Utah's war on social networks is a symptom of a larger problem

Congress failed to act — and now a patchwork of bad state laws is eroding our privacy

“teenager with duct tape over their mouth, cartoon style” / DALL-E

Today, let’s talk about an ongoing consequence of Congress failing to pass any tech regulations over the past half-decade: a patchwork of terrible laws cropping up at the state level that manage to erode free expression while introducing a variety of new risks to average people on the internet.

We’ve already talked here about state laws that would force platforms to carry hate speech in the name of political neutrality (in Texas) and make it illegal to ban politicians or down-rank their posts (in Florida).

Both of those laws have been stayed pending a review by the Supreme Court. But in recent weeks a new threat has emerged, and it’s currently one signature away from becoming law. The bill would restrict people under the age of 18 from using social networks without their parents’ consent, and platforms would be forced to grant access to their children’s accounts.

A separate bill would make platforms liable for harms incurred by minors using their services, including building features that “[cause] a minor to have an addiction to the company's social media platform.”

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox is expected to sign both bills, Axios reported.

Part of me is sympathetic to the Utah lawmakers. The sociologist Jonathan Haidt, who has investigated the relationship between social networks and teenage mental health as vigorously as anyone, wrote last month that a preponderance of recent evidence suggest that social media is a major cause of the mental illness epidemic in teen girls. Girls seem particularly susceptible to negative social comparison — the sinking feeling that everyone you see in your social feeds has a better life than you do — and the anxiety and depression that can come with it.

Platforms have responded to the issue with some fairly gentle tweaks designed to push minors away from mindless, depression-inducing scrolling. Instagram, for example, lets users optionally turn on “take a break” reminders after they have been scrolling for 10, 20, or 30 minutes; nudges them to look at different types of content if they appear to have gone down a rabbit hole on the Explore page; hides like counts; and mutes message notifications when in “quiet mode.”

Meanwhile, this week TikTok said it would limit children to 60 minutes a day in its app, though users can bypass the limit using a code.

I imagine that tools like these are useful to minors with preternatural self-awareness and strong self-discipline — and to highly attentive parents willing to impose discipline on their children whether or not their kids want it.

But it doesn’t feel like any great leap of the imagination to suggest that the teenagers most at risk of anxiety and depression are the ones least likely to diligently use these tools. And to the extent that there are risks to extended use of these platforms, at least for some subset of the user base, it’s to be expected that lawmakers would want to try something — anything — to reduce harm.

Unfortunately, though, the Utah bills — like so many state-based efforts before them — promise to do more harm than good. Let us count the ways.

One, bills like these have an ugly, chilling effect on free expression. Teenagers on the cusp of adulthood arguably have a First Amendment right to make their voices heard online, whether their parents approve or not. This feels especially true for minors whose parents may not be supportive of them — I’m thinking here of LGBTQ children, for whom private access to social networks and the wider internet can serve as a lifeline while they’re still trapped at home.

Creating a legal obligation for platforms to share passwords with parents puts those kids at risk. (And as Mike Masnick points out, for security reasons passwords should be encrypted and not known to the platform itself.)

Two, teenagers themselves have a generally much more positive view of social networks than the lawmakers who would regulate them. And the margins of support here are notable. Here’s Pew Research, writing in November about a national survey of teens 13 to 17 taken last spring:

Eight-in-ten teens say that what they see on social media makes them feel more connected to what’s going on in their friends’ lives, while 71% say it makes them feel like they have a place where they can show their creative side. And 67% say these platforms make them feel as if they have people who can support them through tough times. A smaller share – though still a majority – say the same for feeling more accepted. These positive sentiments are expressed by teens across demographic groups.

Of course, the mere fact that teenagers like social networks isn’t a reason to protect the platforms from regulation. There was a time when cigarettes were really popular with teenagers, too! Still, it’s notable that what teenagers told Pew — that they mostly feel more connected to and supported by their peers thanks to these networks — directly contradicts’ Utah lawmakers’ rationale for intervening.

If nothing else, that ought to be a recipe for caution in rewriting the rules — something the sponsors have not exhibited as they rushed these bills through the legislature.

Three, bills like these create privacy risks for all of us. The way these platforms are going to verify that minors aren’t using them without permission is to ask all of us to submit to facial scanning or worse. The Utah bill, for example, would require platforms to keep records of users’ identities and physical mailing addresses.

Writing on the op-ed page of the Deseret News, Shoshana Weissmann notes that this creates huge security liabilities. Asking “users of any age to hand over IDs and home addresses to any of these companies means incentivizing atrocious security practices,” she writes. “Even the collection of this information itself is a massive risk for data, privacy and security, especially given the sensitive nature of some of the companies covered, and given good actors’ and governments’ struggles to secure data.”

Weissmann notes here the irony that, at the same time TikTok is under a threat of ban for the way it collects and shares information about children, Utah might force the platform to create and store records of their identities — including in some cases their government IDs — along with their mailing addresses.

I could go on; bills like these also have the effect of entrenching incumbents, who are much better able to afford expensive age-verification requirements than challenger networks. Techdirt offers some other considerations, including the fact that teenagers are typically able to get around limitations like these anyway.

Ultimately, I understand the frustration of state lawmakers here. Congress whiffed on several chances to rein in platforms’ worst impulses, and parents who believe their children are being harmed are demanding answers. Leaving the solutions to individual kids, parents, and platforms’ attempts at self-regulation doesn’t seem to be working.

But surely a finer balance can be found here. If not, someday soon it’s going to be hard to visit a website without doing a biometric scan first — whether you’re a child or an adult. If we get to that point, it would strike me as a clear case of the solution being worse than the disease.

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Pushback

Yesterday we included a link to a Bleeping Computer story about an alleged “celebrity mode” inside Bing’s new chat feature that allowed you to talk to virtual representations of Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, and others. Some readers flagged the story as likely misleading, as Bing chat can be instructed to enter a variety of nonexistent “modes” simply by prompting it as if they are real. Indeed, Microsoft tells us that there is no “celebrity mode” in Bing — the model was simply hallucinating.

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Governing

• Congress rolled out a new bill that gives the Biden administration more power to ban TikTok. (Makena Kelly / The Verge)

  • White House officials are considering pushing Congress to give it more legal authority to deal with TikTok, potentially shifting the focus away from ongoing negotiations between TikTok and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. (David McCabe / New York Times)

  • A TikTok ban would be a strange and alien experience for American internet users, this piece argues. (John Herrman / New York Magazine)

• President Biden’s pick to serve as a telecommunications regulator withdrew her nomination to the FTC after a bitter 16-month lobbying battle and relentless personal attacks. (Cat Zakrzewski / Washington Post)

• The FTC has demanded that Twitter hand over internal communications related to Elon Musk, citing concerns that rampant layoffs have harmed the company’s ability to protect users. It’s also planning to depose Musk and seeking information on the journalists who were granted access to Twitter’s internal systems. (Ryan Tracy / Wall Street Journal)

• Twitter employees say the company can’t maintain tools meant to protect users from harassment, due to ongoing layoffs. (Marianna Spring / BBC)

• EU regulators told Elon Musk he needs to hire more human moderators to review harmful posts. I’m sure he’ll get right on that. (Javier Espinoza, Cristina Criddle and Hannah Murphy / Financial Times)

• The FBI and the Defense Department were actively involved in developing facial recognition technology that could be used for mass surveillance. (Drew Harwell / Washington Post)

• US Special Forces plan to use deepfake technology to spread online propaganda and deception campaigns, according to federal contracting documents. (Sam Biddle / The Intercept)

• The Irish Data Protection Commission, one of Europe’s major tech regulators, handed out more than €1 billion in fines last year. (Vish Gain / Silicon Republic)

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Industry

• Meta is planning thousands more layoffs as soon as this week, after already cutting 11,000 workers. (Sarah Frier, Edward Ludlow and Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg)

• Meta’s large language model, LLaMa, which is only available to approved researchers, leaked on 4chan. “We believe the current release strategy allows us to balance responsibility and openness,” the company said. (Joseph Cox / Vice)

• Facebook is considering bringing back in-app messaging features as it seeks to compete with TikTok. It’s the circle of life. (Clare Duffy / CNN)

• Instagram users are inadvertently posting on Facebook due to a “sneaky” design change Meta made last year. Always read the fine print! (Kalley Huang and Sheera Frenkel / New York Times)

• Effective altruism, now famous for its association with Sam Bankman-Fried, is fueled by the idea that AI could kill us — and that philosophy can mask a lot of bad behavior. (Ellen Huet / Bloomberg)

• Some investors are skeptical that generative AI tools will make money, in part because of how much computing power the models take to run. (George Hammond / Financial Times)

• TikTok launched Series, enabling creators to make money by paywalling their stories as premium content. TikTok continues to iterate on this stuff much faster than its peers. (Todd Spangler / Variety)

• Elon Musk bullied a Twitter employee who was trying to figure out if he had been laid off, including by making reference to his disability. Every day a new low at that company. (Jody Serrano / Gizmodo)

• Twitter bots are hawking guns at users who use racial slurs. (Miles Klee / Rolling Stone)

• Salesforce announced its working on ChatGPT-powered tools to help salespeople do their jobs, including the ability to use Slack to talk to a chatbot. (Jordan Novet / CNBC)

• Twitch updated its nudity policy to include a ban on explicit deepfakes, even if they’re only shown briefly. (Jon Fingas / Engadget)

• Google I/O, the company’s developer conference, is taking place on May 10. (Abner Li / 9To5Google)

• Sundar Pichai defended Google’s desk-sharing policy, saying some employees complain the office feels like a ghost town. (Jennifer Elias / CNBC)

• Revenge reporting on dating apps allows people to ban those who’ve wronged them, but some say they have been unfairly shut out of online romance. Some fascinating trust and safety trade-offs in this piece. (Lauren Larson / New York Magazine)

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