Last week, “Project 2029,” a left-of-center group led by Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), announced its first policy priority for the next Democratic presidential hopeful. Titled “Kids Over Clicks,” the proposal outlines various online safety policies for children.
The proposal includes recommendations to age-gate social media for children under 16, prohibit unhealthy design features such as addictive feeds, keep AI chatbots from being marketed as licensed professionals, and institute bell-to-bell cellphone bans in schools.
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On its face, the Project 2029 proposal suggests online safety may be turning into a partisan issue. Indeed, Kids Over Clicks is almost certainly an attempt by a group of entrepreneurial Democrats to contrast their party with Republican congressional leadership and the accelerationist faction of the Trump administration.
Despite what federal politics may suggest, however, the move by Democrats to enshrine children’s online safety in their 2028 presidential platform is a bid to adopt a position that has already become the overwhelming bipartisan consensus.
To be sure, the Project 2029 proposal reflects what blue states such as California and New York have done to protect minors online. For example, New York’s SAFE for Kids Act, enacted in 2024, prohibits social media platforms from offering addictive feeds to users determined to be minors (via “commercially reasonable” age verification processes) without parental consent. Likewise, last year, California was one of the first states to hold AI chatbot providers accountable for keeping chatbots from engaging with minors in ways that encourage self-harm or that provide or solicit sexual content.
But blue states have not been the only ones passing measures to safeguard children in the digital age. Red states were among the first to address federal gaps in online safety and protect children from exploitation by social media platforms and pornography websites. In 2022, Louisiana became the first state to require age verification to access pornography websites. Two dozen states have since followed suit, including Texas, whose age-verification law was upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton.
Then in 2023, Utah became the first state to enact a combination of laws that held social media companies liable for the harms their addictive features cause, age-gated platforms, strengthened parental controls, and created digital curfews for use. Furthermore, Utah was one of the first states to require disclosures of an AI chatbot’s non-human status. Other red states, such as Texas and Arkansas, have also enacted laws aimed at protecting users, including minors, from AI-related harms.
As the Institute for Family Studies has repeatedly found, tackling children’s online safety is overwhelmingly supported by voters, left and right. Last fall, IFS found that a stunning 90% of voters want Congress to prioritize online safeguards for children over tech industry growth. That result includes 95% of Harris voters and 89% of Trump voters. Similarly, a 2026 IFS survey discovered that 80% of voters support holding tech companies liable for harms, 79% want age limits for pornography, and 59% support phone-free school policies. Just last week, a new Pew Research report found that the majority of Americans are in support of banning social media for children under 16, as was recently done in the United Kingdom.
DON’T LET BIG TECH TURN A CHILDREN’S SAFETY BILL INTO CORPORATE IMMUNITY
In the midterm elections and the next presidential race, it will be tempting for both parties to define themselves by opposing the other in a manner that threatens to turn online safety into a completely partisan issue. But letting children’s online safety be reduced to a tug-of-war between the parties, when it is a rare point of consensus, will be a loss for both sides and, ultimately, for American families.
At the federal level, children’s online safety is up for grabs. Electoral victory may belong to whichever party gets its act together first. But to make children’s online safety a partisan issue is to let Big Tech stifle momentum and win the fight. In the war against Silicon Valley’s exploitative power, the American family’s only way to victory is to have lawmakers willing to respond to voters and work across the aisle.
Jared Hayden is a policy analyst with the Family First Technology Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.
