Florida has passed a bill to ban minors under 14 from having social media accounts, and online platforms will be forced to delete any accounts already owned by those under the legal age.
For people between ages 14 and 15, parental consent will be needed to register a social media account.
The bill, HB 3, is considered one of the most restrictive social media bans for minors in the U.S. and will take effect on Jan. 1, 2025. But some critics believe the law won’t stand up to a constitutional challenge, and argue it infringes on the First Amendment rights of young people in the state.
Proponents of the law, however, say it will protect children from online harm and risks to their mental health.
The bill was championed by Republican Speaker Paul Renner, who warned of social media’s “addictive technologies” at the bill-signing ceremony held at a Jacksonville school.
“A child in their brain development doesn’t have the ability to know that they’re being sucked into these addictive technologies and to see the harm and step away from it, and because of that we have to step in for them,” Renner said.
“Social media harms children in a variety of ways,” Gov. Ron DeSantis stated in a news release after signing the bill into law. “HB 3 gives parents a greater ability to protect their children.”
Meanwhile, Democrat Anna Eskamani, of the Florida House of Representatives, argues the law will do the opposite for parents.
“Though I agree more needs to be done in protecting our youth on social media, this bill goes too far in taking away parents’ rights and banning social media usage — and thus First Amendment Rights — for young Floridians,” Eskamani said in a news release.
“Instead of banning social media access, it would be better to ensure improved parental oversight tools, improved access to data to stop bad actors, alongside major investments in Florida’s mental health systems and programs.”
Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, opposed the legislation, saying it would limit parental discretion and raise data privacy concerns because of the personal information users would have to provide to be age-verified.
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The bill does not name any specific social media platforms, but states that it targets sites that promote “infinite scrolling,” display reaction metrics such as likes, feature auto-play videos and have livestreaming and push notifications. It would exempt websites and apps whose main function is email, messaging or texting between a particular sender and recipient.
This version of the bill is slightly watered down from a proposal DeSantis vetoed earlier this month, which would have banned social media access for people under 16.
Florida is far from the first state to consider legislation like this. Utah became the first U.S. state to adopt laws regulating children’s access to social media. But in Arkansas, a similar law was blocked by a federal judge, who wrote: “Age-gating social media platforms for adults and minors does not appear to be an effective approach when, in reality, it is the content on particular platforms that is driving the state’s true concerns.”
Supporters in Florida hope the bill will withstand legal challenges because it would ban social media sites based on addictive features, rather than content.
Renner said he expects social media companies to “sue the second after this is signed. But you know what? We’re going to beat them. We’re going to beat them and we’re never, ever going to stop.”
Eskamani notes that a legal precedent set in the Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) case may be used to strike down Florida’s social media ban.
“The Court has found that statutes restricting constitutionally protected speech will fail if ‘less restrictive alternatives would be at least as effective in achieving the legitimate purpose that the statute was enacted to serve,’” Eskamani writes.
“The Court in Ashcroft affirmed the injunction of a law remarkably similar to this law, noting that the ‘purpose of the test is to ensure that speech is restricted no further than necessary to achieve the goal, for it is important to ensure that legitimate speech is not chilled or punished.’”
The Ashcroft v. ACLU case arose when the U.S. Congress passed the Child Online Protection Act in 1998, to prevent minors from accessing pornography online. The ACLU challenged the law, arguing it infringed on First Amendment rights. The Supreme Court and a Third Circuit court ruled in favour of the civil liberties union.
The law was struck down because it “did not use the least restrictive means possible to protect children (the court found that blocking software installed on home computers by parents would do as good a job without preventing free speech). For similar reasons, the panel found that the act was unconstitutionally “overbroad” — that is, it applied to too much protected material,” according to a summary of the case by the Oyez Project, which is sponsored by the Cornell Law School.
Khara Boender, a state policy director for the Computer & Communications Industry Association, said in a news release that she understands the concern for online safety but expressed doubt the law will “meaningfully achieve those goals without infringing on the First Amendment rights of younger users.”
“This law could create substantial obstacles for young people seeking access to online information, a right afforded to all Americans regardless of age,” Bonder said, adding that she expects the law will face a legal challenge.
— With files from the Associated Press and Reuters
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