(WBUR) The Senate on Thursday passed a bill to regulate youth social media use in what some senators said is an attempt to return the platforms to the “OG social media” of the early aughts.
Senators passed the bill (S 3164) by a vote of 38-2, after adding amendments that address overnight push notifications, age verification techniques and whether certain open source sites fall under the definition of “social media.” They called the proposal a way to regulate Big Tech companies and address the youth mental health crisis while maintaining First Amendment rights, data privacy, and users’ ability to join online communities.
“American teenagers spend an average slightly less than five hours a day on social media. Five hours a day. That’s almost a third of their waking lives spent scrolling on their phones. That means less time for all the other parts of life that are important to youth development: homework, sports, socializing with friends and family, music, hobbies,” said Majority Leader Cindy Creem, whose bill (S 30) served as the baseline for the proposal. “How many times have we been to a restaurant and seen parents having a wonderful dinner, and a two-year-old on his tablet?”
The Senate bill would require all social media platforms to adopt “default” settings for minors that disable things including addictive feeds, “autoplay” and “infinite scroll” capabilities, and that turn off notifications during a period at night. Those default settings would also apply to users who decline to go through an age verification process.
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“This legislation absolutely will pass any type of Constitutional scrutiny, for the very simple reason that when you talk about speech on the one hand, and you talk about design on the other hand, courts are starting to be pretty consistent. If you’re regulating design, it’s OK. Speech, obviously not so much,” Sen. John Velis, who chairs the Committee on Mental Health, Substance Use and Recovery and was pointed to as a significant contributor to the bill, said.
The Senate adopted a redrafted version of the Westfield Democrat’s amendment that expands the required reporting by social media platforms to the office of the attorney general and “allows us to actually see and better understand how these platforms are operating and dealing with these problems affecting our youth,” Velis said.
Social media platforms relied “for the longest time” on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, Velis said, which dictates that social media platforms cannot be held responsible for users’ content.
“In the past couple months we’ve just had two really, really big cases in New Mexico and the state of California,” Velis said. “This is a changing landscape, so weighing in on it now makes a heck of a lot of sense.”
In a landmark social media addiction trial in March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for harms to youth using their platforms, according to the Associated Press. A New Mexico jury also found that Meta violated state law by knowingly harming children’s mental health.