DeSantis Vetoes covers a social media ban for youth under 16
Governor Ron DeSantis on Friday vetoed a sweeping social media bill that would have effectively barred Florida residents under the age of 16 from opening accounts on services like TikTok and Instagram, even if their parents let them.
In a message on XMr. DeSantis said he vetoed the teen social media ban bill because the state legislature was “about to introduce another, superior bill” that recognized the rights of parents. Last week, the governor had suggested that the measure went too far, because it would nullify the authority of parents.
Shortly after news of the veto, Paul Renner, a Republican who is Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, said: in a message on X that the new bill would be “an even stronger product to protect our children from online harm.”
While several states have recently passed laws requiring parental consent for children’s social media accounts, the Florida measure that DeSantis vetoed was intended as a more general ban. It would have required certain social networks to verify users’ ages, prevent people under 16 from signing up for accounts and terminate accounts that a platform knew or believed belonged to underage users.
Parent groups, including the Florida Parent-Teacher Association, had urged Mr. DeSantis to veto the bill after the state Legislature passed it last week.
The bill would almost certainly have faced constitutional challenges regarding the right of young people to freely seek information. It would also likely have sparked online protests from teens who rely on social apps to communicate with friends and family, express themselves creatively, keep up with the news and follow political, sports, food and fashion trends .
NetChoice, a trade group that represents Meta, Snap, TikTok and other technology companies, said it welcomed Mr. DeSantis’ veto. In an email, Carl Szabo, vice president and general counsel of NetChoice, said the measure, if signed, would have “replaced parents with government and Silicon Valley.” He added that the provision in the bill requiring social media sites to verify the age of users would have led to “data collection on a scale never before seen in the state.”
Now, Florida lawmakers plan to amend another bill that would regulate sexually explicit online material that is “harmful to minors,” adding provisions to restrict certain social networks that have “addictive characteristics,” such as endlessly scrolling content .
That bill would require pornographic websites to verify the age of users and exclude people under the age of 18. In the past two years, Louisiana, Utah, Mississippi and other states have passed similar laws.
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The Supreme Court is weighing free speech challenges against other social media laws in cases that could reshape the internet. One of those cases involves a 2021 Florida statute, currently on hold, that would ban platforms like Facebook and X from permanently banning political candidates. (NetChoice is one of two technology trade groups challenging state laws in Supreme Court cases.)
But the bill banning social media for teens in Florida, which Mr. DeSantis vetoed on Friday, went further and represented one of the most restrictive measures yet passed by a state legislature amid an escalating national effort to services such as TikTok and Instagram in name. of children’s safety.
Over the past 18 months, other states have passed new online safety rules that still allow younger teens to use social media.
Utah, Arkansas, Texas and Ohio passed laws last year that would force social networks to verify users’ ages and obtain parental consent before giving accounts to children under 16 or 18. In 2022, California passed a law requiring social networking and video recording gaming apps used by minors to enable the highest privacy settings for those young people by default — and disable certain features like video autoplay.
The crackdown on social media is notable because it is unusually bipartisan. California, a Democratic-led state, and Utah, a Republican-led state, both recently passed groundbreaking laws that take different approaches to protecting young people online. In addition, last year Florida became the first state to require public schools to ban students from using cell phones during class.
Balancing new restrictions on social media with the right to free speech can be difficult. NetChoice successfully sued to stop the new laws in Arkansas, California and Ohio. Judges in those cases said the children’s online safety statutes most likely infringed on NetChoice members’ freedom of speech to disseminate information, as well as young people’s rights to access it.
Mr. DeSantis said last week that he was “grappling” with Florida law and weighing it against the right of parents to make decisions about their children’s online activities.
“You have to find the right balance when you look at these things between policies that help parents get where they want to go versus policies that straight up push parents aside,” he said.