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 exclusively by the Attorney General's office, not by private lawsuit, 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 not name specific verification methods the way some other states' laws do. It requires reasonable age-verification methods without limiting compliant sites to a single technical approach, which gives covered platforms latitude in how they confirm a visitor's age.

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: Attorney General Only, No Private Lawsuit

South Carolina Code Ann. Section 37-1-310(D) authorizes the Attorney General to seek injunctive and other equitable relief against a commercial entity that fails to comply. That is the entire enforcement mechanism written into the statute. Unlike Wyoming's or West Virginia's laws, South Carolina's statute does not create a private right of action, and it does not set a specific civil-penalty dollar figure that applies per violation or per day.

That structure means an individual visitor or parent cannot sue a noncompliant site directly under this statute in South Carolina the way they could under Wyoming's law. Enforcement depends on the Attorney General choosing to act, and no such enforcement action against a specific site under Section 37-1-310 has been publicly reported as of this writing.

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 Attorney-General-only 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), opened this session, current as of 2026-08-13. 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: 2026-08-13.