Age checks put parents back in charge online

The Cato Institute has the parental-rights argument backward: lawmakers should require platforms to verify age and get a parent's consent before a child opens an account. On October 19, 2026, the Cato Institute posted: “Decisions about what kids see online belong to their parents. Mandatory age verification shifts those decisions to the government and puts users’ privacy and free speech at risk, write Cato’s @dr_inserra and @jrhuddles in their new study.”

Cato Briefing Paper No. 207, “Online Age Verification Has Guaranteed Costs and Uncertain Benefits,” by David Inserra and Jennifer Huddleston, was published October 19, 2026. Cato’s paper lists six potential costs of age-verification policies: false positives for adults and disparate impact on minority groups; compliance and opportunity costs; data breaches and privacy risks; restricted access to lawful information; loss of anonymous and pseudonymous speech; and a weakened role for parents. Cato’s paper says, “Age-verification policies shift authority from families to government, weakening parents’ ability to make decisions related to young people’s access to information and media consumption.” Whose decision does an age check take away? When a platform has to ask a parent before it opens a child's account, the decision goes to the parent, the one person Cato says should hold it.

“Decisions about what kids see online belong to their parents.”

Parents want platforms to verify ages

Parents are not waiting for Cato's permission to want this. In its July 1, 2026 report, Pew Research Center found that 85% of U.S. adults support requiring parental consent for minors to create a social media account. Support for requiring people to verify their age before using social media reached 78%. Parents of a child under 18 are more supportive of both measures than adults without one¹.

Pew also reports that no more than one in ten adults oppose platforms putting any of these measures in place. Even the tougher proposal to bar anyone under 16 from social media draws 59% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents and 54% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. Pew surveyed 9,750 U.S. adults from May 26 to June 1, 2026¹.

The two tools do different jobs: the age check tells the platform who is a child, and parental consent gives the parent the decision. Parents who want both are asking for a say, not for a government reading list.

The Court upheld checks for porn sites

Texas has already shown that an age barrier can be enforced against the pornography industry.

A pornography-industry trade association, website operators and a performer sued to block it. They lost. On June 27, 2025, the Supreme Court held in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton that the law survives intermediate scrutiny because it only incidentally burdens the protected speech of adults. The Court found that the law furthers Texas's important interest in shielding children from sexual content and is adequately tailored to it².

The Court’s rule is plain: “no person—adult or child—has a First Amendment right to access such speech without first submitting proof of age.”² That ruling covers sexual material obscene to minors, and account rules for social media will need their own design. But the principle stands: a company that profits from access can be required to check who is asking.

Privacy risks call for safeguards

Cato says mandatory age verification shifts decisions about what children see online to government³.

Take the privacy risks seriously and write them into the statute. Texas lets covered sites check age with government-issued identification or a commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data². A law aimed at social media accounts should add limits: collect only what verification requires, bar reuse for advertising, and require deletion of identity documents once the check is done. It should also require security protections and give families a way to challenge a wrong age determination without handing over more personal information.

Protecting children is no license to build permanent identity files on them.

Lawmakers should make consent count

The duty belongs on the company that provides access, with clear limits on what it may collect, keep or share. Parents should get a plain request for permission, and a platform should never treat silence as consent.

Lawmakers can hold any proposal to three questions that need a yes or no. Does it require a real parental decision before a minor's account opens? Does it protect the information used to establish age? Does it give families recourse when the system gets it wrong?

A parent's answer cannot govern account access if the platform never establishes that the user is a child and never asks. Require the age check, protect the data, and make parental consent count.

Sources

1. Majority of Americans support banning social media for kids under 16 | Pew Research Center
2. 23-1122 Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton (06/27/2025)
3. @CatoInstitute on X, 2026-10-19: Decisions about what kids see online belong to their parents. Mandatory age verification shifts those decisions to the government and puts users’ privacy and free speech at risk, write Cato’s @dr_inserra and @jrhuddles in their new study. https://ow.ly/hOTl, 2026-10-19