Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed the Consumer Data Protection Act into law last week, cracking down on the amount of time young people can spend scrolling on social media.
The measure, which had bipartisan support in the state’s general assembly, bans kids under 16 from using social media for more than one hour every day.
It also calls for a neutral approach to asking someone’s age when they create an account, and it says there has to be a way to accurately verify a young person’s age. The bill says companies can’t use the age information for anything else, and allows parents to increase or decrease the daily one-hour limit.
The law excludes platforms that are mainly used for email or direct messaging, streaming services and news sites.
Jennifer Golbeck, professor at the University of Maryland’s College of Information, said it’s unclear whether the law will have its intended effect.
“If we were to effectively say, ‘Hey, Instagram, TikTok, one hour for people under 16,’ I suspect what we’re going to see is other platforms popping up and kids figuring out creative ways to use them, or they’re just going to lie about their ages on the platforms they’re on already,” Golbeck said. “There’s huge questions about whether this law is going to have any real effect on the way that kids are using social media.”
There is existing technology in place that sets limits on screen time for certain age brackets, but it’s more difficult to enforce if someone isn’t being truthful about their age, according to Megan Duncan, associate professor of journalism in Virginia Tech’s School of Communication.
Kids under 16 typically don’t have an ID, and using a passport or birth certificate could present privacy concerns.
There isn’t research that indicates one hour is a “magical time,” Duncan said, but limits could be useful because “when you’re younger and you don’t have that impulse control that adults develop later in life, you don’t have the ability to set those limits on your own.”
There could be services that provide age verification, Golbeck said, but the practicality of that could be challenging.
“I expect if we don’t come up with a very burdensome way to do that, that we may default to asking kids what their age is, and then everybody’s going to say they’re over 18,” Golbeck said.
There are similar questions surrounding parents submitting approval for changing the limit, and what steps they’d have to take to do it. As of a few years ago, if a parent wanted a young child to have unrestricted access to a site like Instagram, they’d have to fax a copy of their ID, Golbeck said.
“If you’re letting parents essentially change these rules anyway, parents could say ‘you get zero hours on social media according to this bill,’ parents could say ‘my kid can have as much time on social media as they want.’ Why is there a bill then?” Golbeck said.
Duncan, meanwhile, said there’s public support for regulations on social media to address its addictiveness and mental health implications. She’s planning to monitor “to what extent do social media companies push back in the court system about this law.”
Golbeck said while there are many conversations about the negative impacts social media has, there are benefits to those platforms for people who feel socially isolated.
“The bill, while it is trying to address an important problem, really misses that there are vulnerable people who need community, and social media supports finding that community, and we’re taking that all away with this kind of bill,” Golbeck said. “That’s actually where a lot of the real harms lie with this.”
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