Attorney General Ford unveils Nevada Youth Online Safety Act to restrict minors’ social media features; testimony sharply divided

Attorney General Aaron Ford opened a Senate Commerce and Labor hearing on Senate Bill 63 on May 1, presenting legislation the office calls the "Nevada Youth Online Safety Act." Ford said the bill seeks to reduce online predation and lessen exposure of minors to algorithm-driven content that his office and others link to harms to youth mental health.

"These predators aren't lurking in dark alleys," Ford said. "They can slip into a child's DMs or direct messages, impose as peer-aged friends, and start the process of grooming." He described guardrails the bill proposes: parental consent for minors under 18 (with an exception for emancipated minors), age verification with an accuracy threshold the draft sets at approximately 95 percent, limits on platforms' use of minors' personal data in algorithmic recommendation systems, disabling infinite scrolling, hiding interactive metrics (likes/shares) for minors, disabling autoplay and live streaming for minor users, and restricting notifications between midnight and 6 a.m. and during school hours.

The hearing included emotionally charged testimony from family members and students. Bethany Farris told the committee about her daughter, Victoria Kramer, who died Aug. 3, 2024. "She looked up how to tie that knot from TikTok," Farris recounted. "She had a reel playing on her phone about how she... tried over and over again... She had clothes that she had tried over and over again. She had ended up using a pair of leggings that ended up being her demise." Farris urged lawmakers to adopt protections to prevent other families from suffering similar losses.

Donjay King, supervisory investigator with the Attorney General's Human Trafficking and Missing Children Unit, described how predators use fake profiles, gifts of virtual currency, and cross-platform recruitment to groom and recruit children. "These predators are able to send real money or virtual game currencies through digital platforms," King said, and then coax children into ever-riskier behavior.

Mark Krueger, Chief Deputy Attorney General in the Bureau of Consumer Protection, walked the committee through the bill and a proposed amendment. Key clarifications appearing in the amendment included: changing references from "social media platform" to the broader "digital platform" term; specified exceptions for electronic mail, cloud-storage services, online shopping/e-commerce (if conforming to age verification), educational instructional materials used in Nevada schools, certain internal corporate communication, and gaming platforms licensed through the Nevada Gaming Control Board; a 95 percent accuracy benchmark for reasonable age verification; a parent/guardian right to revoke consent; and a carve-out allowing communications between health-care providers and patients where appropriate.

Support for the bill came from students and school officials. Two students from East Las Vegas testified that social media in their community facilitates sales of drugs and weapons and promotes conflicts. Christy McGill of the Nevada Department of Education's Safe and Respectful Learning office said her SafeVoice program had seen harms tied to cyberbullying.

Opponents raised constitutional and practical concerns. The ACLU of Nevada, TechNet and the Computer and Communications Industry Association urged rejection or substantial revision. Concerns included: forcing extensive age verification and parental-consent systems that require collection of sensitive personal data (government IDs, biometrics), privacy and data-retention risks, the technical and financial burden on platforms (especially smaller services), constitutional challenges under the First Amendment, and the prospect that platforms may simply block all minors rather than invest in compliance. Meta's safety-policy representative argued that platforms already provide teen-specific account controls and urged a different solution: app-store level age verification or industry-built tools.

Committee members asked detailed implementation questions. Senators sought to know how age-verification would work in practice, how platforms would identify a parent or guardian, and how the bill would affect exempt categories such as gaming or school-sanctioned tools. Krueger and the Attorney General's office cited other states' laws and litigation: the transcript notes roughly five states had enacted age-verification measures and about nine states were in litigation over related laws, although the office cited cases in which injunctions were lifted (Arkansas, Mississippi) as favorable signals for defendability.

The committee did not record a final vote during the hearing. Attorney General Ford said his office would defend the statute if it passed and urged legislators to move to protect children. No committee action advancing or defeating SB63 appears in the provided transcript.

The hearing made clear the depth of disagreement: proponents framed the bill as a needed public-safety and youth-mental-health intervention, while opponents said the bill’s technical, privacy and constitutional costs outweigh its benefits and argued for alternative approaches or further stakeholder work.