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AttemptedBig Tech / Children's online safety

Pass the MATURE Act to set a minimum age of 16 for social media accounts and require platforms to verify users' age.

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AttemptedFact-checker reviewConfidence: 85%

The promise was to PASS the MATURE Act (minimum social-media age of 16 with government-ID age verification). The determinative PRIMARY source — the govinfo BILLSTATUS XML for S.419 — was fetched directly and fully confirms the rating's factual basis: sponsor Sen. Josh Hawley [R-MO], ZERO cosponsors, introduced 02/14/2023, "Read twice and referred to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation," and NO subsequent actions, votes, or passage. The bill died when the 118th Congress ended. The congress.gov PRIMARY page returned a 403 anti-bot block on WebFetch, but it renders the identical BILLSTATUS data verified in the govinfo source, and its claimed quote is confirmed verbatim there — it is a bot-block, not a dead or fabricated source. The Hill also 403'd, but its exact headline "Hawley proposes ban on social media for kids under 16" is confirmed verbatim by the search engine's returned article title (and a matching thehill Twitter post), with the substance (MATURE Act, age 16, government-ID verification, referred to Commerce, no cosponsors) corroborated by Fox Business, Deseret, Christian Post, and KCUR. No quote is fabricated. ATTEMPTED does not overstate the evidence: Hawley authored and introduced the exact bill (a genuine concrete step, above IGNORED/ABSTAINED), but it never became law and no provision took effect (below FULL/PARTIAL), and despite being sole sponsor there was no follow-through, coalition-building, or reintroduction in the 119th Congress (making the conservative ATTEMPTED call defensible over CHAMPIONED). I confirm the ATTEMPTED rating.

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