Florida AG proposes new law to crack down on teens, social media. Here are his rules

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced the Safe Screens Act on October 23, 2026, proposing mandatory age verification through app stores with parental account linking and consent, prohibition of social media platform recommendations of teen accounts to unconnected adults or messaging from such adults, daily and monthly usage limits, and restrictions on chatbot features for minors. The legislation builds on Florida's existing law that prohibits social media accounts for anyone under 14, which the Eleventh Circuit recently upheld.

Blanket age-gating measures restrict compliant users while driving determined offenders and at-risk adolescents toward unmonitored platforms and encrypted channels beyond regulatory reach, and universal age verification at the app-store level imposes a privacy cost on every user including adults. Guardii's approach—pattern-based detection of grooming, sextortion and predatory contact running in real time across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms—addresses the contact threat the Florida proposal targets without displacing activity to darker corners of the internet, flags hostile or age-inappropriate approaches before they reach the child, and enables selective intervention calibrated to the severity of the risk rather than categorical exclusion.