Michigan’s “Kids Over Clicks” bills would replace parental oversight with government rules

A version of the following public comment was submitted to the Michigan Senate Committee on Finance, Insurance, and Consumer Protection on March 3, 2026.

While we support the underlying aims of Senate Bills 757 through 760 and the effort to empower parents and protect kids online, the bills included in this "Kids Over Clicks" package will not achieve these goals and will instead create a vast web of regulatory controls that would degrade the overall user experience online.

The Kids Over Clicks bills attempt to break social media platforms and AI companion chatbots down into a complicated list of features and product settings, making subjective judgment calls about which may be provided to minors and which to adults. The overly complex definitions intended to create a less "addictive" experience for minors will inevitably become obsolete as online platforms continue to innovate and evolve in unforeseen ways. This is the wrong approach for an industry defined by rapid and unpredictable technological change.

For example, Senate Bill 757 (SB 757) places too much emphasis on the type of algorithms used by platforms such as Facebook and Instagram to recommend content to all users. Some highly publicized research has claimed that "addictive" properties arise from algorithms predicting what content users might like based on others' recommendations and past user behavior. For example, the bill permits minors to view content from authors they have subscribed to, but bans content that an algorithm predicts subscribers to a given author would enjoy.

SB 758 is even more granular, with a laundry list of 11 features and settings deemed inappropriate for minors, including the "ephemerality" of prompts delivered to a user. SB 759, on the other hand, is the simplest of the package, simply tacking on additional penalties for violations of SB 758.

SB 760 takes a similarly problematic approach to regulating AI companion chatbots, creating subjective requirements for a technology that continues to evolve and even disrupt social media platforms.

Rather than empowering parents, these bills would simply put the government in charge of doing the parenting for them by putting rigid technical requirements into law. These bills ignore the tools available to parents-offered both by third parties and by platforms themselves-to put safeguards around their children as they enter the online world, and would subvert the choice of parents to guide their children through this online world before they've left home.

For these reasons, we urge the committee to reject this set of bills.