Opinion | Riggs: Parents Over Platforms Is the Accountability Missouri Has Been Fighting For

The evidence that social media platforms are harming children has been available for years, and Missouri has not waited for Washington to act on it. When the state joined 32 others in suing Meta in 2023, the charge was documented and damning: platforms had knowingly designed their products to get children addicted to harmful content, building features into Instagram and Facebook that purposefully hooked children and teens while publicly insisting the platforms were safe for young users. The state’s own data backed it up, with nearly 35% of Missouri school-age kids reporting feelings of hopelessness. What has lagged behind the evidence is policy that actually changes platform behavior rather than generating headlines.

Senator Eric Schmitt has made holding Meta accountable a defining part of his career in public service. As Missouri’s Attorney General, he joined a 48-state coalition challenging Facebook’s illegal anticompetitive conduct, and filed Missouri v. Biden, exposing how Meta made Facebook a willing instrument of government censorship. That lawsuit ultimately secured a court-enforceable consent decree preventing federal agencies from ever again coercing platforms to bury protected speech. As a Senator, he has continued pressing the company directly, demanding answers about its content moderation practices. Schmitt has refused to let Meta operate without scrutiny. His co-sponsorship of the Parents Over Platforms Act (POPA) should be the next step in ensuring they are held accountable.

POPA addresses the problem at its source by changing what platforms are legally permitted to do when a minor is using their product. Parents establish an age profile on a child’s device, the operating system relays a simple age-bracket signal to apps that carry adult-oriented features or content, and those apps are then required by law to disable the design elements that make their platforms so corrosive for young users. Manipulative recommendation feeds must be turned off, invasive data collection on minors must stop, and personalized advertising directed at children is prohibited.

Importantly, the signal only reaches apps that have been designated as high-risk, meaning those offering features or content designed for adults, so the bill does not sweep up every developer in the country. The obligation falls on the platforms that built these systems, not on families to somehow out-engineer billion-dollar behavioral design.

For Missouri families, the parental rights dimension of this bill matters as much as the platform restrictions. POPA does not dictate what choices Missouri parents make for their children. It ensures that when a parent has designated a device as belonging to a child, certain predatory practices are simply off the table.

The bill trusts Missouri parents to manage their households while guaranteeing that the most powerful behavioral engineering tools ever built cannot be deployed freely against children without consequence. That is not government overreach. It’s the government, finally giving parents the tools and backing to protect their children online.

Missouri has a growing technology sector and thousands of independent app developers whose livelihoods depend on a regulatory environment that does not treat a small business like a social media conglomerate. POPA is written with that distinction in mind. Only apps that offer adult content or experiences are covered by the bill’s obligations. A Missouri developer building a healthcare scheduling tool, an agricultural app, or an education platform carries none of the compliance burden that a harm-generating social media platform does, which keeps the regulatory weight squarely on the companies that have earned it. That targeted approach means Missouri can protect its children without handicapping the independent developers building tools that truly serve their communities.

For years, Missouri has been building the case that these platforms cannot be trusted to protect children on their own. POPA stops asking them to and starts requiring it. Senator Schmitt has taken on platforms like Meta before, and Missouri families need him to do it again. Supporting POPA is the best way he can do that.

State Representative Louis Riggs

Represents Marion and Ralls counties (District 5) in the Missouri House of Representatives. He was elected to his first two-year term in November 2018.