A growing coalition of lawmakers think there’s an opening to regulate social media by treating it the way they would drugs.

A jury in New Mexico recently found Meta was responsible for misleading users about the dangers of its platforms. In a similar suit in California, a jury found Meta and YouTube liable for neglecting to protect users from adverse mental health outcomes, particularly for teens and children. And recent polls have shown a majority of adults and teenagers support restrictions on social media for children.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers are hoping to translate some of that sentiment into legislation that would impose stricter requirements for verifying users’ ages and either banning or limiting the most harmful parts of social media platforms for minors. Their proposals are bringing together strange bedfellows inside and outside of Congress.

“I just think that what these verdicts show is that normal people who are going about their lives, when they get presented with the facts of what these companies are doing, they’re saying, ‘We cannot allow this to go on,’” said Sen. Josh Hawley, a prominent Republican supporter of regulating tech companies. “Congress should quit sticking their hand out to take all the money from these corporations and actually do something for a change, and I hope this will be a wake-up call for them.”

A bill by Hawley, his Republican colleague Sen. Katie Britt and a handful of Democratic senators would impose age verification requirements on artificial intelligence chatbots. A bill in the House from the newly formed Kids Online Safety Caucus would create a legal age-verification framework. A bill backed by three-quarters of the Senate would require online platforms to limit features like algorithmic recommendations and market research for users under 17.

The first of those bills, the GUARD Act, passed unanimously out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. Sen. Chris Murphy, one of the Democrats who supports the legislation and who is often discussed as a 2028 presidential contender, said working with Republicans on the tech issue has been promising because it’s “not a right or left issue” for Americans in general.

He told NOTUS he considers his Republican counterparts in Congress important allies, especially given that the White House has broadly aligned itself with the tech industry.

“The White House is so out of step on this that it’s hard for them to hold all of their colleagues,” Murphy said. “I think Katie [Britt] and Josh [Hawley] are wrestling with how to protect their kids, and I’m doing it with two teenagers.”

No major social media overhauls are on the brink of passing in Congress yet, in part due to legislative gridlock. But Democrats repeatedly pointed to the White House as another reason for the legislation’s lack of momentum.

“This White House is carrying the water of Big Tech,” said Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Democrat who is leading the charge in the House to regulate social platforms.

“You look at their AI framework, it was written by Big Tech, not surprisingly, because they also are funding his East Wing renovation,” he said. “They sat at the front seats of his inauguration.”

A White House spokesperson, in response to questions about how much of a priority tech safety is for President Donald Trump, pointed to the policy framework Auchincloss referenced, which contains a section on children’s online safety and support for legislation to protect children, such as age-verification laws.

But some advocates for more tech regulation are still surprised that the White House isn’t moving faster on those tech safety priorities.

“We were heading in the direction of kind of a broad social response before this administration,” said Michael Toscano, director of the Family First Technology Institute at the conservative Institute for Family Studies. “This administration, I would have assumed, was going to champion that, given the animosity that the Trump administration had toward social media companies in particular. But it seems as if, for reasons which I still don’t fully grasp, that instead, there has been an interest in currying favor with Silicon Valley.”

The bills in the works on Capitol Hill have pulled in support from unexpected constituencies.

For example, the Senate’s Kids Off Social Media Act — which among its provisions would require companies to deactivate the accounts of users believed to be under age 13 — counts Concerned Women for America, a conservative advocacy organization, and the American Federation of Teachers among its supporters.

Despite such support, lawmakers and advocates said almost unanimously that the biggest obstacle to passing legislation is the tech industry’s influence in Washington.

Tech companies spent a combined average of $226,000 a day in federal lobbying in just the first quarter of this year, according to an analysis by Issue One, a nonprofit that aims to reform the influence of money in politics.

“[Big Tech] will often say that they have implemented ways to protect kids on their platforms, or that they’re supportive of things like age verification,” said Maggie McKneely, director of government affairs at Concerned Women for America. “But we’ve often seen that as soon as they do implement something, there is some sort of way to work around it. So they are just not supportive of legislation that’s going to restrict their ability to do business. And they recognize that kids are a huge way for them to make money.”

Regulation of social media platforms has been tried in the past, with little success. States including Utah, Ohio and California have enacted laws that would have restricted or blocked children from using social media, or required tech companies to impose tighter restrictions. But in response to legal challenges, courts have ruled in favor of tech companies, citing First Amendment rights.

Advocates of a crackdown on tech companies say the path forward is to shift the argument completely. Instead of policies restricting content on social media, they argue that laws should deal with platforms like a drug, and addiction to them like a disease.

Auchincloss told NOTUS that regulating social media companies like pharmaceutical companies is more politically and legally viable than anything that’s been tried yet.

“The framing of this, of social media, is starting to change from a publisher of things that people say to a pharmaceutical intervention that really is about the manipulation of your ventral striatum and the distribution of dopamine in your brain,” Auchincloss said.

That version of the fight, Auchincloss said, is where he’s found Republican support.

“These sort of family values groups, they and I are not going to agree on reproductive rights,” Auchincloss said. “They and I are not going to agree on probably a lot of things to do with, frankly, like content, and the role of religion in everyday life. But we are going to align on social media as a temperance movement.”

Rep. Erin Houchin, Auchincloss’s Republican counterpart on the Kids Online Safety Caucus, said she reached out to Auchincloss after reading his Substack, where he has advocated for an “age of adulthood” on the internet of 16, instead of 13. Houchin, an Indiana Republican with three children, wants the same.

“It’s been very refreshing to have members on the other side of the aisle willing to engage, and on these issues that we agree on,” Houchin said.

The lawmakers who have yet to get on board, Houchin said, may need to see firsthand the effects of social media addiction on kids.

“Some people have First Amendment concerns. There are others that maybe they don’t have or haven’t experienced a 13-year-old having access to social media yet that they don’t know that they should be concerned,” Houchin said. “But they will, they will get there.”