Kentucky lawmaker wants social media to lean on AI for age verification

FRANKFORT, Ky. (FOX 56) — A Kentucky lawmaker wants to overhaul protections on social media for children in the 2026 session.

“Our desire was to say, okay, well, we don’t want a bill that’s just going to go to court and get struck down for various reasons. But at the same time, we want to protect our children,” Rep. Matt Lockett (R-Nicholasville) told lawmakers at Thursday’s meeting of the Kentucky Artificial Intelligence Task Force.

Legislating around social media is easier said than done, Lockett explained that bills attempting to require age verification in Arkansas, California, Florida, Louisiana, Ohio, and Utah have either been struck down or stuck in the court system, mainly due to First Amendment concerns.

“Current laws and other states will say, well, a kid has to verify their age one time, and then they can do whatever they want to. All of us know that our teenagers, our kids, are craftier than that,” Lockett said.

Lockett is proposing the SHASM Act: Stop Harms from Addictive Social Media.

“This would require age estimation on behalf of the social media platform. And so instead of relying on age verification, which has not been upheld, where more data is collected on the back end, it utilizes what social media platforms are already doing,” Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Chelsey Youman told lawmakers.

Lockett and ADF argue that several social media sites are already collecting this type of age estimation data to determine the content in users’ feeds and for targeted advertising, often through artificial intelligence.

“That within hours of a user making an account, they have an estimation to the year of how old the user is based on the way they interact online, and it requires them for children’s accounts that they identify within 14 days to take those accounts offline,” Youman explained.

At that point, the bill requires parents to step in and verifiably consent they’re ok with their kids being online up to the age of 16. It would also require expanded parental controls on social media platforms, allowing parents to monitor time on the platform and choose what kind of content their kids are exposed to.

Additionally, the bill would require more security around data collection that is prohibited from being shared with advertisers.