By Sami Graham
Alaska’s most recent Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that 19% of high school students reported attempting suicide at least once in the past year, more than double the rate recorded in 2011. Senator Dan Sullivan has spent years making the case that social media platforms bear real responsibility for that trend, hosting the U.S. Surgeon General in Anchorage for community roundtables on the youth mental health crisis and writing publicly that Big Tech’s business model is to get our children hooked. His co-sponsorship of the Parents Over Platforms Act (POPA) is the next step in that work, and Alaska parents should know what it could mean for their family.
The core of POPA is a simple proposition: when a platform knows a minor is using its product, it is legally required to stop doing the things that cause harm. It must disable manipulative recommendation feeds. Invasive data collection must stop. Personalized advertising targeted at children is prohibited. These requirements do not depend on platform goodwill or self-policing. Senator Sullivan has said we need to shake the hold that social media has on our children. POPA is the mechanism that makes that grip illegal rather than merely regrettable.
The way platforms receive that signal is practical and privacy-respecting. Parents set an age profile on a child’s device, and the operating system passes an age-bracket signal to apps designated as high-risk, meaning those offering features or content designed for adults.
Critically, only apps that provide meaningfully different experiences for adult users are covered at all. A fishing guide app, a rural communications tool, or an Alaska Native language resource has no new obligations under POPA. That targeted scope matters enormously for a state where independent developers and small technology businesses serve communities that larger platforms largely ignore. The bill keeps the compliance burden exactly where it belongs: on the platforms that built predatory systems for profit, not the small developers who did not.
The alternative approach circulating in Washington would put the verification burden on app stores, requiring every user to submit age documentation at account creation before downloading anything. For Alaskans in remote communities already navigating limited connectivity and limited digital infrastructure, that friction falls hardest on the people least equipped to absorb it. It also leaves the biggest gaps exactly where Alaska families need coverage most, since game consoles, browser-based platforms, and pre-loaded apps all fall entirely outside its reach. A teenager in a rural Alaska village can route around it without trying, and the very communities Sullivan has highlighted as most at risk from expanding broadband access would bear the brunt of that gap. POPA’s device-level approach travels with the child regardless of how or where they access content, closing the loopholes that a store-based solution cannot.
The trends in Alaska’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey did not happen in a vacuum. Behind each data point is a kid who picked up a phone and found something that made things worse. Senator Sullivan has spent years telling Alaska families that this fight is worth having. POPA is proof he meant it.
