AINEWS
Sherrill's Kids Code Act and two companion bills turn child safety from an opt in feature into a legal design duty, with data caps and adult minor safeguards.
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill recently signed three bills that recast child online safety from a content problem into a design problem, requiring platforms that know minors use them to treat safety and privacy as the default setting rather than an opt-in feature. The package lands as comprehensive federal kids-online reform remains stalled in Congress.
The centerpiece is the New Jersey Kids Code Act, which obligates covered online services to design their products with minors' well-being in mind and to set default privacy protections for young users at the highest level (New Jersey Telegraph). Two companion bills complete the package. One establishes a Social Media Research Center at a major state university; the other directs a study on social media warning labels. Together, the three bills limit how much data companies can collect and retain on children and add safeguards around adult interactions with minors.
Sen. Raj Mukherji, a Jersey City Democrat who sponsored the Kids Code Act, framed the shift in architectural terms. "If a product is designed for children, if they know children are using the product, then safety and privacy should not be optional features," he said. "They should be the default setting" (New Jersey Telegraph).
That line is now a legal instruction. The Kids Code Act's design duty asks platforms to build for minors from the start, rather than to retrofit safeguards after a child has already engaged with the service. The data caps and the default-privacy provision push the obligation upstream, into the architecture of the product, before questions of content moderation arise.
The new obligations apply to online services that "know" children are using them, a phrase the publicly available summary does not pin down. The practical scope will likely be tested in rulemaking or in court, and it remains to be seen whether regulators read the duty as a settings-menu change or as a deeper architectural one.
The package also extends the work of Sherrill's Office of Youth Online Mental Health Safety and Awareness, which she created on her first day in office. The Social Media Research Center, once stood up, will give New Jersey an institutional base for studying how platforms affect minors, a layer several other states have lacked, and one that will help the state measure what its design duty actually produces. The warning-label study, in turn, will feed back into the legislative process.
The state-only reach drew an on-the-record warning from Asw. Andrea Katz, a Mount Holly Democrat. Federal inaction, she argued, leaves states to shoulder a fight they cannot win alone. Her point: New Jersey can change the legal hook inside its borders, but it cannot tell a platform what to do for a minor logging in from Pennsylvania or New York.
That tension is the honest limit of the package. New Jersey's laws bind platforms that operate in the state, but a national default, the kind that would compel a uniform architectural change across the country, requires either a federal statute or enough copycat state laws to make a single product redesign the cheaper path for the industry. As of the signing, neither is in place.
The test case is concrete: a New Jersey minor opens an app that knows she is under 18. The privacy setting is at its highest level by default. The data collected is capped. The platform's adult-interaction features cannot be reached without friction the design has already built in. Whether that is what the Kids Code Act actually requires, and whether the state's enforcement arm can force a redesign rather than a settings menu, is the next fight the Social Media Research Center will be built to study.