In 2024, Australia became the first country in the world to impose age restrictions for social media. As of late 2025, the country requires companies such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube to verify users’ ages to prevent children under 16 from accessing their platforms.

Since Australia passed its law, several countries, including Malaysia, Denmark, and, most recently, France, have established their own age restrictions for social media, while countries like the Philippines and Spain are considering similar legislation.

Proponents of age restrictions point to studies that have found social media can have negative impacts on youth mental and physical health. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory warning that excessive social media use can increase rates of depression, anxiety, and eating disorders in youth and teenagers.

A number of bills — both successful and unsuccessful — aimed at reducing social media’s negative impacts on youth have made their way through the Colorado Capitol in recent years, including measures that would have required age verification for pornography websites and for social media platforms to publish their policies related to the sale or advertisement of illicit substances, firearms, and sex trafficking.

In November, a federal judge blocked a 2024 law that, in part, requires social media platforms to issue notifications with information about the physical and mental health impacts social media can have on children when a minor user has spent a certain amount of time on social media or is on the app between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.

Last session, the General Assembly issued its first veto override since 1988. The bill in question, Senate Bill 086, would have required social media companies to remove accounts engaged in illegal activity involving children under 13.

The measure would also have required social media companies to comply with search warrants within 72 hours and to staff a phone line to inform Colorado law enforcement agencies of the status of their warrants.

While the Senate succeeded in overriding the governor’s veto, sponsors in the House didn’t believe they had the votes to do the same, and the veto remained in place.

Warrant response is a problem

This year, two sponsors of SB 086, Sen. Lisa Frizell, R-Castle Rock, and Rep. Andrew Boesenecker, D-Fort Collins, have introduced a pared-down version of the bill that only includes the warrant compliance requirement. Sen. Dylan Roberts, D-Frisco, is also a sponsor.

“Warrant response is a problem, and it is a big problem, whether the social media companies will acknowledge that or not,” Frizell said. “We have lots and lots of evidence that they really can’t refute.”

According to Frizell, social media platforms are not currently being punished for failing to respond to search warrants in a timely manner.

“Whether they execute that warrant in two days, 10 days, or two months is really up to them,” she said.

For many cases involving human trafficking and the sale of illicit drugs or firearms, time is crucial, added Roberts.

Waiting for a platform to comply with a search warrant “can stop a case in its tracks,” he said. “That’s my biggest concern, I think, from my perspective, is that we have victims, we have people who are being seriously injured or dying, and then law enforcement can’t get enough information to figure out who did that to them.”

All citizens are legally required to respond to search warrants, Frizell and Roberts said, and large corporations shouldn’t be exempt from that requirement.

“These are warrants that judges have signed off on; they’ve gone through the process, and these are companies that are engaging in commerce in our state, and they have every right to do so, but that also means they need to listen to law enforcement and respond to requests when people have been seriously harmed and we’re trying to prevent further harm,” Roberts said.

“I’m all about free markets and people making money and providing services that people find interesting or applicable to their lives that they want to be a part of, but these companies also have a responsibility to their users,” added Frizell.

The bill is scheduled to be heard by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Feb. 11.

‘They’re growing up in a world with no guardrails’

As the father of three young children, Sen. Matt Ball, D-Denver, knows firsthand how easy it is for kids to access content that may be inappropriate for their age group.

“They’re growing up in a world with no guardrails,” he said. “As soon as they get access to a web browser, they can get anywhere, and there’s a lot of really scary places on the internet.”

Ball is sponsoring a bill, along with Rep. Amy Paschal, D-Colorado Springs, that would mandate that operating systems require account holders to enter their birthdate when setting up a new device. That information is then converted to a signal, and app developers would receive the individual’s age bracket, not their full birthdate.

“No personal information is communicated that you could use to identify somebody; it’s just an age bracket signal,” he said.

The bill also requires developers to ask users who download their apps for their age bracket and prohibits developers from sharing age signals with third parties for any purpose not required by the bill.

Several other states, including Utah, California, and Texas, have passed similar laws.

Ball said his bill is similar to California’s because he liked how it balances users’ privacy with developers’ First Amendment rights.

“It’s really light, it’s really good on data privacy; it’s just communicating the information that companies need and nothing more than that,” he said. “I just think it makes a lot of sense and does make an important step for us in protecting kids online.”

Because other states already have age attestation requirements in place, Ball said tech companies have been relatively cooperative.

Ball noted that the majority of bills related to social media use by kids have received bipartisan support.

“California was really the first blue state to do something on this, and we would be the second,” he said. “This is something that started in red states. I’ve had nothing but productive conversations with Republicans thus far; I would expect it to be bipartisan.”

Being a parent at a time when people have unfettered access to anything and everything on the internet is “pretty scary,” Ball admitted. “We have made no rules, and the internet has a lot of things, but it’s also a cesspool, and we know what it does to kids. I think we need to be thoughtful about how we put those guardrails and put those rules on it, but we have to do something to make sure that kids still have a childhood that’s not disrupted by the worst thing that you can see on Twitter, and I feel really strongly about that.”