Bills to protect kids online died this session. Experts say Wisconsin can’t afford to wait.
Wisconsin made national headlines last month when its law criminalizing AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) was challenged by a federal judge. The ruling came as parents, educators, and lawmakers consider broad-reaching solutions for protecting minors from addictive social media algorithms that connect them to potentially harmful content.
“I’m shocked by that, and we’ll see if the Supreme Court gets involved,” said Dr. Justin Patchin, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire who teaches criminal justice and researches teens and technology. He called the ruling “asinine.”
Most states are grappling with how to curb online scams, deepfake political ads, and addictive social media algorithms that put minors at risk—and digital safety experts say Wisconsin is lagging in its protections compared to other states.
“We’re pretty far behind in terms of, certainly, my focus, which is on youth,” Patchin said. “A lot more could be done to protect youth online, but not only protect their safety, but to protect their rights in terms of utilizing technology for all of its positive purposes.”
Wisconsin stands to receive $313 million in settlement money following a multi-state lawsuit filed against Meta. The platform has proposed policy changes to protect kids, including limiting screen time, capping nighttime access, and minimizing school-day interruptions. It’s an example of what states can do when federal legislation doesn’t provide a blanket solution to these concerns. But is it enough?
“Legislation is necessary but not sufficient—especially just sort of the bare minimum kinds of things like making AI child porn illegal,” Patchin said.
A patchwork approach
Ilana Beller, Director of State AI Governance and Tech Policy for Public Citizen, works with states that want to implement protections in the absence of federal legislation.
Her team has outlined seven model bills with boilerplate language states can use to address deepfake, chatbot, healthcare coverage, and surveillance harms in their areas.
“They’re harms that need to be regulated in real time, or, you know, very obvious looming harms, and we need protections on the books now,” Beller said.
So while they might be a piecemeal approach without federal help, the model bills address potential harms now, with room to improve down the road. And they’ve been successful.
“All of the models that we have have had broad bipartisan support. So both Democrats and Republicans have introduced them, passed them,” Beller said.
Heading into the 2024 election, Public Citizen shared model bills to target deepfake election ads, aimed at protecting voters and alerting them when AI is used in videos. That work made them realize the need to help states pinpoint these harms and outline solutions.
Wisconsin was “ahead of the curve,” according to Beller, when it signed its deepfake election ads bill into law in 2024. More than 30 states have legislation either in effect or pending on the issue, according to Public Citizen’s tracker. But the state also lacks meaningful protection for kids from manipulative AI chatbots—a bill died during the 2025-2026 legislative session that would have protected kids from extreme harms.
Wisconsin does not have legislation protecting its residents from AI decisions in healthcare, but it does have two laws in place protecting adults and minors from intimate deepfakes using AI.
“The landscape would look differently if the federal government was putting meaningful protections in place on these things,” Beller adds.
Yet what various states are doing remains the best option for now.
“From our perspective, in a lot of these cases, there should be a combination of a private right of action and some form of Attorney General enforcement,” Beller said.
What Wisconsin is doing to protect kids
Patchin also supports a multi-prong approach to keeping kids safe online, but reiterated that Wisconsin is woefully behind other states in securing relevant legislation. For example, it’s one of only two states in the nation without a cyberbullying provision in its anti-bullying law.
“It also doesn’t provide clear guidance to schools when it comes to online behaviors on whether or not they can intervene and how,” he added. “Federal law basically allows schools to intervene in off-campus behaviors online that disrupt the learning environment at school. Yet our state statute doesn’t demonstrate that, whereas I think about 30 states do.”
When it comes to protecting kids, Patchin believes the key is strong relationships between parents and their children, so that kids participate in what his research has termed “vicarious supervision,” wherein a child is eager to please their parent with appropriate behavior both in person and when that child is out in the world, not being directly supervised.
He believes that “vicarious supervision,” combined with educational programming for families and state statutes outlining appropriate behavior—even if they lack the teeth for enforcement—works best.
“Basically, educate those who are directly involved in these kinds of situations versus trying to just criminalize these behaviors,” he said. “It’s going to take a sort of holistic approach from all of these different stakeholders.”
Patchin also believes schools could get better funding to educate students and parents about anti-bullying and online safety. The Reason Foundation wrote about how states could spend the money.
While legislation that outlaws certain behaviors and forces companies like Meta to offer better protections for kids on their platforms exists, Patchin knows minors are good at circumventing the laws. Patchin cited a recent episode of This American Life that discussed how kids used the podcast’s Instagram comment section as an unmonitored chatroom.
In the past year, bills that would have established regulations for AI platforms simulating human relationships with kids and new requirements for how social media platforms treat minors both failed in Wisconsin, alongside age verification proposals for kids and updated safety guardrails for minors.
Assembly Bill 1161 died in session, but would have prevented online businesses from collecting and selling, sharing, or retaining the personal data of minors.
AB 963 would have required that social media platforms use the strictest privacy settings for minors’ accounts and avoid the use of addictive features in said minors’ feeds. It also died during the 2025-2026 session.
Patchin has some ideas for how the Meta settlement money owed to the state could be used, starting with research.
“It’s work that needs to be done because we have to know what we’re dealing with and then understand the underlying causes,” Patchin said. “And then what’s the solution that’s directly linked back to those causes?”
Meanwhile, the Attorney General’s office operates an Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force that has produced 173 episodes of a podcast for parents and guardians called PKO Protect Kids Online, covering everything from Snapchat controls to suggestions for toddlers’ use of tech at home.
The task force offers online courses to familiarize guardians with online safety and sends safety updates via a newsletter.
