AG Jackson joins coalition urging Congress to reject federal children’s online safety bill

North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson has joined a bipartisan coalition of 44 attorneys general urging Congress to reject a federal bill that he said would strip away existing state protections for children online, according to a news release from the North Carolina Office of the Attorney General.

Jackson and the coalition sent a letter to Congressional leaders warning that the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act, H.R. 7757, would preempt stronger state laws already on the books, shield tech companies from accountability and fail to deliver meaningful protections for minors.

“This bill says tech platforms have no legal duty to protect children,” Jackson said in the release. “We already have laws in North Carolina that hold tech companies accountable for harming kids, and this bill would wipe them out and replace them with almost nothing.”

According to the release, a section of the bill titled “Kids Online Safety” explicitly states that platforms have no legal responsibility to protect children, and a separate section eliminates any requirement for platforms to verify users’ ages. The bill would also preempt state laws addressing online harms across social media, online gaming, obscenity and AI chatbots — while reserving federal intervention in any case where a state attorney general attempts to enforce its terms.

The release also noted that the bill’s AI provisions carve out chat functions deemed “incidental” to a platform’s primary purpose, effectively exempting widely used chatbots attached to larger platforms from scrutiny, and would permit companies to conduct market research on minors.

Jackson has been active on children’s online safety issues, the release noted, with ongoing lawsuits against Meta and TikTok and a bipartisan AI task force co-chaired with Utah Attorney General Derek Brown focused in part on developing safeguards to protect children from AI-related harms.