Meta’s push for Texas’s new age-verification law—requiring app stores to verify users’ ages and obtain parental consent for minors—appears, at first, to be about child safety. In reality, it’s a strategic move to shift legal risk. While marketed as a way to ease compliance for smaller developers, the law imposes significant new burdens on them. Any app that receives a ‘parental consent’ flag for a user under 13 gains what U.S. law calls ‘actual knowledge’ of that child’s age—triggering obligations under the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Most general-purpose apps, including those never intended for children, would suddenly find themselves subject to complex requirements and liabilities. The result: billions in collective compliance costs for smaller developers.
Meta, however, stands to benefit. Unlike most apps, it already collects extensive personal data from its users—including birthdays and photos—putting it at serious risk of being found to have actual knowledge of underage users, which could lead to fines in the tens of billions. By pushing laws that make age verification the responsibility of app stores and that treat a flagged user as the only trigger for ‘actual knowledge’, Meta hopes to reset the legal playing field in its favour. It is now promoting this model across the United States and internationally, despite the harm it poses to the broader app ecosystem and the unresolved legal conflicts it may create in jurisdictions with similar ‘actual knowledge’ standards.
In the European Union, Meta has already faced multiple enforcement actions for its activities regarding kids’ data. Recent examples include when, in May 2024, the European Commission opened formal proceedings against Meta under the Digital Services Act (DSA) for concerns about Facebook and Instagram’s age assurance methods and stimulation of addictive behaviours in children. Under the DSA, potential fines can be as high as 6 per cent of a company’s global turnover, which for Meta would be around $10 billion. Meta therefore has the same incentive to run the Texas playbook in the EU as it does at the U.S. federal level: shift liability to the app stores, throw up its hands, and say ‘We’re just acting on the age verification flags like anyone else’.
This strategy could significantly influence the outcome of the upcoming Digital Fairness Act (DFA). The DFA is a legislative proposal by the European Commission aimed at strengthening online consumer protection rules by tackling unethical techniques and commercial practices. It will focus on issues like ‘dark patterns’ in online interfaces, addictive digital service designs, exploitative targeted advertising, and difficult subscription cancellation mechanisms. The Commission has acknowledged the need for a DFA in its Digital Fairness Fitness Check Report, which found that existing EU consumer laws, while relevant, need to be better adapted to the unique challenges consumers face online, especially concerning manipulative practices and new technologies like AI.
Meta could mislead policymakers regarding the DFA by presenting its age verification model as a comprehensive solution for children’s online safety and privacy. Perhaps the most surprising part of this story is that, so far, many lawmakers have seen Meta swearing up and down that these bills are the solution for kids’ privacy and safety and have taken the company’s word for it. After all, Meta has a long track record of prioritising engagement and growth over child safety, including promoting AI-powered chatbots that engage in explicit conversations with minors, exploiting youth psychology to drive use, recruiting kids and tweens to its platforms, and even detecting specific teen behaviors to direct marketing efforts.
When Meta takes its Texas age verification rodeo global, we urge policymakers in Europe and elsewhere not to be distracted by the rope tricks. Rather than applying ill-fitting fixes to the entire ecosystem, policymakers should focus on the places where kids are most under threat. Meta’s claims that app store age verification will defeat all the dangers children face online are all hat, no cattle.