners came in at 59 percent and Democrats at 54. Parents of under-18s were more supportive than non-parents, and support has risen since 2023 across every question asked.
Legislators have behaved differently. The Kids Online Safety Act passed the Senate 91 to 3, the dissenters being two libertarian-minded Republicans and one progressive Democrat. When the KIDS Act reached the House floor in June 2026 it passed 267 to 117, with Republicans splitting 162 to 32 in favour and Democrats splitting 104 to 85. The more divided party was the Democrats.
It is worth being clear about what these bills actually cover, because they are not one thing. Some require adult sites to check age. Some require social media platforms to get parental consent. Some put the check in the app store instead of the app. Each design shifts the burden and the privacy cost to a different party, which is why companies that agree children need protecting still disagree furiously about who should do the checking.
In June 2025 the Supreme Court decided Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton by six votes to three, upholding a Texas law requiring age verification for sites where a third or more of the content is harmful to minors. The Court applied intermediate rather than strict scrutiny and held that no person, adult or child, has a right to access material obscene to minors without first proving age.
That closed one door and left several open. It is a ruling about pornography, not about social media generally, and the litigation over social media age laws has continued to move in both directions. In 2026 a federal judge blocked Arkansas's replacement law, while five of six challenged provisions of California's design code remain enjoined. Mississippi's law survived an emergency application, though one justice wrote that the challengers were likely to win on the merits eventually.
Supporters often describe age assurance as a painless face scan. When federal researchers tested age estimation software against roughly 11.5 million photographs, the best systems were still wrong by about three years on average, and error rates were consistently higher for female faces.
A three-year margin around a legal line of eighteen matters in both directions. It lets some minors through and it stops some adults. Anyone misjudged falls back to uploading a government document, which returns the system to identification rather than estimation.
That fallback is where the privacy cost becomes concrete. In October 2025 hackers took roughly 70,000 government identity photos and selfies from the third-party vendor handling age-verification appeals for one large platform. The machinery built to check children's ages became the thing that leaked adults' passports. Every new mandate creates another such store.
Australia set a national minimum age of sixteen in December 2025, the first country to do it. Three months later its own regulator found that 81 percent of under-sixteens were still using an age-restricted platform, down from 86 percent before the law took effect.
Read one way, that is a five point change for an enormous enforcement effort. Read the other way, it is the first hard evidence that anything moves at all, and roughly 4.7 million accounts were revoked or restricted in the process. Notably, about half the children who kept their accounts said no platform had ever asked their age, which supporters treat as proof that platforms check nothing unless a law with penalties forces them.
A 2026 study of the American adult-content laws found something different again. Searches for the largest compliant site fell about 51 percent, while searches for a non-compliant competitor rose about 48 percent and searches for location-disguising tools rose about 24 percent. Demand moved rather than disappeared, and it moved toward sites with weaker moderation.
One argument holds that anonymity online is not a loophole but the point. It is how abuse survivors, questioning teenagers and ordinary curious adults read without a record being kept. Vague duties to protect minors push platforms to over-block health and identity content that isolated young people rely on, and the whole approach lets the companies off the hook for the engagement design that causes the harm in the first place.
The other argument holds that we already check identification for alcohol, casinos, firearms and restricted films without calling it surveillance, and the internet is the one venue where an age check is treated as an assault on liberty. Self-reported birthdays are a fiction the industry has profited from for two decades. An age signal held by the app store gives a parent one gate instead of a running fight with forty apps.
One fact sits awkwardly with both. The American Psychological Association's health advisory does not endorse a minimum age or age verification at all. It says readiness depends on the individual adolescent's maturity, and notes there is no data showing children become unaffected at any particular age.
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