As of mid-2026, there is no federal age-verification or social media safety mandate in force. The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) passed the Senate in 2024 but died in the House. States didn't wait: as of January 2025, 19 states had passed laws requiring age verification for potentially harmful online content, and according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, that number grew enough by the end of 2025 that roughly half of U.S. states now mandate some form of age verification for adult content or social media platforms, with nine state laws taking effect in 2025 alone.
This is a genuinely fast-moving legal area: state laws in Georgia and other states have been preliminarily enjoined by courts even as they remain formally on the books, meaning the practical legal landscape shifts month to month as litigation proceeds.
On June 27, 2025, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, upholding Texas's age-verification law (HB 1181) for adult content. Justice Thomas, writing for the majority, held that the law survives First Amendment review because it "only incidentally burdens the protected speech of adults." This ruling is widely seen as having strengthened the legal footing for similar state laws nationally, particularly those targeting explicit adult content specifically, as opposed to broader social media age-verification mandates, which continue to face more mixed results in court.
California's own "Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act" (SB 976), by contrast, remains partially blocked by federal courts as of early 2026, illustrating that the legal outcome still depends heavily on how a given law is written and what specifically it targets.
On June 29, 2026, the House passed a new, broader package called the KIDS Act (H.R. 7757) by a 267-117 vote. According to EFF's analysis, this version drops KOSA's original "duty of care" standard and instead relies heavily on age verification requirements, mandating that platforms judge whether a user is "more likely than not" a minor and take action once they "know or should have known" someone is underage. The bill's path through the Senate remains uncertain as of this writing.
Digital rights groups including EFF have specifically warned that a negligence-based standard like this could push platforms toward more invasive verification methods, government ID checks, or facial and behavioral age-estimation, for all users, not just minors, since platforms would need a reliable way to confirm someone isn't underage.
Child-safety advocates generally argue that algorithmic feeds and unrestricted access to adult content pose demonstrated harms to minors that justify mandatory age verification, even with some cost to convenience or privacy. Digital rights and free-speech advocates, including groups like EFF, generally argue that age-verification requirements burden the speech and privacy rights of adults too, create new data security risks by requiring ID or biometric checks, and that platforms should instead build stronger duty-of-care requirements around content and design without ID verification. The Supreme Court's Paxton ruling didn't resolve this broader argument, it specifically addressed adult content laws, leaving the more contested question of general social media age verification still being litigated state by state.
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