Florida on Monday became the first state to effectively ban residents under 14 from having accounts on services like TikTok and Instagram, enacting a strict social media bill that will likely change the lives of many young people.
He historical law, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, is one of the most restrictive measures a state has yet enacted in a growing nationwide push to insulate young people from potential mental health and safety risks on social media platforms. . The statute prohibits certain social networks from providing accounts to children under 14 and requires the services to terminate accounts that a platform knew or believed belonged to underage users.
It also requires platforms to obtain parental permission before giving accounts to 14- and 15-year-olds.
At a news conference Monday, DeSantis praised the measure and said it will help parents navigate “difficult terrain” online. He added that “being buried” in devices all day was not the best way to grow.
“Social media harms children in a variety of ways,” DeSantis said in a statement. The new bill “gives parents greater ability to protect their children.”
DeSantis had vetoed an earlier bill that would have banned social media accounts for 14- and 15-year-olds even with parental consent. The governor said the previous bill would affect the rights of parents to make decisions about their children's online activities.
Florida's new measure will almost certainly face constitutional challenges over the rights of young people to freely seek information and the rights of companies to distribute information.
Federal judges in several other states have recently suspended less restrictive online safety laws on free speech grounds in response to lawsuits filed by NetChoice, a tech industry trade group that represents companies such as Meta, Snap and TikTok.
Judges in Ohio and Arkansas, for example, have blocked laws in those states that would require certain social networks to verify users' ages and get parental permission before giving accounts to children under 16 or 18. A federal judge in California has suspended a law in that state that would require certain social media and gaming apps to turn on the highest privacy settings by default for minors and disable by default certain features, such as auto-playing videos, for those users.
In addition to age restrictions on social media, Florida's new statute requires online pornography services to use age verification systems to keep minors off their platforms.
Apps like Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram already have policies banning children under 13. This is because the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act requires certain online services to obtain parental permission before collecting personal information, such as full names, contact information, locations, or Selfie Photos: of children. under 13 years old.
But state regulators say millions of underage children have been able to register for social media accounts simply by providing false birth dates.
