Support Us!
New Jersey just did the thing Congress has spent years failing to do. On Tuesday, August 11, Gov. Mikie Sherrill stood in Jersey City and signed the New Jersey Kids Code Act — a law that tells social media companies exactly how they’re allowed to treat kids in this state, and hands parents the right to sue when they don’t.
The framing wasn’t subtle. “Big Tech isn’t just the Big Tobacco of our era. They are worse,” Sherrill said at the signing. “They designed platforms that hijacked our kids’ attention spans.”
She pointed to the number that’s become the whole argument: the typical American teen spends around 35 hours a week on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. That’s almost a full-time job.
Here’s what the law actually does — and the catch nobody’s saying loudly enough.
What Changes for Kids’ Accounts
The Kids Code Act — officially the New Jersey Age-Appropriate Design Code — flips the defaults. Right now, most platforms open kids up and dare them to lock things down. The new rules reverse that.
Starting September 1, 2027, any covered platform has to set a minor’s account to its strictest privacy settings out of the box. Account visibility, direct messages from unknown adults, geolocation sharing, search-engine indexing — all off by default. Companies also can’t keep nagging kids to loosen those settings, and they can’t quietly make a child’s account discoverable to strangers.
The algorithm gets leashed too. Platforms can’t feed minors data-driven content recommendations unless the kid actually asks for it — through their settings, a search, or a clear request. No more infinite feed engineered to keep a 14-year-old scrolling at midnight.
Speaking of midnight: notifications get a curfew. They’re off by default, and if they’re on, platforms can’t ping a minor between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. all year, or during school hours — 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on school days between Labor Day and Memorial Day. The law also limits how much data companies can collect from kids and bars them from repurposing it for anything beyond why they grabbed it in the first place.
Who Has to Follow It
This isn’t just the giants, though it’s aimed squarely at them. The law covers any online service likely to be used by minors that either pulls in more than $25 million in annual revenue or handles the personal data of 25,000 or more New Jersey residents.
The state splits kids into two groups: a “child” is anyone under 13, a “minor” is 13 to 17. For now, both get the same protections.
The Part That Gives It Teeth: You Can Sue
Plenty of online-safety bills sound tough and then die quietly in enforcement. This one comes with a private right of action.
A violation counts as an unlawful practice under New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act, which means the Attorney General can investigate, sue, and levy penalties of up to $10,000 for a first offense and $20,000 after that. But the bigger deal is that parents can go to court themselves. A judge can award $5,000 per violation or triple the actual damages — whichever is larger — plus attorney’s fees, punitive damages for reckless or knowing violations, and orders forcing the company to knock it off.
That’s the right federal lawmakers have refused to give families for years. New Jersey just wrote it into state law.
The Local Angle
If you’re a parent in Jersey, this is a two-year runway, not an overnight fix. Nothing on your kid’s phone changes tomorrow — the September 2027 start date exists because rebuilding this stuff takes platforms real time. The Department of Health still has to spell out what legally counts as “compulsive use,” and the Attorney General’s office will write the enforcement rules.
Sherrill signed two companion bills the same day. One (A4014) funds a social media research center at a New Jersey public university with $500,000 in this year’s budget, set to open this fall. The other (S3412) orders a study on whether warning labels on social apps actually curb addiction, with a report due inside 18 months.
Sen. Raj Mukherji (D-Hudson), a sponsor, put the shift plainly: “When I was a kid, our parents worried about strangers and who’s talking to us at the park or at the mall. Today, we have to worry about who’s DMing them, what algorithms are pushing into our kids’ feeds and what sensitive information is being collected, used, even sold before they’re old enough to understand what they’re giving away.”
The Take
Enforcement is where the doubt lives. A design code only works if a regulator can look at a feature and decide whether it was built to be useful or built to be compulsive — and Big Tech has a very deep bench of lawyers who’ll argue that line all day. Expect challenges. Expect the September 2027 date to feel a lot closer to the companies than it does to the rest of us.
But give Jersey this: while Washington held hearings and wrote sternly-worded letters, our statehouse actually passed something with a lawsuit attached. Whether it holds up is the next fight. For once, the state’s not waiting around to find out.
Sources: Office of the Governor of New Jersey; New Jersey Legislature (A4015 legislative fiscal estimate, July 2, 2026); New Jersey Monitor / NJ Spotlight News; Future of Privacy Forum; Bloomberg Law; Central Jersey.
