Summer Reading: Children’s Online Safety

Summer is still in; school is still out. Which leaves children—and, perhaps more pressingly, their parents—with the task of filling free time. Children are adept at filling time, which capacity is, by terms, liberating and vexing to parents. The same creativity that fills childhood with wonder, spontaneous comradery, and adventure steals road signs and leads to parents receiving phone calls from the police station. As children become less free-range and more online, old difficulties have been mitigated and new ones created. Summertime for many is sucked up by devices as pool water drawn into a drain pump. Determining what proportion of a child’s day should be devoted to digital activities is, of course, a prerogative of the parent, not unlike decisions about what books he should read, what movies he should watch, and which friends he should keep company with. But many in politics and media have in recent years taken to arguing that parents cannot manage such matters themselves, proposing to replace parental authority/responsibility with unconstitutional and likely ineffectual regulatory regimes. To distract from whatever your children are using their last days of freedom to destroy, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) presents this latest edition of 2026’s “Summer Reading,” on the latest and hottest children’s online safety debates and legislative proposals.

The notion that parents are helpless in the face of technological headwinds is bunk, unalloyed. It is, moreover, hazardous, for parents who believe themselves to be incapable of protecting their children are unlikely to make the attempt. Young children should not be sent out alone to roam the streets in dangerous parts of town; the same goes for the digital streets. As TPA wrote last December, “parents can—and ought to—employ an underutilized word: No.” Kevin D. Williamson, the national correspondent at The Dispatch and a writer in residence at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), provides a helpful illustration of how this process works:

Now, when it is just the two of us [Williamson and his toddler] early in the morning and he is not otherwise occupied, he often asks to watch the weasel video or the wrestling video. In the evenings, before bed, he asked for “The Longest Time” almost every night for about a month. And after a few weeks of my saying “No” to that request, he stopped. I haven’t repeated the wrestling video and cut off the weasels after about the third viewing. But it is clear that it is not only the content he is after—it is the sensation of watching a video.

…

As my Competitive Enterprise Institute colleague Jessica Melugin points out, parents have the tools in front of them to manage their children’s digital lives. I think here of Michael Oakeshott’s view of the relatively modern phenomenon of individualism: Some people will experience it as liberation, and others will experience it as a burden. Some parents appreciate the tools they have to moderate their children’s experience of technology, but others—many others—feel experience the use of such tools as just another difficult obligation from which they wish to be liberated.

But self-appointed children’s online safety advocates dismiss all this, rushing to public policy for a remedy. “Given the growing sense of urgency that Congress finally needs to do something to address the safety of children and teens online, the U.S. House of Representatives has passed a cobbled-together package of legislation dubbed the Kids and Internet Digital Safety (KIDS) Act,” the R Street Institute’s Josh Withrow writes. “While this conglomeration contains some proposals that on their own would be praiseworthy, taken as a whole it represents a huge government overreach into online platform design that is likely to degrade platform usefulness and free speech for all internet users, while doing little to actually protect minors.”

The KIDS Act is a blunderbuss, a paradigmatic instance of “something, anything” legislating. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression ably describes the innovations the proposal would bring about:

For decades, Americans have enjoyed broad freedom to build tools to communicate with each other on the internet. From the smallest message board to the biggest social media platform, the First Amendment protects our right to freely design and use platforms to talk and share content with each other online. The government can go after wrongdoers that use online platforms for illegal activity, but it does not get to decide how a platform is designed and operated in the first place.

The KIDS Act would fundamentally overturn this status quo by allowing the government to decide how platforms can be built and imposing restrictions that will censor the speech of adults and minors alike.

The effects of such policies have been written into the public record overseas, as Jennifer Huddleston of the Cato Institute reports:

The United Kingdom, for example, recently made headlines by moving to bar anyone under 16 from using social media and advanced a raft of further restrictions: government-mandated app curfews for 16- and 17-year-olds, along with a plethora of potential new regulations on everything from AI chatbots to messaging apps.

In effect, the UK has placed the government between users and the internet, dictating how much screen time and what information a person may access unless they first prove who they are. Australia banned under-16s from social media in late 2025, and similar bans have been considered in countries ranging from France to Malaysia.

Meanwhile, in the world’s greatest deliberative body, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) is undeterred in her latch-ditch [sic] bid to squash free speech and deliberation online. As CEI’s Alex Reinauer notes, Blackburn’s flagship legislation, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), and other bills transplant into their texts the language of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Act—that is, “knowledge fairly implied on the basis of objective circumstances.” However, there is mischief afoot, all but ensuring overcompliance and rendering widespread age verification very likely. Reinauer explains:

This knowledge standard, as used in the FTC Act, requires companies to make a deductive or compliance-based judgment by applying known legal rules to known corporate actions, like evaluating whether a marketing claim is false or misleading. When applied to age determination, however, the judgment is essentially reversed. Companies must make an inductive or probabilistic judgment by inferring unknown facts about users from digital signals like gaming habits or active hours. It’s an epistemological mismatch that transplants an FTC Act trade practice rule standard onto age inferences.

This not only creates uncertainty for companies as to whether they are following the law, but it also ensures that there will be false negatives and false positives, as some adult users will be flagged as minors while some underage users will be mistaken for adults.

The risk will likely be so high that companies have little choice but to verify age using government IDs, regardless of the stipulations in the bills saying that age verification is not required.

Richard Sill of the Reason Foundation has more on age verification:

Laws aimed at protecting minors online are pushing social media companies to verify age more aggressively, and facial age estimation has become one of the most appealing tools for doing that. Platforms must distinguish between children, teenagers, and adults with more certainty, making selfie-based checks and backup ID requests look like practical ways to show compliance. However, this is quickly shifting a broad policy problem into a biometric one, where access to ordinary online services can depend on literally showing your face.

While facial age estimation may offer platforms a convenient way to respond to youth online safety demands, that convenience comes with serious privacy costs. Required facial scans lower the baseline of privacy for everyone, especially teens, and create a regime where access to everyday social spaces depends on individuals surrendering sensitive information about their faces and, in many cases, their identities. If lawmakers continue to enact youth safety laws that pressure companies to apply facial scans in ways that may conflict with existing biometric laws, they risk creating a system that may protect teens in ways while exposing them, and everyone else, to long-lived surveillance and data trails that are difficult to escape.

In the dog days of summer, the heat is dogged and unrelenting. Lawmakers thinking of regulating the internet should not seek in their proposals to match the oppressiveness of the weather.