Utah Hands Parents the Keys to the App Store

Two devoted Utah parents experienced the unthinkable in 2022: They lost their 14-year-old son—a warm, football-loving boy—to suicide. In the painful days that followed, as they searched for answers, they discovered something chilling. Despite their best efforts to set up parental controls and screen time limits, their son had been relentlessly fed pro-suicide content by TikTok. The “safety features” they trusted turned out to be little more than window dressing.

Stories like this are heartbreaking, and all too common. As parents and policymakers, we can’t stand by while a digital ecosystem treats children like adults, targets them like consumers and leaves them exposed to harmful content without real safeguards. That’s why Utah became the first state to pass comprehensive social-media legislation in 2023. Now, it’s the first to pass the App Store Accountability Act—a groundbreaking law that confronts one of the most overlooked dangers in the digital world: misleading app ratings and unchecked gatekeepers.

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