South Carolina Age Verification Law: Child Online Safety Act Explained

South Carolina's Child Online Safety Act requires commercial websites where more than a third of the content is harmful to minors to verify a visitor's age before granting access. The law, codified at South Carolina Code Ann. Section 37-1-310, is enforced from two directions, private damages lawsuits and Attorney General injunctions, and it carries two separate dates that both matter.

What South Carolina's Child Online Safety Act Requires

Act 198 of 2024, also known by its bill number H.3424 and titled the Child Online Safety Act, requires a commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material harmful to minors on a website containing a substantial portion of such material to perform reasonable age verification before granting access. South Carolina defines a substantial portion as more than thirty-three and one-third percent of a website's total material meeting the statutory definition of material harmful to minors, the same one-third-style threshold several other states use.

The statute does name the methods that count. Section 37-1-310(A)(12) defines reasonable age verification methods as any of three approaches: use of a digitized identification card, which subsection (A)(4) defines as a state-issued data file downloaded to a mobile device through a state-approved application and displaying the license or identification card's current status; verification through an independent, third-party age verification service that compares the personal information the visitor enters against a commercially available database, or aggregate of databases, regularly used by government agencies and businesses for age and identity verification; or any commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data. The third option is a catch-all, so covered platforms retain real latitude in how they confirm a visitor's age, but the first two are specified in the text.

Two Dates, Not One: When South Carolina's Law Took Effect

South Carolina's law is easy to misdate because it genuinely has two separate, both-correct dates rather than one. Act 198's own effective-date section states the Act takes effect upon approval by the Governor, and Governor McMaster approved it on May 21, 2024. That is the Act's general effective date.

The age-verification liability provision itself works differently. Section 37-1-310(C)(1) carries its own internal operative clause reading "beginning January 1, 2025," meaning the specific liability created for failing to perform age verification did not attach until that later date, even though the broader Act had already taken legal effect the previous spring. Neither date is a drafting error; they describe two different things within the same Act, and an accurate description of South Carolina's law states both.

Enforcement: Private Damages Lawsuits and Attorney General Injunctions

South Carolina's statute is enforced from two directions, and the private one is the part most summaries of this law leave out.

Section 37-1-310(C)(2) provides that a commercial entity that fails to perform reasonable age verification is liable to the minor, by and through the minor's parent or legal guardian, for damages resulting from the minor's accessing the material, including nominal damages, actual damages, court costs and reasonable attorney fees. Subsection (C)(3) adds punitive damages where the entity's conduct satisfies the standards for punitive damages elsewhere provided by South Carolina law. Subsection (C)(4) allows individual claims that meet the ordinary joinder or class-action standards to be combined in a single action.

Subsection (B) creates a separate private damages action, one running to an individual rather than to a minor through a parent, against a commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes obscene material, or material that depicts, describes or promotes child pornography or child sexual exploitation, on the Internet. The remedies there are the same nominal damages, actual damages, court costs and reasonable attorney fees.

Section 37-1-310(D) then authorizes the Attorney General to seek injunctive and other equitable relief against a commercial entity that fails to comply. That is an additional enforcement avenue layered on top of the private claims, not a substitute for them.

What the statute does not do is set a fixed civil-penalty dollar figure per violation or per day, the way some states' age-verification laws do. Recovery under Section 37-1-310 runs through the ordinary damages categories a court awards rather than a scheduled statutory amount. No enforcement action against a specific site under Section 37-1-310, by the Attorney General or by a private claimant, has been publicly reported as of this writing.

Data Retention Ban, Safe Harbors and Exemptions

Section 37-1-310(C)(6) bars a commercial entity or a third party that uses reasonable age verification methods from retaining any identifying information about the individual after access has been granted. That is a flat prohibition rather than a data-minimization preference, and subsection (C)(7) gives it teeth: a commercial entity found to have knowingly retained identifying information after granting access is liable to that individual for the resulting damages, including court costs and reasonable attorney fees as ordered by the court.

Three provisions narrow who the section reaches. Subsection (C)(5) is a compliance safe harbor, providing that an entity using reasonable age verification methods to confirm a visitor is not a minor may not be held liable under the section for allowing access. Subsection (C)(8) states the section does not apply to any bona fide news or public-interest broadcast, website video, report or event, and may not be construed to affect the rights of a news-gathering organization, unless that organization's own website contains a substantial portion of material harmful to minors. Subsection (C)(9) shields an Internet service provider, an affiliate or subsidiary of one, a search engine or a cloud service provider from being held to have violated the section solely for providing access or connection to content it did not create.

How South Carolina's Law Fits the National Pattern

South Carolina's Child Online Safety Act is one of dozens of similar state statutes enacted since the mid-2020s requiring age verification before access to adult content. The U.S. Supreme Court's June 2025 decision in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton upheld a nearly identical Texas law, holding that this category of statute triggers, and survives, intermediate scrutiny rather than the stricter standard some challengers had argued for.

That ruling is the constitutional backdrop against which South Carolina's combined private-action and Attorney General enforcement model should be read. The general category of law South Carolina enacted has already been tested at the Supreme Court and upheld, even though no lawsuit has separately tested South Carolina's own statute.

A Different South Carolina Law Is in Federal Court, Not This One

South Carolina does have active federal litigation touching online age and data rules, but it targets a different statute. NetChoice filed suit against South Carolina's Attorney General in February 2026 challenging the state's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, a separate law (H.3431) that regulates how online platforms design services likely to be accessed by minors, raising First and Fourteenth Amendment and Commerce Clause claims along with a federal preemption argument tied to COPPA.

That lawsuit does not target Section 37-1-310, the adult-content age-verification statute described on this page. No lawsuit specifically challenging Section 37-1-310 was located in this research. Readers who see South Carolina named in age-verification litigation coverage should confirm which of the state's two distinct laws, the Child Online Safety Act or the Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, the coverage actually concerns.

Verified directly against South Carolina's own General Assembly bill-text page for Act 198 (H.3424) and the codified text of Section 37-1-310 on the South Carolina Code of Laws site, both opened this session, current as of 2026-09-02. The finding that no lawsuit challenges Section 37-1-310 itself is a researched-but-unconfirmed negative finding drawn from a law-firm survey of state children's-privacy litigation, not a docket search; recheck before relying on it as a permanent fact.

Related Resources

• Age Verification Laws by State
• Texas Age Verification Law
• Georgia Age Verification Law
• West Virginia Age Verification Law

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Last updated: 2026-09-02.