Utah seeks to restrict kids’ access to social media, require parental consent

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Jan. 31 to discuss child safety.Manuel Balce Ceneta/The Associated Press

If Michael McKell has his way, children in Utah will no longer be able to visit a universe of websites later this year unless they can persuade a parent to give them access to Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, fan fiction sites or any similar services.

A Utah law likely to pass the state’s Republican-controlled legislature in the next two weeks would sharply curtail access to social media for children not yet 18, while limiting the ways tech companies can lure teens into passing their waking hours staring at screens. It would also bar any access to social media without parental consent.

“But I hope they don’t consent. I don’t think any parent should consent,” said Mr. McKell, a state senator who has championed the law. For young people, he said, the advent of social media has brought a “direct spike in mental-health problems, depression, anxiety, loss of sleep – and it’s been significant.”

“The harms just grossly outweigh the benefits.”

The Utah legislation has inspired an unlikely coalition of opponents that includes free-speech advocates, technology titans, former polygamists and at least one queer 17-year-old in Salt Lake City, who argue that it curtails speech, threatens privacy and bars access to online communities that can help teens struggling with difficult circumstances or questions about their identity.

Legal challenges prompted Utah legislators to redraft their law, first passed last year, in hopes of ensuring its successful implementation on Oct. 1 of this year. Critics say the new wording does little to address fundamental issues, including how social-media sites with sprawling advertising operations can be trusted to verify real-world identities without violating privacy.

Behind the debates, however, lies a new willingness by legislators in the U.S. to grapple with a much larger question: how to erect digital guardrails that can keep young people away from parts of the internet.

“We were the first state to really take on the regulation of this space,” said Jordan Teuscher, a Utah state representative. It’s an idea that has, however, spread with remarkable speed. Mr. Teuscher and Mr. McKell have spoken with legislators in two dozen other states who are interested in pursuing similar regulations. But it is “a really tricky space” to legislate, Mr. Teuscher said.

Last year, a judge blocked the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, which was crafted to protect younger users of social media through privacy settings and data collection. Earlier this year, an Ohio judge granted a preliminary injunction against a social-media parental consent law there. New York City has taken a different tack, suing TikTok, Meta, Snap and Google for what Mayor Eric Adams said was their role in “fuelling the nationwide youth mental-health crisis.”

In the meantime, a different set of laws has passed in a series of states to mandate that pornography websites ascertain the age of users, to block minors from their content.

Utah’s social-media law contains similar age-verification requirements, as does a Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act currently under consideration in Canada. Lawmakers in France, too, have sought age verification for both pornography and social-media websites.

Exactly how to do that, however, is among the most vexing questions facing those who want to ensure children cannot enter some corridors of the online world. In Germany, the government has tasked third-party providers with verifying the age of internet users who access adult content online in videos, games, gambling and pornography.

In the U.S., however, state regulations blocking minors from pornography “have the dubious distinction of being both ineffective at their goal of preventing minors from accessing adult content, and quite effective at chilling access to legal, constitutionally protected speech,” said Mike Stabile, spokesman for Free Speech Coalition, a trade group for the adult industry.

In Louisiana, for example, traffic to Pornhub and other sites operated by Montreal-based Aylo has fallen by 80 per cent – despite the state’s provision of a digital identification that allows users to more easily confirm their age. (The company has blocked its sites to all users from a series of other states, including Utah.) In France, Aylo testing has allowed users options to verify age, including scanning ID cards, voice identification or facial age estimation.

“The uptake rate was 0.5 per cent. That is, 99.5 per cent of traffic, when faced with an age verification dialogue, left the site,” said Solomon Friedman, the vice-president of compliance for Ottawa-based Ethical Capital Partners, the private equity fund that owns Aylo.

“People will not provide their personal identifying information to access adult content – or, we think, social-media content,” he said.

Mr. Friedman advocates device-level identification, which might involve phones using Apple or Android operating systems to verify to any site that the user is an adult. No private information would need to be revealed, nor would each website have to devise its own system.

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has called for federal legislation that would require parents to give permission before teens can download apps.

But on-device verification is not yet available, making it at best a theoretical solution, said Julie Miville-Dechêne, the Canadian senator who sponsored the Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act. Those making such proposals, she said, “just want somebody else to be responsible.”

Nor does on-device verification solve all problems: While most teens use devices with operating systems made by Apple, Google or Microsoft, internet access is also available on a myriad of other devices, from gaming consoles to smart televisions and even refrigerators, said Jason Kelley, director of activism for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

He argues that parents, not governments, should be the sole authority on what content children can access. “There’s no good way to say on a grand scale what objectionable content is,” he said.

In Utah, however, the social-media law now under discussion says there is reason for government to act. The text of the legislation contains a finding that “excessive use of an algorithmically curated social media service is likely to cause adverse mental health outcomes in minors, regardless of the content being viewed.”

The law would limit use of such services to three hours a day, with a blackout from 10:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. It would also obligate social-media providers to present content in chronological order rather than according to the dictates of an algorithm, and to disable features designed to keep users engaged.

Mr. McKell would prefer it if the children’s version of the internet looked more like a digitized library. Previous generations, after all, “survived actually using books. And it’s OK,” he said.

The Utah law was inspired, in part, by the writings of Jonathan Haidt, a New York University social psychologist popular on the TED circuit, who has traced the role of social media in modern social problems like extreme polarization, populist demagoguery and online mob justice.

“The most important change we can make to reduce the damaging effects of social media on children is to delay entry until they have passed through puberty,” he wrote in a 2021 article in The Atlantic.

“That was the first moment I’m like – we really should as a state do something,” Mr. Teuscher said.

“I’m not saying all social media is bad,” he says. But he likens it to “the Wild Wild West,” a place that “we for too long have allowed it to be its own thing without any regulation.”

The state’s efforts to craft a social-media law have won plaudits from Prof. Haidt. “Utah is leading the country in changing laws so that parents have a chance to set the rules in their own household,” he said.

“Fears about social media and the internet are the number 1 fear of most parents, ahead of drunk driving, kidnapping, pregnancy, everything else.”

Lu Ann Cooper says the new bill 'literally aiding and abetting the polygamist leaders in keeping their women and children in confinement.' Cooper was born into what she calls a controlling polygamist community.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail

But Utah has also had to grapple with questions that have less easy answers, such as: What are the limits to the rights that minors possess? And how much does the state expect its legislation to outright bar young people – even those preparing to graduate high school – from parts of the internet that inspire creativity and provide support?

“This bill is literally aiding and abetting the polygamist leaders in keeping their women and children in confinement,” said Lu Ann Cooper, a woman born into what she calls a controlling polygamist community who escaped with her two daughters at the age of 20. She is now president of Hope After Polygamy, a non-profit group. “There are a lot of people looking to leave or looking for some kind of refuge,” she said, and social media is often the best way to reach them.

Young people, too, have argued that strangling access to social media will hurt the vulnerable. It was through sites like Tumblr and online fan fiction repositories that Hannah Zoulek, a 12th-grade student in Salt Lake City, learned about their own identity as a queer person, and then later as a person with autism. Giving parents full control over teens’ access to social media threatens their ability to find “private space to talk about these things,” they said.

Hannah Zoulek, a 12th-grade student in Salt Lake City, on Feb. 14.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail

“I’m a queer person in Utah. And there are not that many places in Utah that are exceptionally friendly to queer people.”

Besides, they said, it’s bad policy to treat children as if “they’re these little potted plants, and we have to keep them safe and shelter them from the whole world.”

Even the goal of limiting hours spent on social media may be flawed, said Megan Moreno, a University of Wisconsin-Madison physician who is co-medical director of a centre studying social media and youth mental health at the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“It’s similar to television, in that a half-hour of watching Jerry Springer back in the day has more potential for harm than two hours watching PBS,” said Dr. Moreno. Content creation takes time, but “has been associated with better well-being,” she said.

In fact, she thinks policy makers should abandon the mental-health arguments for protecting teens from social media. It would be better, she said, to adopt an approach like securing a driver’s licence, which comes both with education and mandated safety measures such as seat belts and airbags.

“It’s worth thinking about what are the actual potential harms for kids engaging with social media, and what are some of the ways we could work with the industry to get some better airbags and better seat belts.”

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