Florida attorney general proposes bill that limits social media, AI features for teens in the state - Reuters

Losing a court case and immediately proposing a bill is the legal equivalent of shouting *fine, I'll do it myself* and storming off to find a pen — which is precisely what Florida's attorney general has done, days after a judge declined to order Meta to overhaul Instagram and Facebook for teenagers. The remedy on offer is an act that would "dictate changes" for app stores, social media companies and AI chatbots. Dictate changes. That is the entire policy content we have been handed, and it is doing an enormous amount of work in a very small sentence.

Note the target list, which reads like a teenager's afternoon rendered as corporate defendants: app stores, social media companies and AI chatbots, the whole supply chain from the download button to the thing that tells your fifteen-year-old it has feelings for them. What the bill would actually make any of them do is, at this stage, a rumour with a title. No age threshold has been published, no compliance mechanism, no named chatbot — just three industries and a verb, which is how a lot of legislation starts and rather more press releases end.

And then the small print, delivered with a straight face: the act "would still need to be introduced by a legislator." Translation — this is a press release with a cover sheet and a hopeful expression, awaiting a sponsor who fancies their name on it. Attorneys general have learned that a drafting pen is cheaper than a courtroom, and the state-by-state patchwork we noted earlier now extends its tendrils toward the Sunshine State. Meta, meanwhile, has already won the round that mattered. Florida's answer is a document that is not yet a bill, aimed at three industries at once, on the strength of one lost motion. Whether a legislator obliges is, as ever, someone else's problem.