Stop Harm from Addictive Social Media Act

Scripture is unambiguous about who bears primary responsibility for a child's formation. "Train up a child in the way he should go" (Proverbs 22:6) and the commands of Deuteronomy 6 place that duty squarely on parents, not on corporations optimizing for engagement. For years, social media platforms have exploited the anonymity of their sign-up flows to treat minors as indistinguishable from adults, exposing them to algorithmically driven content loops that researchers and courts alike have recognized as psychologically harmful. South Carolina's SHASM Act corrects that imbalance.

The bill's operative requirements are specific and enforceable. Covered platforms must use reasonable means to estimate user age, must verify the age of users who appear to be minors, must apply protective default settings to those accounts, and must obtain affirmative parental consent before granting access to the addictive features that define the modern social media experience. Each of these steps is a concrete transfer of power away from platform designers and back to families.

This matters because parental authority is not merely a policy preference. It reflects the created order. Parents are accountable before God for the hearts and minds of the children entrusted to them. Legislation that forces platforms to make parental consent a precondition rather than an afterthought does not supplant that authority. It creates the legal conditions under which that authority can actually be exercised in an environment that has, until now, been engineered to circumvent it.

Critics may argue that age verification raises privacy concerns or places burdens on platforms. Those are legitimate questions of implementation, and the bill's "reasonable means" standard gives platforms flexibility to answer them responsibly. But the privacy of children from predatory design choices is itself a value worth protecting, and the burden on platforms to know who their users are is modest compared to the burden already carried by parents navigating a system built to exclude them.

The American Council supports the SHASM Act because healthy families are the foundation of a healthy society, and families cannot fulfill their God-given function when the tools their children use daily are designed to bypass parental oversight entirely. This legislation is a measured, principled step toward restoring the rightful order of authority in children's digital lives.