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A new bipartisan bill announced Wednesday would require parental consent for anyone under the age of 18 to use social media.
The The Act on the Protection of Children on Social Media It will also ban platforms that use algorithms to provide content to minors and will set the minimum age to use these platforms at 13. It will also create a pilot program for certificates. New age verification can be used to register on social media platforms.
It’s the latest effort by lawmakers to create new protections for children’s online safety as several states move forward with their own laws aimed at protecting younger voters. from harm. Some recent state laws, such as those in Utah, will provide parents with access to children’s private messages, has raised concern among some civil society groups about the possibility of putting children in further danger depending on their family circumstances.
The new proposal, backed by Sens. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, Tom Cotton, R-Ark., Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Katie Britt, R-Ala., will give parents nationwide new control over rights their children’s access to social networking services such as Meta Facebook and Instagram, taken by Snapchat and TikTok. However, while many parents beg lawmakers to give them more tools to protect their children online, many also feel that monitoring their children’s online behavior has become too much of a burden for parents.
In addition to parental consent for social media use, the bill requires such companies to “take reasonable steps beyond simply asking for endorsements” to verify users’ ages. That is likely to raise privacy concerns since it can be difficult to narrow down a user’s age without some sort of government ID or face scan. The bill says that “existing age verification technologies” should be taken into account and that information collected for age verification purposes must not be used for any other purpose.
While age verification tools are still limited, the bill also aims to expand them through a pilot program to discover free “secure digital identity” credentials for US citizens.
The program will be run by the Department of Commerce and will seek to create a new, highly secure authentication tool based on government-issued documents. These documents once issued can be used to verify the age of users for registered social media platforms or their parent/guardian relationship with a minor user .
Immediately after the bill was announced, the technology-backed industry group NetChoice, sued California over its Age-appropriate Design Rulecriticized the legislation in a statement, saying it “would require extensive, large data collection and retention, undermining Americans’ privacy and security. It would also strip away constitutional rights. parents in making decisions about what’s best for their children online.”
