Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

30. Federal Trade Commission · Minor

Examine platform advertising and contracts with children as unfair trade practices

Partially done

875 30. Federal Trade Commission

“The FTC should examine platforms’ advertising and contract-making with children as a deceptive or unfair trade practice, perhaps requiring written parental consent.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The Commission issued compulsory 6(b) orders to seven companies — Alphabet, Character Technologies, Instagram, Meta, OpenAI, Snap and xAI — requiring them to say how they monetize engagement, how they test the effects of companion chatbots on children and teens, and how they apprise parents of the risks. That is the examination the Quote asks for, under the Commission's own study power. The second limb — requiring written parental consent for advertising to or contracting with children — was not taken up as a rule; the COPPA Rule amendments published 2025-04-22 and effective 2025-06-23 require separate verifiable parental consent before a child's data is disclosed for targeted advertising, but they were adopted by the previous Commission on 2025-01-16 and cover data, not contracts.

  2. Attempted

    The Commission announced and then held a public workshop, The Attention Economy: How Big Tech Firms Exploit Children and Hurt Families, on how platforms impose addictive design features, erode parental authority and fail to protect children — with the Chairman, both sitting Commissioners and two Senators taking part. A workshop is an examination announced, not one with compulsory process behind it.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • Also in the window and consistent with partial: the FTC’s age-verification workshop of 2026-01-28 and the COPPA enforcement policy statement of 2026-02-25, which withholds enforcement from operators that collect personal information solely to verify a user’s age. They are named here rather than dated as separate events because they answer #2244’s age-threshold question more directly than this Quote’s advertising question.
  • Leveled with #2243 (proceedings) and #2245 (education); all three sit on pages 875–876 and were read together against the same run of FTC children’s work.
Action
restrict
Object
platform advertising and contract-making with children
ID
2242