(22 News WWLP) As senators prepare to debate youth social media regulations Thursday, they’ve got implementation, reporting and algorithms on the mind.
“When you’re on your phone for hours at a time, are you going to the gym the same amount, are you sleeping as much as you should, are you getting outside? Are you talking to students, et cetera, like that? Are you talking to friends? And so often the answer is a no,” Sen. John Velis told the News Service, referring to questions he poses to kids when visiting districts as part of his work chairing the Committee on Mental Health, Substance Use and Recovery.
“I think what this bill does that I like is it gives that young person the ability to form a cognitive thought,” Velis said. “Do I want to continue to scroll or do I want to go meet my buddy and play basketball?”
The Senate Ways and Means draft (S 3164) 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 between midnight and 6 a.m. Those default settings would also apply to users who decline to go through an age assurance process.
Sen. Barry Finegold, who has two daughters in their 20s and a son who’s 14, said that he’s “seen the negative consequences of unfettered social media” and “strongly feel[s] that there should be guardrails and limitations.” He flagged social media algorithms as one of his largest concerns.
The Senate proposal takes a drastically different approach to regulating social media than a bill the House passed in April (H 5366), which would ban kids under 14 from using social media platforms and require that platforms obtain parental consent for users aged 14 and 15. The House proposal is embedded in a bill that would also ban student cellphone use in schools, an issue the Senate took up in a standalone bill. Digital rights advocates have bashed the House’s outright ban and age verification requirements, but are expressing cautious support for the Senate “default” proposal.
“I think, in general, we just need to look at the society that has been created from, sort of, the free rein of social media, and think about if government needs to get involved in this. And I think that the answer is yes,” Republican Sen. Patrick O’Connor said. “To what level and to what extent — I think that we’ll find out not just tomorrow, but also in conference.”
Debates about how to structure youth social media regulations are playing out across the country and world, as lawmakers point to the negative consequences of the platforms on children’s health and wellbeing. Major related litigation has played out in U.S. courts this year and countries like Australia and the United Kingdom have, or are planning to, implement bans for certain ages. The U.S. House recently passed a package aimed at addressing kids’ internet safety, though it faces uncertain waters in the U.S. Senate.
“As is with a lot of issues that we bring up, doing this on a state-by-state basis is going to be incredibly difficult, and I would really hope that this sends a message to Washington that they need to start working on regulating tech and regulating social media in a way that’s much more appropriate to what we’re experiencing on the ground in our districts day-to-day,” O’Connor said.
Asked after a caucus of House Democrats if the House would consider “anything less than a total ban on social media,” House Speaker Ron Mariano said, “Well, sure.”
“This is a negotiating process. This is something that we’re used to doing. We have a bill in the Senate. We’ll have a bill, and they’ll go to conference, and we’ll make the arguments of why we put in an age restriction, and they will make the argument of why they didn’t. Maybe we land on a third party to negotiate,” Mariano said. “So there’s 100 ways that this thing could be resolved.”
Unlike Mariano, Senate President Karen Spilka was not made available to the News Service following Wednesday’s caucus of Senate Democrats.
“A lot of it’s going to come to implementation. I know that there’s some commerce clauses that people are concerned about, because social media has become a monetization tool as well, and how does that interact with certain age limits and a lot of the other things that we’re trying to do?” O’Connor said. “I think that there’s a lot of technical questions in nature of how to do this, but I would say that from my conversations and the people that I’ve talked to, everyone has identified social media as a major problem inside of their district.”
Velis linked social media use to the “youth behavioral health crisis” and pointed to an amendment he filed (#31) that addresses algorithm “accountability and transparency.” The amendment text states that platforms would, at least annually, have to undergo “an independent algorithm risk audit conducted by an independent third-party auditor approved by the attorney general.” Velis said it would serve as an enforcement mechanism, as well as require social media companies “to open up their books to figure out how these algorithms work.”
Two amendments of the 32 filed to the Ways and Means draft had been withdrawn as of early afternoon Wednesday.
“It’s complicated, and it gets even more complicated, I think, because of the way in which the House presented their bill, and then there obviously being privacy issues and biometric issues and other things that were associated with that. Trying to fix some of that, work with the House to try to come to agreement on that, and put in place the best possible bill that we can,” O’Connor continued. “I honestly think that it’ll be a working document, we’ll see the things that we may have potentially missed and work on that and keep on adding to it.”