Amid the last-minute flurry in this spring’s legislative session to push bills to the governor’s desk, one bipartisan bill made the cut: a push to heavily regulate social media for children under 16.
Faced with growing knowledge of the intense harm social media can inflict on growing minds and hearts, over nineteen other states have passed legislation addressing minor access to social media.
Minnesota’s new legislation is crafted around social media design features that must be toggled off by the platform if a user is under 16, a move designed by legislators to avoid First Amendment issues associated with regulating content.
Under this new bill, large social media platforms must remove “addictive” features for users 15 years old or younger, such as certain types of push notifications, “infinite scroll” interfaces, video autoplay and “awards” for using the platform (e.g. Snap scores). Personalized, targeted ads are also not permitted. These new rules ensure that social media apps for young users will have strong “training wheels” attached until the user turns 16.
Plus, parents are now empowered to watch over their child’s digital landscape. The bill requires that all social media accounts for children 15 and younger have parental controls that allow Mom and Dad to monitor time use and set daily and weekly app time limits.
The politically shared legislature meant that this bill had to have a bipartisan consensus. Senate co-authors Erin Maye Quade, DFL-Apple Valley, and Michael Kreun, R-Blaine, were in agreement as to the intense need for this type of legislation. From KSTP 5:
“This decisive vote affirms that children are not products for billion-dollar companies — they are people who deserve protection from the proven harms of excessive social media use,” Quade said. “With support from parents, young people will be able to participate online and be shielded from predatory corporate practices.”
“There is a public health crisis in the pockets of our children,” said Kreun. “We’re dealing with addiction, 45% of kids feel they spend too much time on social media, 25% of them meet the clinical criteria for social media addiction. We’re dealing with mental health, 46% of adolescents report social media makes them feel worse about their body image. We’re dealing with cyber bulling, 58% have experienced cyberbullying. We’re dealing with radicalization.”
For the most part, the bill relies on social media companies themselves to self-regulate and transition young users to a less addictive version of the app. Per the bill, social media companies must transfer users to the nonaddictive app version if 1) the user indicates via their birthday selection that they are under 15 or if 2) an active user’s browsing history indicates that they are under 15. It’s easy to believe that social media websites, reliant on targeted ads for revenue, are already consistently, easily, and accurately predicting the age of their users; but internet watchdog group NetChoice has complained that the legislation codifies expansive algorithm surveillance. It’s possible that these issues will be hashed out in court, as social media legislation in other states has faced challenges from social media companies.
Despite flaws, this piece of legislation is a commonsense victory for Minnesota’s children. It is hopefully the first of many steps towards giving parents strong oversight over their child’s digital world and ending addictive features in apps.
At the time of this writing, Gov. Tim Walz has not yet signed this bill into law, but is expected to do so.