A new bill might finally make online protections work

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OPINION – Like many teens, I used to roll my eyes at screen time limits, content restrictions, and the occasional social media “detox” imposed by the adults in my life. It felt invasive, outdated, and unnecessarily controlling. But as I’ve learned more about how Big Tech companies actually design their products, I’ve come to a very different conclusion: The real threat to teen autonomy isn’t digital restriction. It’s corporate manipulation.

With social media as bait, Big Tech capitalizes on my generation. It feeds on our vulnerability. It targets our insecurities. It profits off of the very nature of our youth—minds still developing, still forming the capacity for self-regulation and discernment.

That’s why I believe the Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043) is so important. It helps restore some balance to a digital world that has, for too long, operated without meaningful safeguards for young people, and approaches this challenge with thoughtful realism. Recognizing that digital spaces can offer connection, creativity, and support to teens, it doesn’t ban access outright or impose blanket restrictions. Instead, it creates a privacy-first age assurance system that ensures platforms will actually know the ages of minor users, thereby making them subject to long established laws designed to protect kids online. The California bill sponsored by Children Now does this by requiring manufacturers of devices, operating systems, and app stores to signal a user’s age range to developers of apps, instead of relying on a user to declare.

Importantly, AB 1043 also limits data overreach: it bars the collection of extra personal information beyond what’s needed to verify age range. Companies that violate these rules face fines of up to $7,500 per child.

Many of my friends might criticize this bill, arguing that requiring parents to provide their children’s birth dates at device set up will lead to a more restrictive digital environment that imposes more ‘control’ over our digital lives. I see it differently. The truth is, teens already live in a highly controlled digital environment. But the ones doing the controlling aren’t the rules meant to protect us; they’re executives at tech companies we’ve never met, operating under incentives we’ll never be part of. My generation, often without realizing it, is being subtly but powerfully manipulated by opaque algorithms, endless notification loops, infinite scroll features, dopamine-driven design tricks, and feeds engineered to provoke anxiety, outrage, and comparison. We are hooked to platforms that are built to exploit our developmental vulnerabilities including our need for social validation, our still-forming attention spans, our sleep schedules, and our emerging sense of self.

AB 1043 is not at all about limiting teens; it’s about limiting corporations that profit from manipulating us. It closes the loopholes that have allowed tech platforms to ignore long-standing protections for young users and finally enforces rules that were always meant to apply but rarely did in practice.

AB 1043 has passed the California State Assembly with unanimous bipartisan support and now awaits a critical vote in the State Senate, so now is the time to act. Join me in contacting your state senator and urging them to support this legislation. At stake is not just another piece of legislation, but the effectiveness of laws we already claim to uphold. For years, tech companies have exploited a simple loophole: if they don’t know a user is a child, they don’t have to protect them. AB 1043 gives us a chance to close that loophole and protect millions of young people. Let’s not miss it.

Vihaan Bhardwaj is a high school student and member of the California Partners Project’s Youth Advisory Committee, where he collaborates with state leaders to address mental health for California youth