Apple helped nix part of a child safety bill. More fights are expected.

After adding a provision to a social-media bill requiring the tech company to help enforce age restrictions and prevent minors from downloading some apps, Carver got a flurry of texts before he got off the floor of the Louisiana House of Representatives.

“I’d describe them as panicked," Carver recalled.

As state legislators around the country seek to regulate teen smartphone use, Apple is gearing up for a battle with app makers and legislators over child safety. The question at the heart of the fight is whether regulation of teen social-media use should happen entirely within apps or whether smartphone makers and app stores also have a role to play.

Driven by the alleged risks of social media to teen mental health—as well as examples of social-media apps being used to sell drugs to minors and recruit child sex-abuse victims—a wave of states have proposed or passed legislation to regulate platforms. The proposals restrict their ability to collect data on minors, serve them algorithmically targeted content or allow them to establish accounts without parental approval.

Before Carver’s bill in Louisiana, Apple had largely managed to stay out of the fray, but that is expected to change as lawmakers nationwide seek to confront the issue. Social-media platforms and many youth-safety advocates argue that effective content restrictions will require some form of age verification from Apple and Google, the duopoly that oversees operating-system software for the world’s billions of smartphones.

“Age verifying app by app is a case of whack-a-mole," said Chris McKenna, founder of advocacy group Protect Young Eyes, who also advises Apple on digital-safety issues for children. “Every device knows the age of its user. We give our devices an enormous amount of our identity."

An Apple spokesman said websites and social-media companies are best positioned to verify a user’s age and that user privacy expectations would be violated if the company was required to share the age of its users with third-party apps. Apple provides tools that allow parents to control the devices of their children, the spokesman said.

The company reiterated its allegation that Meta Platforms’s efforts to steer legislative responsibility toward Apple are an attempt to deflect responsibility for its challenges with child-safety issues.

A spokeswoman for Meta—the parent of Facebook, Instagram and other apps—disputed that assertion, saying that verifying a child’s age app-by-app isn’t practical.

“Rather than putting the onus on parents to upload sensitive information or provide proof of identity for their teen’s age for every single app their children use, app stores can provide a central place for families to do this," a spokeswoman said, a position that many other age-sensitive app developers have endorsed.

Match Group, which owns Tinder and other dating apps, also supported this position in Louisiana.

“Kids are less safe when responsibility is limited only to developers," a Match Group lobbyist testified on the Louisiana bill.

Louisiana was one of the first U.S. states attempting to make Apple enforce age restrictions. But a number of legislators in different states are looking at introducing bills that would require app stores to verify the age of users, including Utah.

In crafting his child-safety legislation, Carver teamed up with a group of high-school students to write a bill restricting the ability of large social-media platforms to collect personal data about minors and serve them targeted ads. Platforms that failed to make “reasonable efforts" to comply would face substantial fines.

The original legislation made no mention of Apple. But during Carver’s discussions with various tech companies, a lobbyist for Meta—one of the bill’s primary targets—made a case for requiring Google and Apple’s app stores to flag minors. Both companies collected such data about the owners of a device, the lobbyist argued, and sharing it would make it easier for apps to identify children on their platforms.

“I didn’t want to absolve Meta, Instagram, TikTok or Snapchat from their responsibility," Carver said. But a single device-level chokepoint for age made sense, he thought, so he added the provision before bringing the bill to a vote.

An Apple lobbyist responded with a flurry of text messages, declaring the provision a “poison pill from Meta" and forwarding news stories about allegations that Meta has failed to protect children, Carver said. He described Apple’s outreach as “all day, every day." In a series of conversations, Apple’s lobbyists and staffers made clear the company would fight any effort at age-gating.

“At that point, I was like, ‘OK, we’re done talking,’" Carver recalled. “We had the bill pass unanimously on the house floor."

Within days, lobbying records show, Apple hired four additional lobbyists in Baton Rouge. Among them was Alton Ashy, a Baton Rouge heavyweight best known for representing truck-stop casinos in the capital. One of Carver’s legislative colleagues joked that his bill was turning into a full employment act for the state’s lobbyists.

This isn’t the first time Louisiana legislators have faced aggressive pushback from Apple. In 2021, Louisiana attempted to pass an app store bill that would have allowed app developers to use alternative payment systems, threatening Apple’s lucrative fees on app transactions.

Apple pushed back. In a meeting with Tanner Magee, then a top leader in the Louisiana House of Representatives, an Apple employee threatened to move production for a film the company was bankrolling out of the region, said Magee. The film was “Emancipation," an 1860s drama starring Will Smith about a runaway slave.

“He basically said that if we didn’t kill the bill, he’d kill the movie and hurt our economy," said Magee, recalling his conversation with the Apple employee.

An Apple spokesman denied any Apple employee threatened to pull movie production.

“We always operate with the highest standards of integrity, and allegations that we have not in this instance are false," the Apple spokesman said.

Three years later, Carver said he had no trouble selling most of his senate colleagues on requiring app store assistance with age gating. “No one I’ve ever mentioned it to thinks it’s a bad idea except Apple and Google," he said.

Carver’s overall child safety legislation faced little apparent opposition in Louisiana’s Senate, but it needed approval from a key committee before it could come up for a vote. Several members of the committee declined to comment on Apple’s efforts at persuasion. Carver said the company’s representatives warned that if the app store amendment wasn’t removed, the state should expect years of litigation, though Apple’s representatives never explicitly said they would sue.

Carver began hearing rumblings that Apple was making inroads with the committee—his amended bill might be in trouble. Uncertain on how to proceed, he approached the chairwoman of the committee, Sen. Beth Mizell, for advice.

He declined to describe the substance of the conversation to The Wall Street Journal, but in the end, he promised not to object if she removed the app store provisions or support restoring them on the Senate floor.

“I made the choice to take the win that we could get," Carver said.

At a committee hearing in May, Mizell proposed removing app stores from the bill on the grounds that the approach wasn’t proven.

With the app store provision removed, Carver’s bill targeting social-media companies sailed through. An Apple lobbyist thanked Carver for not seeking to restore the amendment on the Senate floor.

Apple’s lobbyists didn’t respond to requests for comment. Mizell declined similar requests, noting at the hearing that other states hadn’t previously pursued it.

Gene Mills, the head of the conservative Louisiana Family Forum and a supporter of app store age-gating, credited Apple’s lobbyists with capitalizing on Carver’s newness to the state capitol.

“It’s hard to know who the trusted voices are," Mills said of Carver. “He had the votes, but he was told he didn’t."

Carver remains proud to have passed legislation targeting social-media data collection and advertising to minors during his first term. But he has regrets. Losing the app store provision was a disappointment, he said, and he hopes to take another swing at app store-specific legislation in the state’s next session.

A recent experience attempting to set up parental controls on his 14-year-old daughter’s new iPhone left him more convinced of the need to regulate app stores along with social-media platforms.

“I quickly realized Apple’s parental controls aren’t the panacea they’re promised to be," he said.

Write to Jeff Horwitz at jeff.horwitz@wsj.com and Aaron Tilley at aaron.tilley@wsj.com