Congress should follow the Texas approach to child safety online

Big Tech is fighting this tooth and nail. But it’s the right thing.

Few things have been more troubling in recent years than the unfettered social experiment of throwing children in front of black mirrors and hopping them up on app-induced dopamine. After a decade of witnessing the hollowing out of their children firsthand, parents are frustrated.

Even in the limited-government, business friendly Lone Star State, 80% of parents want Gov. Greg Abbott and the Legislature to require app stores to get parental consent for children to download apps, according to recent polling by the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Among Republican voters, support is even higher.

Bottom of Form

To out-of-state pundits, it came as a shock that Texas — 22-time winner of the Governor’s Cup, the gold standard for measuring business climate — would reach for a government solution to this problem. But Texans can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can incentivize businesses to call this state home and also ensure they promote values that don’t California our Texas.

So, what were Texas lawmakers selling that Texans were buying? The App Store Accountability Act, or SB 2420, would align the brick-and-mortar world with the digital world. To analogize, if I walk into a convenience store to buy a can of Zyn nicotine pouches and a six-pack of Shiner, the clerk is required to check my ID to verify my age before ringing me up. Zyn and Shiner don’t card me individually, the marketplace does.

The App Store Accountability Act takes this same approach but, critically, finally recognizes the facts that, first, the App Store is a dangerous minefield riddled with harmful content that is promoted to children and, second, parents should be empowered to decide what is safe for their child to download, not Big Tech.

The mechanics are straightforward. App stores verify age at account creation — the same common-sense check we expect at convenience stores — and sort users into categories: children, younger teens, older teens and adults. If you are an adult, nothing changes. If you are under 18, your account is linked to your parents, so they can approve or reject download or purchase requests. Gone, too, are the days of rating apps with pornographic content safe for ages 4+. Ratings must now accurately reflect the new age categories. And before you ask, the act requires data minimization, deletion of age-verification data and enhanced security. In other words, personal data is protected. It’s verify, then delete.

With all but one state senator supporting the bill, 93% of the Texas House voting yea, Abbott rallying behind the bill at public ceremonies and the recent 5th Circuit Court order upholding the law (meaning the constitutional objections Big Tech’s lawyers promised would doom it have already failed), you might think it was a cake walk to advance such common sense policy that Texans of all stripes were asking for.

It was anything but. I thought Big Tech had lost the capacity to surprise me. But the methods they deployed to kill this bill left me in shock. They spent close to $1 million on advertisements and lobbyists who used every dirty trick in the book.

Now that the App Store bill is getting federal attention, the misinformation campaigns are everywhere again. If you’re seeing posts claiming this bill creates universal digital IDs, there’s a high chance someone was paid to publish them. One gentleman, bankrolled by Big Tech to pay conservative influencers to spread misinformation, learned my organization supported the bill and had the audacity to call and offer, for a price, to have different influencers post support instead.

I share all this to underscore two things. First, the tremendous courage and victory evinced by Texas policymakers to get the job done, and second, the sophisticated underbelly of bad actors who will do whatever it takes to commodify our children and keep parents at arm’s length.

As the White House advances a child online safety package, Congress may soon be asked to make the Texas law the national standard. Texas wrote the playbook and proved it can survive both Big Tech’s millions and federal court scrutiny. As Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and Michigan Rep. John James carry the App Store Accountability Act to Congress, the question isn’t whether the Texas model works; it’s whether Washington has the courage Texas did.