Illinois bill to regulate social media for children sparks privacy, censorship concerns

Noah Berlatsky

May 19, 2026

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Politicians across the country, from both parties, have been increasingly interested in regulating how children access social media. In Illinois, JB Pritzker, Democratic governor and possible 2028 presidential contender, is pushing the Children’s Social Media Safety Act, which is intended to prevent companies from targeting minors with what Pritzker calls addictive social media feeds. The bill has passed the Illinois House and is awaiting action in the Senate.

Social media companies have been accused of deliberately trying to get children addicted to social media feeds in order to keep them scrolling—and keep them seeing targeted ads. 

But many attempts to regulate social media, particularly those focusing on children, have been criticized by civil liberties groups, who worry about the privacy implications, and by LGBTQIA+ advocates, who are concerned that greater oversight of children could be used to target queer youth. The Illinois bill attempts to address some of these issues, but activists continue to have concerns. Instead, they say, social media companies and their targeted advertising should be regulated for all users, rather than just children.

The highest-profile push to regulate social media is unfolding in Massachusetts. Gov. Maura Healey and the legislature have proposed regulations that would force social media companies to install age verification systems for all social media users. The Massachusetts House passed a bill that would ban children under 14 from social media entirely, and only allow children 15 and 16 to access sites with parental consent. Healey has proposed another measure that would restrict minors on social media to two hours per day and ban features such as autoplay videos.  

Evan Greer, the director of Fight for the Future, an organization focused on the intersection of technology and human rights, said she has several concerns about the Massachusetts law and others similar to it. 

“Cybersecurity experts have been really clear for years that there’s just simply no safe way to verify a user’s age,” she told Prism. 

Verification often requires users to upload an ID, which raises serious privacy and security concerns. Alternately, it requires the use of facial recognition software, which often misidentifies Black, trans, disabled, and other marginalized people, making it difficult for them to access social media. 

That’s a major problem, Greer said. “While Big Tech social media companies are deeply flawed, and they should absolutely be regulated, they are, for the most part, what we have right now, and people use them for all kinds of important daily functions,” she said. 

As one example, Greer noted that people in immigrant communities—who might not want to upload their government IDs to a website—use social media to warn people about immigration enforcement agents in their neighborhoods. Effectively, these laws interfere with the ability of adults and children to speak or to read others’ speech, Greer said. Courts have previously ruled that these measures violate constitutional rights to free expression, such as two rulings last year against age-verification laws in Louisiana and in Arkansas. 

Joan Priester, a Hampshire College sophomore who grew up in Chicago, raised similar concerns. She told Prism that while she dislikes social media for “addictive and oligarchic reasons,” Instagram and other sites were an important way in which she found information when she was in high school. 

She was around 15 during COVID-19 lockdowns, and learned about Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests through Instagram, both through posts by friends and posts suggested by the algorithm. Priester’s experience with BLM protests in Chicago led her to other organizing. This year, for example, she worked with an anti-war Food Not Bombs campaign in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Priester also said that social media was key to her accessing information about queer identity and community. She was not out to her grandparents, who were her guardians. 

“If less supportive parents control the algorithm,” she said, “it is definitely a bad thing for somebody who’s growing up and discovering themselves.”

To address some of these problems, Illinois is trying a somewhat different approach. Instead of requiring social media sites to verify user’s age, the bill would require that devices—cellphones, laptops, or tablets—ask users for their age. This voluntary, self-reported information would then transmit the user’s age-cohort (rather than exact birthdate) to the sites. 

The sites would then be required to implement privacy protections. For example, sites would not be allowed to display geolocation information for minors; minors also would not be able to receive or send currency. Websites would be forbidden from providing addictive social feeds to minors and from sending them notifications between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. 

In response to LGBTQIA+ concerns, the Illinois bill specifically states that it is not to be construed as “preventing access to information regarding sex, sexuality, gender, and reproductive health that is not already prohibited by existing law.” 

Democratic state Rep. Jennifer Gong-Gershowitz, the chief co-sponsor of the bill in the House, told Prism that the act did not require age verification precisely because “that raises complex privacy and First Amendment issues.” Instead, the measure would simply allow parents to specify their children’s age when they set up their device. The goal of the bill, she told Prism, “is not to hand social media companies more information, but to actually hand them less.” 

Gong-Gershowitz also emphasized that the bill is not content moderation. 

“So a child could still follow ESPN Sports if they like ESPN Sports or Taylor Swift if they like Taylor Swift,” she said. “But in their feed, the things that they follow would show up in chronological order. It wouldn’t be utilizing data to produce content for children that becomes highly addictive.”

Still, Stephen Ragan, a policy and advocacy strategist at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Illinois, told Prism that the organization is opposed to the bill and lobbying against it. The core concern, he said, is that although there is no age-verification provision in the bill, there is “a prohibition on certain content feeds except with parental consent.” 

“Social media companies are going to have to identify who a parent is or a legal guardian,” Ragan said, and that could likely require legal documentation. 

“The majority of courts,” he said, “have held that prohibiting access to protected information violates the Constitution, and conditioning access to protected information on parental consent is additionally unconstitutional.”

Ragan and Greer both said they would prefer to see laws that move away from the focus on children and the difficulties of verification. Instead, legislators could restrict the ability of social media companies to collect data on all users. Ragan argued that the reason companies create addictive feeds in the first place is that they want to keep users on the platform to sell them targeted advertisements. If targeted advertisements were prohibited, he told Prism, “then I think we have disincentivized this monetization of personal information.”

Ragan said the ACLU has recommended that the bill could mandate a base privacy protection feed by default for everyone, and people could then choose the algorithm if they preferred it. That would “give users an option to choose what they want rather than, as this bill is currently written, the government making that choice for everybody—and in particular for kids,” Ragan said.

Editorial Team:
Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor