Why PA’s Efforts to Regulate Social Media Companies Have Failed So Far –

Bills that would ban TikTok and regulate kids’ social media accounts have been debated in Pennsylvania, but lawmakers haven’t found a consensus.

Stephen Caruso of Spotlight PA

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HARRISBURG — Despite bipartisan interest in setting ground rules for social media companies, Pennsylvania lawmakers are struggling to reach a consensus amid privacy and other concerns that don’t neatly break down along party lines.

In recent months, the legislature has debated bills that would mandate disclosure of artificial intelligence-generated images, ban TikTok from state-owned phones, and require monitoring of minors’ social media. The debate around the latter most clearly demonstrates the balancing act legislators are trying to achieve.

Social media can help young people find community, but can also expose them to disinformation and hate speech, and encourage them to self-harm, according to the American Psychological Association.

From California to Ohio, red and blue states alike have passed laws that attempt to combat this by requiring age verification and parental consent to use apps.

NetChoice, a tech industry group whose members include Meta, TikTok, and X, has challenged many of these laws in federal court, sometimes with the backing of civil liberties groups like the ACLU. Several suits have succeeded.

In one, a federal judge last August issued an injunction blocking an Arkansas parental consent law from going into effect until the courts settled the matter.

In his opinion, U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks wrote that NetChoice was likely to succeed in its First Amendment challenge. He added there was no evidence that the law would “protect minors from materials or interactions that could harm them online.”

Regulating speech is tricky under the First Amendment, says Megan Iorio, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonpartisan advocacy group in Washington, D.C. In a March interview with Marketplace, she argued there is “no privacy-protective way” to verify a user’s age.

But placing the onus on parents to mitigate the harm of opaque social media algorithms is also “not how things should work,” she added.

“The government should be able to pass regulations to prevent harms to kids,” Iorio said.

Parents versus privacy

This session, legislative leaders in Pennsylvania have attempted to thread this needle with two bipartisan bills. But both efforts have stalled amid tech lobbying and a wide swath of concerns from both major parties.

In March, state House Democrats advanced a bill sponsored by state Rep. Brian Munroe (D., Bucks), who represents a suburban Philadelphia swing district.

Like other states’ proposals, the bill would require social media companies to verify users’ ages and obtain parental consent before anyone 16 or younger opens an account. It would also allow parents to restrict how much their children use an app by allowing parents to view their kids’ privacy settings or set time limits on an account’s use.

Additionally, it would prohibit the collection or sale of a minor’s browsing history, require that such users opt in to algorithmic recommendations, and make it unlawful for a social media network to “intentionally, knowingly, recklessly or negligently cause or encourage a minor to access content which the social media company knows or should have known subjects one or more minors to harm.” The provisions would be enforced by the state attorney general.

Munroe told Spotlight PA the idea for his proposal came from a project by local high school students on social media’s mental health impacts.

Parents, Munroe said, do give a level of consent to tech companies when they provide a phone to a child. But “once I give that to you, it’s a jungle,” he said.

“We need to be able to offer tools that are going to make it more mainstream for parents to be able to have a say in what their children are involved in,” Munroe added.

Controversially, the bill accomplishes this in part by requiring social media companies to monitor any group chats on their platforms that involve two or more individuals aged 16 or younger. If the company finds any “chats, posts, videos and images that are deemed sensitive or graphic” under a platform’s terms of use, the company must report the content to the minor’s parent or legal guardian.

That provision drew the opposition of the Pennsylvania chapter of the ACLU, which argued in a memo…