US senators introduce SCREEN Act requiring age verification and parental consent for minors online

A bipartisan group of US senators has introduced the Shielding Children's Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net Act, or SCREEN Act, which would require social media platforms and other online services to verify the age of all users and obtain verifiable parental consent before allowing minors to create accounts. The bill mandates that platforms use age-verification technology approved by the Federal Trade Commission and prohibits the collection, use or disclosure of personal information from users under 13 without explicit parental permission. It builds on earlier legislative efforts to regulate minors' online access and follows similar age-verification mandates introduced in several US states.

Requiring every user to prove their age in order to access a service imposes a privacy and friction cost on the entire user base to address harm that concentrates in specific interactions. Systems that identify predatory contact, escalation and coercion within live conversations target the actual threat actor and the child at risk, blocking hostile approaches before they reach the recipient and flagging sustained sextortion or grooming attempts for immediate intervention. Guardii operates across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and Roblox to detect these threat patterns without demanding identity verification from every participant, delivering child protection at the point where harm occurs rather than at the front door.