The dispute over social media age verification and parental consent for minors is often presented as if it were a startling innovation: the state intruding into a borderless digital world, parents being conscripted into platform bureaucracy, courts being asked to referee a fight for which there is no historical map. That framing is wrong. The actual question is older, plainer, and deeply familiar in American law: when a new commercial environment exposes children to risks that families cannot reliably manage alone, may the state set baseline rules of access? Texas has answered yes. It enacted a law requiring age verification and parental consent for minors using certain social media applications, then filed a motion asking the court to keep the law in effect while litigation proceeds. The law applies to applications accessed within Texas jurisdiction. The legal challenge is real. But the principle behind the law is not some constitutional orphan wandering the wilderness.
The best defense of the resolution begins with an old doctrine and an old caution. The doctrine is parens patriae, the state’s duty to protect those not yet fully able to protect themselves. The caution is that every era flatters itself that its technologies are too novel for inherited institutions, right up until those institutions reassert themselves. Railroads, factories, motion pictures, broadcast television, cigarettes, lead paint, gambling devices, pornography sold to minors, and countless other products or systems were all defended, at one time or another, as matters for private choice, family discretion, or market self-correction. In nearly every case, society learned the same expensive lesson: where minors are concerned, private incentives often arrive late, and law eventually supplies guardrails.
That does not mean every proposed guardrail is wise. The strongest opposing arguments deserve serious treatment. One objection is constitutional and moral: parents, not the state, have the primary right to direct the upbringing of their children. That is not merely rhetoric. It is rooted in a line of American constitutional thought that includes Pierce v. Society of Sisters, which recognized that the child is not “the mere creature of the State.” Another objection is practical: age verification laws can be clumsy, expensive, and easy to evade, especially when social media services operate across state lines and teenagers are adept at circumvention. A third objection is civil-libertarian: requiring age checks may create data collection systems that themselves threaten privacy, expand surveillance, or harden control points on the internet.
These are not trivial concerns, and a serious supporter of the resolution should not wave them away. But none of them defeats the underlying case for state action.
Start with parental rights. Properly understood, a law requiring parental consent does not displace parents. It empowers them. The resolution does not propose that state officials decide which minor may post videos, send direct messages, or create accounts. It proposes that a minor should not gain access to social media applications without a parent’s consent. That is not the abolition of family authority. It is the state reinforcing it at the point where platforms have spent years routing around it. The modern social media business model has depended, in part, on frictionless onboarding, porous age gates, and engagement systems calibrated for attention capture. If the law says a parent must affirmatively authorize access, the state is not nationalizing childrearing. It is recognizing that parents cannot exercise authority over what they are never meaningfully asked to approve.
Now consider the practical objection. Yes, Texas’s law is being challenged. Yes, enforcement at the state level is awkward. Yes, a patchwork of state laws can impose compliance costs. But from a historical perspective, these are ordinary features of American federalism, not reasons for paralysis. States have long acted as first movers when Congress lagged and national consensus had not yet hardened. Child labor restrictions, public health rules, obscenity regulations, and consumer protections often emerged unevenly before they matured into broader settlements. The fact that a law is litigated does not prove it is misguided. In constitutional republics, litigation is often the toll paid for legal clarification.
Nor is imperfect enforceability a decisive argument. Law does not become illegitimate because some people will evade it. We require age limits for alcohol and tobacco despite fake IDs. We require parental permissions in school, medicine, and contracts despite occasional fraud. The relevant question is not whether every minor will be blocked from every social media app, but whether a legal baseline will reduce casual underage access, strengthen parental leverage, and force platforms to internalize obligations they have preferred to treat as optional. In the history of regulation, partial success is not failure; it is often how institutions begin.
The privacy objection is the most serious because it points to a genuine danger. A badly designed age verification regime could create exactly the sort of identity dragnet critics fear. But here again, history counsels discrimination rather than surrender. The existence of implementation risk is an argument for narrow tailoring, data minimization, retention limits, and strict liability for misuse. It is not an argument for leaving minors in a commercial environment optimized to collect data, shape behavior, and hold attention without any externally imposed checkpoint. The choice is not between pristine liberty and state paperwork. It is between one form of governance and another: governance by public law, or governance by platform architecture.
Opponents often invoke the borderless internet as if jurisdiction itself were obsolete. Yet Texas’s law applies to applications accessed within Texas jurisdiction because that is what states do: they regulate conduct and commerce touching their territory and residents. The internet did not repeal police power. It complicated it. Courts may narrow particular mechanisms, demand exceptions, or require more precise drafting. That is how constitutional systems absorb technological change. But the broad proposition that states may protect minors online is entirely consistent with the long American practice of recognizing that children occupy a distinct legal category.
There is also a broader macro-historical pattern worth noticing. Every communications revolution begins with evangelists for openness and ends with a settlement around responsibility. Printers, exhibitors, broadcasters, and carriers all claimed, at one point, that regulation would smother innovation. Yet durable institutions emerged not by treating children as miniature adults, but by acknowledging developmental difference. The law has never required the state to pretend that a 13-year-old navigating algorithmic feeds, direct messaging, viral challenge culture, and commercial persuasion is situated the same as a mature adult. To insist otherwise is not neutrality. It is amnesia.
Texas may yet lose in whole or in part. Its current motion to keep the law in effect may be denied, trimmed, or upheld. Courts may say this statute goes too far, or not far enough, or uses the wrong instrument. Fine. That is a judgment about one enactment, not a refutation of the resolution. The resolution asks whether states should require age verification and parental consent for minors using social media applications. They should, because the state has long held both authority and duty to establish baseline protections for children where markets underprice harm and where parental authority needs legal reinforcement to be meaningful.
The error of the present moment is the familiar error of every present moment: confusing novelty of medium with novelty of principle. Social media feels unprecedented because the devices are new, the interfaces are sleek, and the scale is enormous. But the governing issue is ancient. Children deserve special protection. Parents deserve legal support in exercising responsibility. Commercial actors that profit from youth attention should not be permitted to define the safeguards that constrain them. On that point, history is not ambiguous. It is instructive.