One week before the Texas Legislature gaveled in to do the work of Texans, the House and Senate held a joint committee hearing to study the effects of social media on minors. The goal was simple — to hear from experts, advocates and victims of social media to better understand why our kids are being emotionally, psychologically and mentally disemboweled by social media and digital devices.
“Disemboweled” feels like the right word: The horror stories left the seven-member committee filled with a hollowness in their gut as they choked back tears. They heard stories describing the pipeline from social media to pornography to sex slavery. They heard about destructive TikTok “challenges” that have taken the lives of young Texas children. And they heard from the mother of David Molak, who detailed how social media drove her otherwise healthy son to commit suicide.
The hypothesis needs no further testing: Experimenting on our children by giving them unfettered access to social media and digital devices is decimating our future generation.
To steal state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst’s closing salvo, “We can no longer tolerate this as a society… If [these tech companies] can create it, they can prevent it. Come with solutions, or we’ll come up with solutions you won’t like.”
The sad reality of the digital age is that moms and dads have been left on their own to fend off a tech-induced health crisis, contending against the allure of products engineered by the most powerful corporations in history to be maximally addictive to kids. Worse, Big Tech has not only remained indifferent to the harms children are suffering from its products, but there is also strong evidence that they intentionally perpetuate the problem.
That’s why Texas came up with a solution: the App Store Accountability Act, which enlists the app store providers, like Google and Apple, to help parents nip these issues in the bud.
This proposal leverages a standard policy prescription to prevent children from accessing addictive services or products — the onus is on the store to age-gate the product. In the brick-and-mortar context, when you walk into a convenience store, we require the store to check for an ID when a customer purchases cigarettes, alcohol or pornography. We also hold the store — not necessarily the source of those products — liable when kids get their hands on these. In other words, we don’t rely on Philip Morris or Anheuser Busch to ensure that kids aren’t purchasing their products; we look to CVS, 7-11 and supermarkets to age-gate. The app ecosystem should be no different.
Another added benefit of the act is that for parents, kids, adults and app developers, it reduces the costs of age verification. As Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has put it, app stores are “the single choking point” of the mobile ecosystem. Every service goes through one of two app stores — Apple’s App Store or Google’s Play Store. App stores provide the front door to every addictive and harmful product to kids, and requiring them to verify the ages of users and communicate with the parents of minors streamlines the process and removes the burden of every app developer from having to verify ages, and every adult from going through yet-another age verification process whenever they access a new app.
Better yet, the act avoids the obvious privacy objection that Big Tech organizations like to lodge against age verification measures at the website tier. How? Well, app stores already have all of this age information and say they perform age-gating. This means that the user would not need to proffer more data to these platforms. Apple and Google already have the tools to take these child-safety measures and are already required to do so in certain contexts by the Federal Trade Commission.
What is more, the act builds off studies performed by Jonathan Haidt and myriad civil society groups that have all identified devices and their app stores as the primary vessel to address the issue of age verification and parental consent.
To harken back to Sen. Kolkhorst, Texas has a solution that app stores have already demonstrated they are capable of enforcing. Just this week, Senator Paxton introduced Senate Bill 2420, which codifies the App Store Accountability Act and empowers parents to protect their children from digital harm. For the bad-faith actors like Google and Apple that refuse to show up for hearings in Texas, the saying holds true: if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. And Senate Bill 2420 is the item du jour.