“It does not appear to us that they know what they’re doing,” said Scotia Hille of Act On Mass, a progressive advocacy organization.
The pushback underscores the difficulty of nimbly adjusting to the technological fore and its impact on society, frontier and its impact on society, and reflects the checkered track record Beacon Hill has on the subject.
“I completely understand the urgency around this issue, and I appreciate that lawmakers want to do something about the harmful and predatory business practices of Big Tech,” said Evan Greer, director of the digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future. But the legislation so far “feels a little bit like vibes-coding policy.”
“It’s not actually about the substance,” she said. “It’s sort of about the headline.”
Healey’s bill proposes limiting teens to two hours a day across all social media platforms and restricting certain addictive features. Separately, the Massachusetts House earlier in April passed a bill that would ban social media companies from allowing anyone under age 14 to create accounts on their platforms and require parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds.
Both bills surfaced just weeks after two juries awarded millions of dollars in damages in lawsuits alleging kids were harmed by using Facebook and YouTube.
Civil liberties groups and organizations in favor of tech privacy — including some that are backing the bills — warn the proposals could backfire and make online activity even less private by requiring users to submit personal information to verify their ages or parental status.
Some restrictions, experts argue, would also face First Amendment challenges by limiting young people’s speech and vulnerable groups’ abilities to find community online. And other pieces are simply practically difficult to police, such as time limits.
“Children need to learn how to use social media so they aren’t using it irresponsibly, and we need to learn how to use our phones,” said Max Nash, a junior at Mashpee High School who formed the Coalition for Student Mental Health to lobby for alternative tech policies. “But that requires education and not a ban.”
The various measures have support from several teachers unions, physicians, and groups that advocate for limited technology use among young people, citing research showing that early social media use contributes to mental health issues and worse school performance.
Representative Kenneth Gordon, who chairs the education committee, said lawmakers shaped the bill to closely follow a similar law in Florida, whose under-14 social media ban has faced court challenges for two years. If passed, Gordon said, it would make Massachusetts the 18th state to ban or restrict access to social media for minors.
“It’s a matter of standing up to Big Tech just as we stood up to Big Tobacco in the past,” Gordon said.
Both the Healey and House proposals would require age verification measures that civil liberties groups and privacy experts say are excessive. All users — not just minors — could be required to give tech companies more personal information, such as photos of government IDs, to prove their age, they warned.
Healey’s proposal, for instance, would require social media companies to provide a host of age-specific data that could require checking users’ ages.
People who don’t have such IDs, or might be hesitant to provide them, could then be unable to access a wide range of online content. The bill includes a broad definition of social media sites, including nearly any platform with personal accounts and user-generated content, which opponents argue could encompass sites such as the popular information forum Wikipedia.
That ID hurdle has formed the basis of First Amendment challenges in many states, according to Paul Taske, co-director of the NetChoice Litigation Center, a tech industry-funded group that has successfully sued to have the law set aside in several cases.
“Ultimately, the laws suffer from the same core constitutional infirmity: They block or restrict access for users, particularly minors, but also adults when it comes to speech that is lawful for everyone,” Taske said.
Cybersecurity experts warn that children could bypass the checks, and hackers could seek to steal data collected. Parental consent requirements could present further security issues, with little way for parents to reliably prove their relation to a user, opening the door for nefarious actors who abuse online reporting systems.
More than 400 cybersecurity experts, including from MIT, Tufts University, and Boston University, issued a public letter last month calling for a moratorium on online age verification laws they said “might cause more harm than good.”
“This policy will inevitably massively reduce privacy online by forcing users to reveal more information to service providers than they do nowadays,” the group wrote.
The age verification measures could also run counter to the goals of a separate date privacy bill the state Senate passed last fall and is backed by the ACLU of Massachusetts and other groups. That legislation would allow companies to collect only “reasonably necessary” personal data and permit consumers to opt out of data collection. Companies would also be barred from selling children’s data.
Senate majority leader Cynthia Stone Creem, who filed the privacy legislation, said senators crafted it with the understanding that “there has to be a balance between the First Amendment and protecting our kids.”
To Kate Ruane, director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Senate’s privacy bill could motivate companies to use less personal data and focus on improving user experiences.
The other social media bills, she believes, could instead give companies even more information to exploit. “Dealing with [social media] via blunt instruments like age verification and bans … does not change the incentives that created the problems in the first place,” she said.
House leaders, too, drew criticism from government watchdog groups for the speed at which they plowed through their bill: They unveiled the social media measures on a Monday alongside language creating a bell-to-bell cellphone ban in schools — a version of which the Senate embraced last summer — and passed the bill two days later.
Their approach even surprised some would-be supporters, including Deb Schmill, head of the Becca Schmill Foundation who for months worked with lawmakers to implement a bell-to-bell cellphone ban in Massachusetts.
Healey’s office asked Schmill earlier this year for input on social media-related legislation, and Schmill appeared at Healey’s press conference announcing those measures this week. But Schmill said she was shocked when House lawmakers added social media measures to their cellphone legislation.
“There are parts of the bill that are going to be challenged … and it risks preventing phone-free schools from passing at all,” Schmill said.
Massachusetts has a long history of struggling to adapt to technology, from misfiring on efforts to tax the tech industry to making its own websites work.
There are also potential implementation problems, experts say. It’s unclear how a two-hour limit on social media use, as Healey proposed, would be applied across platforms owned by different tech companies. Healey said that would be left to the tech companies to put into place
Advocacy organizations also raised concerns about other First Amendment violations, including for users who might face the most repercussions from verification measures and social media restrictions.
Such a law, some argue, could limit teenagers’ abilities to organize political activity, hear the latest news, express themselves creatively, or find community online.
Teddy Walker, a 21-year-old Bostonian who is trans and a leader of a group organized to protect trans rights, said he was isolated and depressed as a teenager until he found solace in Instagram and YouTube trans communities.
“It really helped give me the language and understanding for who I am,” Walker said. The proposed parental restrictions could “lead to trans youth and trans kids being less safe, being less able to access that content online that was so life-saving and life-affirming for me.”
Anjali Huynh can be reached at anjali.huynh@globe.com. Aaron Pressman can be reached at aaron.pressman@globe.com. Follow him @ampressman.
