WASHINGTON, DC — The Supreme Court spent Thursday morning hearing oral arguments on whether states can require social media platforms to verify the ages of their users, a question several justices struggled to address without first acknowledging that the platforms in question have known the ages of their users since roughly fourth grade.
The case, brought by a coalition of states and a trade group representing the companies whose entire valuation depends on the data the law would now require them to formally check, centers on a single constitutional question: whether asking a 14-year-old to upload a government ID to a company that has been logging her keystrokes since she got her first iPad constitutes a meaningful new invasion of privacy.
“The platform already knows she’s fourteen,” said Anwen Pakulski, a tech policy fellow at the Beacon Internet Project, an organization most observers describe as nominally independent. “It knows she’s fourteen, it knows what brand of retainer she has, and it has a fairly confident guess about her crush. The question before the Court is whether she should also hand over a driver’s permit so the company can confirm what it has already monetized.”
During arguments, Justice Sotomayor asked counsel for the platforms whether the companies could simply share the age data they already possess with the states seeking to regulate them, prompting a forty-second pause during which the attorney appeared to age in real time. Justice Alito, separately, asked what TikTok was.
Counsel for the states argued the verification regime would protect minors from “content harmful to minors,” a category the brief defined as content that is harmful to minors and otherwise left to the imagination. Justices on both sides of the bench appeared to accept the definition with the weary nod of adults who have not opened the app in question but have heard things about it from a niece.
Parents outside the courthouse expressed support for the law in principle, with several volunteering that they would feel safer knowing their children’s social media use was being formally tracked by a state agency rather than informally tracked by six advertising consortia, a Chinese data broker, and the family’s smart refrigerator.
Teenagers reached for comment had already moved to a different app.
A decision is expected by June. The companies have indicated that whatever the outcome, they will continue to know everyone’s age, home address, and approximate emotional state in real time, and that any compliance burden will be passed along to users in the form of a slightly longer onboarding screen.