The evidence-free moral panic over social media keeps getting stupider, and when things get particularly stupid about the internet, you can pretty much rely on Utah politicians being there to proudly embrace the terrible ideas. The latest are a pair of bills that seem to be on the fast track, even in Utah’s short legislative session. The bills are HB311 from Rep. Jordan Teuscher and SB152 from Senator Michael McKell (author of a number of previous bad bills about the internet).
Both of these bills continue the unfortunate (and bipartisan) trend of taking away the autonomy of teenagers, treating them as if they’re babies who need to be watched over at every moment. It’s part of the typical moral panic that suggests that rather than teaching kids how to handle the internet and how to be prepared for real life, kids should effectively only be allowed to access a Disneyfied version of the internet.
Following California’s recently passed and horrific AB 2273 (again, these are bipartisan bad ideas), both bills would require websites to age verify people who visit.
Beginning January 1, 2024, a social media company shall verify the age of a Utah resident before the Utah resident may:
(a) continue to use the Utah resident’s account on the social media company’s social media platform if the account existed before January 1, 2024; or
(b) create an account with the social media company’s social media platform.
This is one of those things that people who have never actually studied this issue think is a good idea, but where everyone who has any experience at all in this knows it’s a terrible idea and a privacy nightmare. As we recently noted, even the French Data Protection Agency (which is one of the most anti-internet regulatory agencies around) has called out that every possible solution for age verification is terrible for privacy. And for good reason. As we’ve discussed, the biggest age verification tool around happens to be the one owned by the company behind Pornhub.
In other words, Utah politicians may be requiring every Utah resident to be giving their private data over to a porn company. Nice one, McKell!
Of course, there are new entrants in the age verification market who say it’s no big deal, you’ll just have to have your face scanned (for a few seconds, so they can get a “proof of liveness”) for every website you visit. How very dystopian.
Also, for all the talk of how scary and bad TikTok is because of how much data it collects and possibly sends back to China, it’s worth noting that this bill will require TikTok to collect way more information and private data on children. Way to go, Utah!
Believe it or not, McKell’s SB152 bill gets even worse. If someone is under the age of 18 (as “minor” is defined in the bill), then any social media company has to give parents access to their kids’ accounts.
Beginning January 1, 2024, a social media company shall provide a parent or guardian who has given parental consent for a Utah minor account holder under Section 13-63-102 with a password or other means for the parent or guardian to access the account, which shall allow the parent or guardian to view:
(1) all posts the Utah minor account holder makes under the social media platform account; and
(2) all responses and messages sent to or by the Utah minor account holder in the social media platform account.
So many problems, so little time. First off, even while it says that “other means” should be available, the idea that a law is requiring a website to hand over passwords is absolutely ridiculous. Because no website should be able to access passwords themselves. They should be encrypted, meaning that even the website shouldn’t have access to the passwords in a form that they could give to parents.
Utah has actual computer security people living in the state, right? Because it’s clear McKell’s team spoke with none of them if this made it into the bill.
But, more substantially, this is nuts. No, parents should not be able to spy on everything their teenagers do and say to others. There may be times and places where that’s appropriate for some families and some kids on the younger end, when they’re just learning how to use these services, but teaching 17 year olds that they should be surveilled all the time by their parents is ridiculous, and takes away their own basic fundamental rights.
And, I mean, it’s pretty ****ing rich that these Utah politicians claim they need to do this to protect the children, when, well, stories like this are common and easy to find with just a quick search. Maybe, just maybe, the problem isn’t the internet.
Finally, the bill says that social media cannot be accessed by kids between 10:30pm and 6:30am. The social media company has to block them. Does McKell not know that parents can install pretty easily accessible tools to do this for themselves? Why does the government need to do this?
As for HB 311, there’s some overlap here. It also requires age verification, and has all the problems we discussed above that come with that. But then it also says that no one under the age of 16 is allowed to have a social media account. Again, this is beyond stupid. We already know how this works out, and it appears that no one in the Utah legislature bothered to do even the slightest amount of research. Most websites these days ban children under 13, to avoid having to deal with federal COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) regulations. And, because many of these services are still useful, even for kids, we’ve built a system where parents are teaching their kids to lie about their age to access these sites.
I know plenty of families with kids who have set up Gmail accounts, Zoom accounts, Discord accounts and other such things by lying about their kids’ ages, because those tools (used properly) are really useful for kids to communicate with family members, especially grandparents. From the link above (from over a decade ago):
Many parents want their children to have access to free email accounts, like those provided by Yahoo!, Hotmail, and Gmail. Instant messaging access is often important to parents and video and voice chat services like Skype are especially important to immigrant parents who have extended family outside of the U.S. When Dr. boyd asked parents why they wanted their children to have access to email, IM, and other chat services at a young age, the explanation was consistent: to keep in touch with family. Grandparents were most frequently cited as the reason why parents created accounts for their young children. Many parents will create accounts for children even before they are literate. One parent explained that “giggle vision” was an extremely important way for his daughter to communicate with her grandparents. Although some parents create accounts for children as young as 6 or 8, these parents are very involved in when and how these accounts are used.
By middle school, communication tools like email and IM are quite popular among tweens (ages 10-12). Tweens pressure their parents for permission to get access to accounts on these services because they want to communicate with their classmates, church friends, and friends who have moved away. Although parents in the wealthiest and most educated segments of society often forbid their children from signing up to social network sites until they turn 13, most parents support their children’s desires to acquire email and IM. To join, tweens consistently lie about their age when asked to provide it. When Dr. boyd interviewed youth about who taught them to lie, the overwhelming answer was parents. Dr. boyd interviewed parents who consistently admitted to helping their children circumvent the age restriction by teaching them that they needed to choose a birth year that would make them over 13. Even in households where an older sibling or friend was the educator, parents knew their children had email and IM accounts.
Of course, the Utah politicians pushing this will say that such studies don’t matter, because with “age verification” they won’t be able to lie. But beyond the privacy issues, you can bet that people will quickly figure out how to get around those things as well.
And the idea of keeping kids away from the tools to communicate with schoolmates is laughable. Kids always find a way. I’m reminded of the story from a few years back when schools had banned social media to avoid kids communicating that way… so the kids essentially turned Google Docs (which they needed access to for school) into their own private social media network.
Kids are going to find a way to communicate, no matter how much the overly paternalistic Utah politicians wish they’d stay silent.
These bills are about taking away the rights of teenagers, because a few stuffy Utah politicians have forgotten what it’s like to be a teenager and wish to inflict maximum pain on teens, and take away their basic rights to communicate with one another.
And, boy, are they being obnoxious about it. At a hearing earlier this week, apparently some politicians demanded to know whether or not those speaking out against the bill had children — as if that was any of their business.
At least some people were speaking out against the bill… including teenagers!
Not everyone was in support of the bill, and some — including 13-year-old Lucy Loewen — said the benefits of social media can outweigh the downside. Lucy said teenagers can use social media to connect with friends and that those connections can help them deal with depression and suicidal thoughts.
“Will this really be creating responsible teenagers and adults if the government is just taking over and not letting us choose for ourselves?” she asked the committee. “We want to stop government intervention, so why would we let the government control our lives?”
Lucy’s right, on multiple levels. As we discussed recently, new research from the Pew Research Center found that most teens get real value out of social media. And it seems like, as Lucy notes, the way to deal with those who struggle with it is to help create responsible teens: that means not just teaching them how to handle difficult situations, but also showing that you trust them. That doesn’t mean spying on their every move, helicoptering over them and demanding their private info. It means preparing them for the real world instead of totally sheltering them from it.
And, of course, with bills like this already being passed in California and now being considered in Utah, you can expect them to spread, perhaps even to the federal level. Already, Rep. Chris Stewart seems to have copied HB311 at the federal level, introducing a bill in Congress to ban social media for kids under the age of 16. We didn’t even mention it above, but this would be pretty blatantly unconstitutional anyway, and I’d celebrate the teenager who took that case to the Supreme Court to remind these busybody politicians that teenagers have 1st Amendment rights themselves.
Tragically, it seems that actually trusting kids and teaching them how to be good citizens is not the sort of thing that Utah elected officials believe in. Which is a real shame.
