By Amrith Ramkumar and Meghan Bobrowsky

The fight over online child safety is reigniting in state legislatures across the country this year, pitting social-media titan Meta Platforms against app-store giants Apple and Google in a dispute over who should verify the ages of users.

At least nine states, including Utah and South Carolina, recently proposed bills that would require app-store operators to check the ages of users and get parental consent before letting minors download apps. More than 60 child-safety advocates are forming a new coalition to push for passage of app-store age-verification laws nationwide.

Both Apple and Meta think the onus to verify user ages shouldn't be on them. Apple last year helped kill a bill in Louisiana that would have forced app stores to handle age verification. Meta, along with social-media companies Snap and X, last week sent a letter to legislators in South Dakota arguing app-store verification would be simplest since app stores already collect user information.

"It looks like the policy-debate equivalent of a game of 'not it,'" said Kate Ruane, director of a free-speech campaign at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that has opposed many child-safety laws on the grounds that they are ineffective and infringe on free speech and privacy.

The debate underscores the pressure facing lawmakers after years of failed legislative efforts. Campaigns by parents whose children were harmed online have gained bipartisan attention, but there is little agreement on how to address the issue in practice.

In addition to Utah and South Carolina, South Dakota, Alaska, Kentucky, Alabama, New Mexico, West Virginia and Hawaii have all introduced legislation in the past two months taking aim at app stores.

"It's a lot easier to target two app stores than it is to target 10,000 developers," said Todd Weiler, a Republican state senator sponsoring the Utah bill.

Apple and Google have said they already take many steps to help parents control the content seen by their children.

Apple maintains that apps are better suited to handle age verification and that requiring the iPhone maker to do it could lead to excessive sharing of user ages with virtually every app.

Google recently said one of the most difficult challenges in keeping inappropriate content away from children is verifying ages. The company will begin testing a machine-learning age estimation model this year.

To try to get momentum on these bills, five dozen child-safety organizations and advocates are launching a new coalition called the Digital Childhood Alliance to push for app stores to verify user ages.

Dawn Hawkins, senior adviser to the National Center on Sexual Exploitation and a member of the coalition, said app-store laws are some of the most straightforward ways to curb abuse online she has seen in roughly 15 years working on the issue.

"It became really clear that there's a chokepoint with Google and Apple, " she said.

Several states have passed laws requiring online platforms to verify the ages of users. In many cases, lawsuits have delayed their implementation. Other policy proposals include tweaking the designs of online platforms and measures to hold websites accountable for harmful content.

Online child-safety bills have largely stalled at the federal level, but Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah) said he plans to reintroduce a bill that would require verification by app stores after a bill he introduced last year failed to gain momentum.

The minimum age required to access many social-media services is 13, which stems from a 1998 law requiring platforms to obtain parental permission before collecting personal information on children. But that is only a requirement if sites have "actual knowledge" that children are using their platform.

Write to Amrith Ramkumar at amrith.ramkumar@wsj.com and Meghan Bobrowsky at meghan.bobrowsky@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 25, 2025 08:00 ET (13:00 GMT)

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