Guest Columnist Idaho Senator Brian Lenney: Parents? Who Needs THOSE?

The Left thinks they OWN your kids…

Check out this small clip from a hearing on Friday about Idaho schools secretly transing your kids. We passed a bill to say they can’t. Some leftists showed up in droves to oppose it.

This should not surprise anyone…

And it’s part of a several-decade-long trend to take away parenting from parents and outsource it to the schools, the state, even social media. Or how about a combo of all three?

Because yesterday, the House and Senate passed a bill to make billion-dollar social media companies AND the state of Idaho the new Mommy and Daddy.

H0542. The “Stop Harms from Addictive Social Media Act.”

Sounded great, right? Protect kids from Instagram and TikTok?!

Except I voted no, and here’s why (full debate, my part starts at 13 minutes).

We all want to protect kids…

I think to some extent, every single person in that chamber does (although, obviously we all define it differently and have different goalposts).

This bill (H542), to its credit, was aimed in the right direction. Because it didn’t go after app stores or device manufacturers. It targeted the platforms themselves. That was the right call. And Meta came out against it (they had five lobbyists running around the building trying to kill it, from what I heard).

So let’s look at who was lobbying against this bill:

1. The Washington Post reported in August 2025 that Instagram’s chatbot helped teen accounts plan suicide (and parents can’t disable it).
2. Court documents from last month showed an internal Meta researcher warned of 500,000 child sexual exploitation cases per day, English-speaking markets only, and their own employee wrote “we expect the true situation is worse.”
3. TIME Magazine reported that Meta had a 17-strike policy for sex trafficking. Sixteen violations before your account got suspended. Their former head of safety testified to this under oath.

That’s who was fighting this bill.

But here was my problem…

I’m also old enough to remember when conservatives said “we don’t co-parent with the government.”

And although I really wanted this to work, I couldn’t vote for it. Because it was presented as a bill that “put parents in the driver’s seat” and “protected kids” but the kids who needed this most got nothing!

Section 48-2103(2) said these platforms have no obligation to verify age on accounts that existed continuously for seven years.

Say your daughter lied about her age at ten and has been on Instagram ever since. The algorithm shaped her entire adolescence. Eating disorder content at midnight, comparison culture wrecking her self-image, all of it.

By seventeen this bill owes her nothing. But Meta got seven years of her data.

Why? Because verifying old accounts is expensive for Meta. For TikTok. For any of these companies. So this bill carved out the most damaged kids to protect their balance sheets and we’re calling it “child protection.”

Parents don’t need a bill to put them in the driver’s seat.

They’re already there.

But Section 48-2103 requires platforms to track cumulative usage. Twenty-five hours, fifty hours, every hundred hours after that. Detailed usage histories tied to identifiable users. That’s a surveillance apparatus for your kid. Run by the same companies that connected groomers to two million minors. And now we’re trusting them to protect your daughter?!

And this is where it got insulting to me…

Section 48-2106(3) says parents can’t waive the requirements. You understand the risks, you make an informed choice about your own child, and the state says nope. Your judgment doesn’t count.

So we mandated that billion-dollar social media companies monitor your children for you. While overriding your authority to make decisions about your own family.

Because apparently parenting is too hard and the government knows better.

That’s not conservative.

I don’t know what it is but it’s not that.

And then there’s the compliance theater aspect of all this..

Section 48-2105(2)(d) says platforms aren’t liable if they used “reasonable means” to comply.

Meta’s lawyers are going to camp out in those two words. So will TikTok’s. So will every platform with a legal team. Every violation will turn into a multiyear court fight about what “reasonable” means.

Meanwhile your kid keeps scrolling. Not protected.

They already know who these kids are. They target ads to thirteen-year-old girls interested in fitness with surgical precision. But now they have a legal excuse to play dumb.

The thirty-day loophole is almost “funny” too…

Section 48-2104(7)(b) says when a platform flags a child’s account, the kid gets thirty days to dispute. Infinite scroll stays on during that window. Autoplay too. The exact features we’re supposedly banning keep running while compliance happens on paper.

That’s what this bill does. We identified the harm. We just gave it a month to keep happening.

And the billion-dollar threshold? Discord walks. Tumblr walks. Roblox probably walks too (they make their money from Robux, not ads, and this bill only covers advertising revenue). The next TikTok walks. Any platform under a billion in ad revenue operates freely while Meta and Snapchat build compliance systems their competitors can’t afford.

So really, we just protected their market position and called it regulation.

All these billion-dollar corporations have to do is hire some compliance officers, build a dashboard, let the lawyers handle the edge cases. The ones who can’t afford it? Free pass.

Kids on Discord? Unprotected.

Kids on Roblox? Unprotected.

But Meta, TikTok, and Snapchat get a compliance shield and call it a win.

The bill passed by four votes in the Senate.

I wasn’t one of them.

Because I’ve been against these types of bills for years and I’ll keep being against them. But my reasons and Meta’s reasons are not the same.

They wanted this bill weaker. I wanted it to actually hurt them.

But, still, I can’t really blame anyone who voted yes. A billion-dollar organization that’s harming our kids hired five lobbyists to kill this thing. That says something. So I can understand why people voted the other way.

But I voted no because Idaho kids deserve a bill that actually kneecaps these companies. One that protects kids without offloading parenting to the same social media companies that are actively harming them.

This one didn’t get us there.

Protecting kids matters. But at the end of the day I just don’t think outsourcing parenting to Meta and the state of Idaho is how we do it.