Efforts to minimize online risks to young people have attracted widespread, bipartisan support. In his State of the Union address last month, President Joe Biden called on Congress to pass legislation restricting how tech companies may track teenagers and children online.
State legislatures have already introduced a number of bills intended to limit mental health and safety risks that social networks, multiplayer video games and other online services may pose to some children and teenagers. Last year, California enacted a sweeping online safety law that will require many social networks, video games and other services to install the equivalent of seatbelts and airbags for younger users.
Among other things, the California measure will require such services to turn on the highest privacy settings by default for users under 18. It also requires social networks and other services to turn off features by default that could pose risks to younger people, like “friend finders” that allow adult strangers to contact children.
But the Utah law far outstrips the California online safety effort, imposing broad constraints and enabling parental surveillance that could alter how many teenagers in Utah use the internet. Sarah Coyne, a professor of child development at Brigham Young University, in Provo, Utah, warned that the measure could inadvertently boomerang, exacerbating youth mental health issues by cutting off vulnerable young people from important sources of information and support.
“We know that marginalized youth, such as L.G.B.T.Q. kids, use social media in some really important ways to find belonging and support, especially when they don’t have family support,” said Dr. Coyne, who has studied how time spent on social media affects adolescents.
“So if you’ve got a 17-year-old who is really struggling with mental health turning to social media to find a place to belong, and their parents are cutting it off or looking at their messages, that can have a really significant negative impact,” she said.
Senator McKell said that the bill was intended to help parents protect their children online and that potential benefits far outweighed potential drawbacks. In addition to requiring parental consent, the bill will prohibit social networks from allowing strangers to message young people, ban targeted advertising and limit companies’ collection and use of young people’s personal data.
