Slowly and unsurely, legislators at the state and national level are recognizing the great harm being perpetrated on children around our country through social media companies.
For too long, the onus has been on parents to control access to social media websites. Every parent understands that is an impossible job given the social pressures on kids and the intentional obstacles social media companies create. Individual effort can’t truly confront a social ill.
From TikTok to Instagram to whatever next month’s brand is, these products are designed to addict young users to their content even as they repeatedly expose them to deplorable and often illegal material.
As of Sept. 1, the state of Texas’ new SCOPE Act, short for Securing Children Online Through Parental Empowerment, is largely in effect. It is, to be sure, an imperfect law that cannot singularly address the depth of problem that social media has become for children. That said, the law is an important step forward in requiring that “digital service providers” register the age of people creating accounts and prevent account holders from later altering their age.
The act then limits data collection from minors absent a parents’ verified authorization. The goal here is to interrupt social media companies from accessing one of their most lucrative revenue streams — information about our kids.
Some similar legislation easily passed the U.S. Senate in July with the co-sponsorship of Sen. John Cornyn. The Kids Online Safety Act and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Act are intended to “create a legal responsibility for online platforms to prevent and mitigate specific dangers to minors in their product design, including suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, sexual exploitation, and advertisement for certain illegal products.”
We urge the House of Representatives to take up this legislation quickly and pass it.
The social scientist Jonathan Haidt has persuasively demonstrated the relationship between the growth in social media use and the rise in depression and anxiety among American children, especially girls.
Social media companies have demonstrated repeatedly that they are unwilling or unable to self-govern in any reasonable way.
These laws are at the very least an acknowledgement of the nature of the problem, and it isn’t parents. It is a problem of exploitative technology.
While we support these laws, we aren’t actually confident they will make much of a difference. Whatever fines these companies are assessed will likely be folded in as a cost of doing business.
We hope that this is instead an early step in an ongoing legislative awakening that the fundamental law governing the internet is inadequate to what the internet has become and that wholesale reform is necessary.
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