The big Silicon Valley tech companies keep telling us about all the efforts they are taking to protect young social media users. They keep pointing to all the money, time, and resources they are using to improve their social media platforms in response to suggestions from parents, educators, and advocacy groups. So, why then are they also actively working to block new social media legislation?
California’s new social media law
The one piece of legislation that I have in mind is California’s new social media age verification law, which is supposed to take effect in January. The new law has several important clauses. One of them requires parental consent for any type of personalized social media feed for minors. Another limits minors to a certain amount of social media usage per day during the school year. Another limits the ability of social media platforms to push out updates or notifications at night. And another requires social media companies to verify the age of users using methods beyond just self-reporting.
All of the above sounds very reasonable, right? It’s important to get parents more involved. It’s important to set limits on social media usage. And it’s important to limit the number of pings, notifications, updates, and alerts that are known to fuel social media addiction.
It’s hard to imagine any reasonable person objecting to these goals. However, a number of tech activist groups appear to be fighting back against them hard, desperate to prevent this new California social media legislation from going into full effect next year.
The tech lobby fights back
The tech lobbying group NetChoice is the most visible right now. It is making a number of wild claims. For example, it claims that all of those age verification rules would end anonymous speech on social media. After all, if you have to provide an official ID of some kind to prove your age, then you’re not anonymous anymore.
And it further claims that the “duty of care” required of the big social media companies could pose a threat to First Amendment protected speech. NetChoice claims that the new law would be unconstitutional, as it would severely limit the access of kids to protected online speech.
And that’s not all. These tech lobbying groups are convinced that a greater duty of care is being placed on tech companies than on media companies. For example, why can a streaming video service like Netflix use a recommendation algorithm to suggest new movies to kids, but a social media platform like Facebook can’t use a recommendation algorithm to suggest new posts to kids? And why can ESPN blast out late night sports updates and notifications to sports-obsessed kids, but social media platforms can’t do the same?
So you can see what’s going on here. The tech lobbying groups are trying to muddy the waters here. They are combining half-baked constitutional law arguments with half-baked business competition arguments.
Moreover, tech lobbyists are even raising questions about how complex the law is going to be to enforce. For example, “parental consent” might be great, but how do you know that somebody claiming to be a parent is really a parent? And what about all the potential cybersecurity hazards posed by third parties being used to verify identities? There are even questions being raised over whether this law applies to Californians who leave the state temporarily, such as for a vacation.
Same playbook, different tactics?
We’ve seen this story before. The big social media companies make a very public show about how hard they are trying to reform. They promise to self-regulate. They promise to abide by the law. And, then, secretly behind the curtains, they do something entirely different.
It’s time for that bad behavior to stop. We need new social media laws now. While they may be imperfect in some regards, they are much better than having nothing at all.
