Big Tech has designed its social-media platforms to addict our children. It is a predatory industry, hooking kids to maximize “user engagement” for profit. These companies have proven themselves to be disinterested in the welfare of children. Rather, they are in a race to the bottom to capture young users first. Now, Congress is saying “enough.”

Current federal law to date, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998, has rendered parents practically powerless to prevent their children from opening a social-media account.

COPPA says that companies may not collect data on minors under the age of 13, and since this is how social media’s business model operates, the de facto age for creating an account has been 13. But it has not been meaningfully enforced because the knowledge standard for liability is extremely high. For social-media companies to be liable for allowing an underage child on their platforms, they had to have “actual knowledge” that the user was underage (essentially meaning they’d need a user’s birth certificate to know that). The result is that eight- to twelve-year-olds are all over social media.