Social media companies shuffle posts and ads with complex algorithms to create a never-ending stream of entertainment and design feeds to be as engaging as possible.
A new California law will require companies to block these algorithms by default for users under 18, which lawmakers say will reduce the negative mental health effects of social media on children. Requires other mandated adjustments to be made.
The bill, dubbed the “Protecting Children from Social Media Addiction Act” by its author, state Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), was announced at a press conference with California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta made the remarks Monday alongside another bill that would strengthen privacy protections for minors.
“Social media companies have the ability to protect children,” Skinner said. “They could act. They're not.”
One of the key provisions of this law is to make chronological feeds the default setting for platforms, allowing users to track the users they follow rather than positioning their content to maximize engagement. posts will be displayed in the order they were uploaded.
Bonta said the changes will show young users “what they want to see, as opposed to the addictive algorithmic feeds that kids are currently being fed.”
The bill would also require default settings on social media apps to mute notifications from midnight to 6 a.m., limit usage to one hour each day, and remove “like” counts. Parents, and indeed children using these apps, can also change these default settings.
Rep. Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), who introduced the bill to strengthen privacy protections for minors, said the changes could have big benefits for children.
“We know some kids will change the default settings, but the default settings are a very powerful tool,” Wicks said.
The new bill is just the latest in a series of legislative and regulatory actions California lawmakers and lawyers have taken in recent years aimed at changing the way social media companies do business.
October Bonta Office filed a lawsuit Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and 32 other states, accused the company of misleading the public about the negative effects of these “harmful and manipulative platform features” while addicting young users in particular. He claimed to have designed the app to
Some internal company documents included in the lawsuit show that Meta knew that more than 1 million children under 13 were using Instagram, but company officials said It has publicly stated that users are not allowed to use Instagram. The lawsuit also alleges that the company's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, personally weighed in on a proposal to ban filters that simulate the effects of plastic surgery, despite opposition to the negative effects on girls' mental health. He claims that he exercised his right to veto it.
Bonta's office too won a $93 million settlement A lawsuit against Google last year alleged that the company misled users by collecting location data for ad targeting and other applications after they opted out.
But a previous law aimed at reining in social media companies' treatment of young users ran into trouble in the courts last year. A federal judge in San Jose ruled in September that California's Design for Age Act likely violates the First Amendment rights of the technology companies it seeks to regulate. issued a temporary injunction against the law.
The law, co-authored by Wicks and set to become law in 2022, would require companies to protect children's privacy by default. The court found that enforcing these provisions could require additional data collection to verify the age of certain users or limit the content that adult users can view. Bonta's office is appealing the decision.
Lawmakers at Monday's press conference cited a study released last year by the U.S. Surgeon General as evidence of the harm social media use causes to minors. The report found that “young people who spend three or more hours a day on social media are twice as likely to experience poor mental health,” and nearly half of young people say They said their image had deteriorated, and the majority said they felt the following: “Hate-based content” occurs regularly.
“We're profiting off of children and sacrificing their well-being,” Skinner said Monday. The new law is “aimed at preventing these highly preventable harms.”
