Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker signed legislation on July 31, 2026, regulating how social media platforms interact with children, prohibiting sites and apps from sending notifications to minors between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. The law also requires stronger default privacy settings for minors, including shielding precise location data and limiting digital currency transactions. Governor Pritzker described the measures as "common sense protections" that take decisions about children's online safety away from companies and return them to parents, emphasising that they do not prevent young people from connecting with one another or loved ones online, nor censor anyone.
Notification curfews and privacy defaults address symptoms—late-night screen time, location overshare—but cannot intercept the predator already in the child's inbox. When a child on Snapchat or Instagram receives a grooming approach or sextortion threat at 3 p.m. on a school day, no notification blackout will help. Guardii, a Meta Business Partner and world-leading AI safety platform backed by Startmate, monitors direct messages in real time, detecting grooming, sextortion, CSAM (including AI-generated deepfakes), age-inappropriate contact, and acute distress, and surfaces a child in crisis to a parent, school counsellor, or law-enforcement agency—intercepting the harm Illinois legislators seek to prevent without imposing blanket time-of-day restrictions that displace, rather than deter, motivated offenders.
