A courtroom confrontation between TikTok and the state of Alabama was slated for Monday, but a $100 million settlement halted the trial from proceeding.
Late Friday, TikTok agreed to resolve a lawsuit brought by Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, which charged the platform with knowingly harming the mental health of children. The accord requires TikTok to roll out several safeguards, including curbing late-night access for young users, presenting teens with a default nonpersonalized feed, bolstering parental controls, imposing a two-hour daily cap for children, and implementing “robust age assurance measures to effectively verify the age of young users.” The agreement could also expose TikTok to an extra $183.8 million if other states reach qualifying settlements with the company, according to the Associated Press.
Alabama’s attorney general’s office hailed the settlement as “the latest victory in Attorney General Marshall’s efforts to hold technology companies and social media platforms accountable for putting Alabama consumers, particularly children, at risk.” The office noted that last month Meta agreed to a $117 million settlement as part of a $17.1 billion multistate lawsuit over similar allegations that social media platforms harm young users.
Alabama’s push extends beyond social networks. The video game developer Roblox settled with the state for $12.2 million in April over online safety concerns. Under the terms, all Roblox users must “undergo age verification to ensure children have access only to age-appropriate content on the platform.” The state said Roblox would rely on facial recognition technology and government-issued IDs to confirm ages.
Harsh age-verification requirements spark serious privacy worries. Adopting Roblox-style ID checks would imply that all users would be subjected to these verifications, making online anonymity increasingly hard to maintain. Any age-verification measures TikTok enforces in Alabama would likely apply to the platform’s entire user base to separate adults from minors.
Meanwhile, inventive and tech-savvy users frequently find ways around such constraints or migrate to less-regulated corners of the internet. In Australia, a ban on social media for anyone under 16 has proven largely ineffective, as many youngsters have not been asked to verify their ages. Among those confronted with age gates, many sidestep the rules by having older friends set up accounts for them, gaming the age-assurance system, or even using VPNs.
As This American Life host Ira Glass reported last week, youngsters who were ineligible for social platforms were engaging in the comments section of an NPR program on Spotify—what’s more, because it offered relatively few comments, one adolescent explained. While the NPR thread isn’t the wild west of the internet, the anecdote demonstrates how teens can be highly inventive in locating less regulated spaces to connect online. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick noted last year that students barred from school social networks have even used Google Docs as a makeshift chat room.
“Maybe Australia will ban kids from Spotify comments next. Then Google Docs. Then whatever random corner of the internet kids discover after that,” he wrote. “We can keep playing [whack-a-mole] until we’ve legislated away every possible space where teenagers might talk to each other without adult supervision.” Yet he cautioned that youngsters always find a workaround, so the wiser approach is to teach them how to navigate online spaces safely.
At best, government-imposed social media restrictions can come off as political theater; at worst, they resemble chilling censorship orders. If more of these safety measures are enforced, vast swaths of the internet could become age-gated. Officials may feel they are safeguarding children in their states by striking settlements with tech platforms, but in doing so they risk making the online world less free for adults and nudging children toward more obscure areas of the web.
