A bill making its way through the Texas Legislature would ban minors from accessing popular social media apps and websites in an effort to curb what a lawmaker says is an addictive and "harmful product."
Republican state Rep. Jared Patterson's measure, House Bill 186, passed the Texas House with bipartisan support last month and appears poised to be pushed through by the state Senate en route to Gov. Greg Abbott's desk.
In an interview with Fox News Digital on Monday, Patterson said the bill came about by speaking with multiple committees and with parents who have young kids about the effect that popular social media sites like X, TikTok, Facebook and Snapchat have on children.
These committees and conversations came during the last two interims in the state Legislature that studied the issue of social media and minors.
"Learning more about it, we really came to the realization that this is the most harmful product that our kids have access to in terms of its addictive nature," Patterson said.
NEW TEXAS LAW TAKES EFFECT REQUIRING PARENTAL APPROVAL FOR CHILDREN TO CREATE SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS
Bill 186 would ban minors from signing up for accounts on social media, require parental consent to download applications, and place warning labels about the dangers of social media.
Websites that allow users to create content and share it will be considered a social media platform and thus be banned from minors.
However, websites containing news and sports will be accessible for minors.
While Texas isn’t the first state to put some restrictions on minors' access to social media platforms, it right now would be the strictest.
As of June 2024, there are 10 states that have age restriction laws on social media for minors, according to the Age Verification Providers Association.
SNAPCHAT ‘OPENLY DEFYING’ LAW, ALLOWING KIDS ACCESS TO HARMFUL ADDICTIVE CONTENT: FLORIDA AG
Currently, only Florida has laws banning minors from using social media, but its laws are not as strict as the proposed Texas Bill 186.
Florida’s age restriction is currently 14 years old, while Texas’s proposed limit would be for those under the age of 18.
However, Patterson said the age restriction isn’t set in stone.
"We'll see what happens with the Senate. When [the bill] left the House, people under the age of 18 will be prohibited from social media. There was broad bipartisan support when the bill left the Texas house," Patterson said. "[The Senate has] every right to adjust it to whatever it needs to get out of that body."
MOMS FOR LIBERTY CO-FOUNDER SAYS CONGRESS' LATEST BILL TO PROTECT KIDS ONLINE HAS SERIOUS LOOPHOLE
Regardless of what changes are made, Patterson said he still feels strongly that protecting children is the No. 1 priority and that parents will realize just what exactly is happening.
"It starts with the understanding that these parents don’t stand a chance against these algorithms," he said. "It also starts with parents understanding that these apps aren’t for friends sharing information with friends; they are built to harvest data and get people hooked on their products."
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Patterson said Texas will continue to "stand in the gap and protect these kids, even when these social media companies refuse to show up.
"They refuse to answer for the harm they’ve caused, and they don't even care to answer questions in a public forum about what they’ve done to our kids."
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It’s finally possible to purchase an audiobook from Spotify’s iPhone app with just a few taps. On Monday, Spotify announced that Apple approved an update that allows users in the US to see audiobook pricing within the app and buy individual audiobooks outside the App Store.
The update also lets Spotify Premium subscribers purchase additional audiobook listening hours. This change follows last month’s Epic Games vs. Apple ruling, which upended the iPhone maker’s control over the App Store. Under the ruling, Apple can’t collect fees on purchases made outside the app store, nor can it govern how developers point to external purchases.
Spotify submitted the update last week, but now it’s official. The music streaming service pulled audiobook purchases from its iOS app in 2022 after accusing Apple of “choking competition” with App Store rules that made it more difficult to purchase audiobooks. Spotify also started letting iPhone users purchase subscriptions outside the App Store earlier this month.
The iOS apps for Kindle, Patreon, and Delta’s emulator have also taken advantage of the court ruling, but Epic Games is still fighting to bring Fortnite back to the App Store. “This change lowers the barriers for more users to embrace their first — or tenth — audiobook, while allowing publishers and authors to reach fans and access new audiences seamlessly,” Spotify said in its announcement.
Web developers will be able to start leveraging on-device AI in Microsoft’s Edge browser soon, using new APIs that can give their web apps access to Microsoft’s Phi-4-mini model, the company announced at its Build conference today. And Microsoft says the API will be cross-platform, so it sounds like these APIs will work with the Edge browser in macOS, as well.
The 3.8-billion-parameter Phi-4-mini is Microsoft’s latest small, on-device model, rolled out in February alongside the company’s larger Phi-4. With the new APIs, web developers will be able to add prompt boxes and offer writing assistance tools for text generation, summarizing, and editing. And within the next couple of months, Microsoft says it will also release a text translation API.
Microsoft is putting these “experimental” APIs forth as potential web standards, and in addition to being cross-platform, it says they’ll also work with other AI models. Developers can start trialing them in the Edge Canary and Dev channels now, the company says.
Google offers similar APIs for its Chrome browser. With them, developers can use Chrome’s built-in models to offer things like text translation, prompt boxes for text and image generation, and calendar event creation based on webpage content.
Microsoft launched its Copilot Plus PC and Windows AI efforts last year, and now it’s going a step further today with native Model Context Protocol (MCP) in Windows and the launch of the Windows AI Foundry. The groundwork is necessary for a future envisioned by Microsoft whereby automated AI agents assist their human companions.
Introduced by Anthropic late last year, MCP is an open-source standard that’s often referred to as the “USB-C port of AI” apps. Just as USB-C connects devices from many manufacturers to a variety of peripherals, developers can use MCP to quickly let their AI apps or agents talk to other apps, web services, or now even parts of Windows. Microsoft’s embrace of this protocol is a big part of its ambitions to reshape Windows and make it ready for a world of AI agents to be able to connect to apps and services in ways that haven’t been possible before.
“We want Windows as a platform to be able to evolve to a place where we think agents are a part of the workload on the operating system, and agents are a part of how customers interact with their apps and devices on an ongoing basis,” says Windows chief Pavan Davuluri in an interview with The Verge.
Microsoft is supporting MCP in a big way inside Windows, alongside even broader efforts to power what it calls the agentic web. To evolve Windows to this agentic world that Microsoft envisions, the company is introducing some new developer capabilities to enable this MCP framework for AI agents to expose key Windows functionality that AI agents will be able to access.
An MCP registry on Windows will act as the secure, trustworthy source for all MCP servers that AI agents will be able to access. “Agents can discover the installed MCP servers on client devices via the MCP registry for Windows, leverage their expertise, and offer meaningful value to end users,” says Davuluri. MCP servers will be able to access things like the Windows File System, windowing, or the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
In a demo during a briefing for Microsoft’s MCP in Windows announcement, the company showed me an early preview of how Perplexity on Windows could leverage MCP capabilities. Instead of having to manually select folders of documents, Perplexity can simply query the MCP registry to find a Windows file system MCP server to connect to. This allows Perplexity to perform file searches on behalf of a user in a more natural way, so you could simply say “find all the files related to my vacation in my documents folder,” instead of having to add this folder or the documents manually.
You could imagine how a world of MCP servers and hosts inside Windows might eventually open the operating system up to a lot more automated app features, especially for querying data from the web inside apps like Excel. We’re also starting to see Microsoft make parts of Windows AI-powered through AI agents. Copilot Plus PCs will soon have access to an AI agent settings interface, which lets you control system settings using natural language queries.
This type of MCP functionality also opens Windows up to a world of new attack methods from malicious actors. The security risks of MCP have been well documented in recent months, with warnings of potential token theft, server compromises, and prompt injection attacks. Microsoft is well aware of the security risks of embracing MCP at such an early stage, so the company is only making a preview available to select developers to help work on its feature set and secure it fully.
“I think we have a solid set of foundations and more importantly a solid architecture that gives us all the tools to start, to do this securely,” explains David Weston, vice president of enterprise and OS security at Microsoft, in an interview with The Verge. “We’re going to put security first, and ultimately we’re considering large language models as untrusted, as they can be trained on untrusted data and they can have cross-prompt injection.”
In the demo Microsoft showed me of MCP working in Windows, there were also early security prompts to let these AI apps access MCP capabilities. “Just like a web app asks for your location, you’re in control of what you share, and we want to make sure that’s intentional,” says Weston.
This is all early work from Microsoft right now, but the demo did remind me a little of Windows Vista’s UAC prompts that would pop up whenever you needed admin permissions to do things in Windows. Those became very annoying and a subject of mocking ads from Apple. Getting these prompts right will be key for Microsoft here, as it has to balance security and the convenience of using these AI agents and apps. I sure don’t want a repeat of UAC or even Apple’s copy-paste prompts that are highly irritating in iOS right now.
Microsoft is also committing to a variety of MCP security controls that Weston outlines in a blog post today, alongside some security requirements in order for MCP servers to appear in Microsoft’s official list, or registry. “These will prevent classes of attack like tool poisoning while also creating an open and diverse
ecosystem of MCP servers,” says Weston. “More information on these requirements will be available when the
developer preview is released.”
Alongside this big MCP push, Microsoft is also positioning its own AI platform inside Windows as the rebranded Windows AI Foundry. It integrates models from Foundry Local and other catalogs like, Ollama and Nvidia NIMs, and is designed to allow developers to tap into models available on Copilot Plus PCs, or to bring their own models through Windows ML.
Windows ML should make it a lot easier for developers to deploy their apps “without needing to package
ML runtimes, hardware execution providers, or drivers with their app,” according to Davuluri. Microsoft is working closely with AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm on its Windows AI Foundry effort.
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 83, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, please don't spoil Andor for me, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I've been reading about Mission: Impossible and Sam Altman's kitchen and bad roommates, ranting to PJ Vogt about all the ways I'm trying to use my phone less, writing all my scratch notes in Antinote, deciding to be cautiously optimistic about The Paper, rewatching the last season of Mythic Quest, watching and reading about life as an air traffic controller, trying to restart a meditation practice after discovering I get Headspace through work, and using Ludex to see if any of my sports cards are worth anything. So far… they're not.
I also have for you a pair of headphones you're practically guaranteed to love, two new sci-fi shows to check out, the new Airbnb, and much more. Let's dive in.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you reading / watching / listening to / playing / carrying around in a backpack this week? What should everyone else be just as into as you are right now? Tell me everything: ins …
Duolingo
What happens to schools if AI becomes a better teacher?
Luis von Ahn, CEO of Duolingo, recently shared his vision for the future of education on the No Priors podcast with venture capitalist Sarah Guo, and it centered on AI transforming the very role schools will play.
"Education is going to change," von Ahn said. "It's just a lot more scalable to teach with AI than with teachers."
That doesn't mean teachers will vanish, he emphasized. Instead, he believes schools will remain, but their function could shift dramatically. In von Ahn's view, schools may increasingly serve as childcare centers and supervised environments, while AI handles most of the actual instruction.
"That doesn't mean the teachers are going to go away. You still need people to take care of the students," the CEO said on the podcast. "I also don't think schools are going to go away because you still need childcare."
In a classroom of 30 students, a single teacher can struggle to offer personalized, adaptive learning to each person. AI, on the other hand, will be able to track individual performance in real time and adjust lesson difficulty based on how well each student is grasping the material, according to von Ahn.
Imagine a classroom where each student is "Duolingo-ing" their way through personalized content, while a teacher acts as a facilitator or mentor. "You still need people to take care of the students," he noted, "but the computer can know very precisely what you're good at and bad at — something a teacher just can't track for 30 students at once."
Education is slow to change, so this may take many years, von Ahn explained, noting that regulation, legacy systems, and cultural expectations all serve as drag forces. Still, he sees a future where AI augments or even supplants parts of formal education, especially in countries that need scalable education solutions fast.
It's a provocative vision, one that raises deep questions about the future of learning and what we expect from education in an AI-driven world.
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