A while ago I wrote about legislative bad intentions, those on the part of many legislators to attack members of specific groups (in that case, sexual and gender minorities). But as the last legislative session recedes into the rear view mirror, and new laws go into effect, we should think too about what better intentions also bring, where the consequences of the legislature aren’t well enough thought through.
Today’s instance: House Bill 541, passed by the Idaho Legislature and signed into law by the governor on April 2.
Backed by Senator Cindy Carlson and Representative Jarom Crane, R-Nampa, both Republicans, the bill requires “Covered Social Media platforms to obtain parental consent in order to maintain accounts for children aged 16 years old and under, and to refrain from presenting addictive interface design features to such children.” The “covered” platforms generally are those operated by companies generating a billion dollars a year in gross revenue worldwide.
Several other states have moved forward on this, South Carolina and Kentucky among them.
Say this up front: Carlson and Crane have identified a real and massive problem state legislatures around the country (not to mention Congress too) should be tackling, as some have been. They’re taking a serious stab at addressing it. The specific problem of “addiction of children to social media” is widespread and damaging. And we know that in places where use of social media by young people actually has been curtailed, as in many schools around the country, positive results consistently have been reported.
Social media companies profit from online addiction, of adults and children both, and they have no incentive to scale back their use by younger people. The risks, ranging from invasion of privacy and doxxing incidents to sexual harassment and much more, are real too.
How would this new bill work? Here’s one simplified description of the national template: it would “require that children under the age of 16 receive consent when creating a social media account. If the child tries to get around this, the platform will boot the user off until parental consent is given.” Another description adds that “Social media platforms must use age estimation technology (which they already admit to using) to identify users who are 15 or younger.”
But will this actually work?
While the bill passed overwhelmingly in the House, 14 senators – an eclectic group of Democrats and various shades of Republicans – voted against.
In the Senate State Affairs Committee on March 13, one advocate against the bill made the points (as the minutes record) about “Harms to small businesses; privacy concerns with providing sensitive personal information to platforms for verification; Concerns that this legislation undermined safety efforts and created inconsistent rules across platforms; unconstitutional restrictions on speech and content; unique family dynamics and the inability for platforms to determine who a child’s parent was.”
Age estimation technology is out there and social media companies have it, but its reliability is uncertain. It uses patterns an algorithm thinks suggest a younger user, and users of social media sites can fake a lot of their inputs. (Might it entangle adult users too?) Might it turn into yet another way for social media companies to hoover up information about us all? There are unclear and significant legal issues here.
Imagine a mega-social media corporation digging sufficiently into sometimes complicated family structures to find out who parents are and exactly how old certain minor users of the platform might be.
And who on the state level will enforce it? And how will they accomplish it?
Doesn’t sound as if we have the silver bullet in hand yet.
Carlson and Crane deserve credit for at least trying to deal with one of our more perplexing problems (something too few legislators spent much time with this session). And if this bill isn’t the final answer, that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying. Sometimes flawed legislation is what you have to get through to make your way to what does work.
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