Opinion: Don’t Let Big Tech Pretend to Protect Our Kids

Teenagers are clever. Anyone raising one will tell you that. They can figure out a phone faster than the adults who bought it for them, and they can find a workaround for almost any rule you put in place. That is part of growing up, and most of the time it's something to be proud of. But cleverness is not the same thing as judgment. The internet is not a place a 13-year-old should be sent to figure things out on her own and the job of guiding her through it belongs to the parent who knows her, not to a platform on the other side of the country that has every commercial reason to keep her scrolling.

That is the test I am applying to the two federal bills Congress is about to take up on children and social media. They are both being sold as protection. Only one of them actually puts the parent in a position to do the guiding. The other puts the platforms in charge and calls it a day.

The first is the Parents Over Platforms Act. Read past the title and you'll find the kind of language I used to watch get drafted in the back of a committee room. It is the kind of language designed to give a bill the appearance of doing something while making sure nothing actually changes. There is no real verification anywhere in it. A user types in an age, and the system takes him at his word. That keystroke then follows the child downstream into every app she ever downloads. The platforms get to claim compliance. The child gets nothing. The bill is called Parents Over Platforms. In practice, it puts platforms over parents.

The second is the App Store Accountability Act. It does something much more straightforward. It requires the app store to verify a user's age category at the front door. And it requires my consent, as the parent, before my child can download an app onto her phone. No federal bureaucrat decides which app is appropriate for my daughter and which one isn't. I do.

That isn't complicated. It is the same standard we apply at every other counter in Texas where age matters. The store on the highway in Spearman has to card a kid before it sells him a beer or a pack of cigarettes. We don't let the clerk skip the check because the kid says he's twenty-one. There is no reason the richest companies in human history should be held to a softer standard than a clerk in a small town.

A national survey earlier this year found that 88 percent of parents support requiring app stores to get parental approval before kids download apps. Eighty-eight percent. I have watched a lot of polling in my career, and I can tell you that kind of consensus does not happen by accident. Parents have already reached a verdict. The App Store Accountability Act is the bill that meets it.

There is a privacy piece in this too, and out here it matters. Several of the competing proposals would have parents verifying a teen's age separately on every single app — handing a driver's license, sometimes a face scan, to dozens of different companies. That is not a serious answer. It is a security problem dressed up as a solution. Verifying once, at the app store, keeps that information in one place instead of scattered across every developer who wants it.

Washington has a long habit of pretending to solve problems with bills that don't actually do a thing. Rural Texas knows the difference. We don't need another press release Washington can put out, pat each other on the back, and call it a day while we leave our kids less protected. We need a real check at the door — and I'd like to see our Texas delegation get behind the App Store Accountability Act and finish the job.