Should PA Require Parental Consent to Create Social Media Profiles?

Navigating the digital landscape as a parent and policy expert, I'm Jesse White, and in my latest Keystone Reckoning Podcast episode, we tackle the hot-button issue of parental consent in the age of social media. As I dissect Pennsylvania's House Bill 2017 and Senate Bill 22, you'll gain invaluable insights into how these legislative measures could reshape our kids' online experiences. By scrutinizing the responsibilities these bills propose for tech giants—from securing consent to safeguarding data—I lay out the stakes for our children's digital well-being. Join me for a compelling exploration of what these potential laws mean for targeted online content and the overarching implications for privacy in young lives.

Every parent has faced the modern conundrum of managing screen time, and this episode is no exception. We'll explore the intricate dance between fostering digital savviness and guarding against the risks that come with it. From the decision to bid farewell to apps like Roblox to the double-edged sword that is YouTube Kids, I share personal stories and expert views on guiding our children through this ever-connected world. Listen in as we discuss the necessity of vigilant parenting in tandem with applauding legislative initiatives aimed at compelling social media platforms to prioritize the protection of their youngest users. This isn't just policy talk; it's about shaping a safer digital future for every child.

Learn more about the Keystone Reckoning Project at www.keystonereckoning.com

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:30

Should Pennsylvania require parental consent for children opening social media accounts? I don't know, but I think it's something worth talking about. Good morning, it's Tuesday, march 19th 2024, and welcome to the Keystone Reckoning Podcast. I'm your host, jesse White. So this is a pretty interesting topic for a variety of reasons, and the reason it's coming about is there is a bill out there that was introduced by State Representative Brian Monroe from Bucks County. It is House Bill 2017. You can find it online and what it does is it requires parental consent for a social media account to be open for any minor under the age of 16. There's also a bipartisan bill in the Senate which is similar Senate Bill 22 from Senator Vince Hughes, but I thought we could look at the Monroe bill because it was just introduced and, before we get into the discussion about the bill itself, let's get a couple of things out of the way.

Speaker 1: 1:33

First of all, I am a parent. My wife and I have two boys, ages eight and nine, soon to be nine and 10. So this is something that I can look at both as a parent and as a public policy expert and political operative. I can see this from a lot of different sides, and I think that definitely allows me to look at the totality of the issue and to see if this is actually a solution to a real problem. I think one of the things we see a lot of times in legislation is it's a solution in search of a problem, and I'm not quite sure that that's the situation here. I think there's a real discussion to be had Whether this is the right approach. I think we can debate or perhaps disagree, but I think it's a real thing.

Speaker 1: 2:25

So first of all, let's talk about the bill briefly. It would amend Title 50 of the PA Consolidate Statutes and what it says. It's fairly dense, but the long and short of it is that any minor defined as anybody under age 16 that would open a social media account, and it defines what a social media platform is. That's all the big ones that they would be required to have parental consent before the account could be opened. Additionally, a parent could at any time revoke that consent and there are prohibitions against data mining, selling information from those minors social media accounts, even if there was consent to open them. So what it really is doing is putting the onus on social media platforms to set up some safeguards and some processes by which they can not only limit unfettered access for minors to their platforms, but also puts obligations on them in terms of what they do with the data, which I think in some ways is as if not more important, because that data that is generated through those platforms then goes into the algorithm, which is then purchased by third parties, which is then used to feed the information that people see. So it's really a way to craft content and ads and different things right back to the kids based on what they're already watching.

Speaker 1: 3:55

That can be difficult enough for adults to deal with when we are victims to those algorithms and we're aware of what they are, but for children it could be really really damaging, because they don't know why they're seeing what they're seeing and, as we saw in recent elections, what we are fed by an algorithm will help dictate our perceptions of the world, the way we interact with people, and for adults, in a lot of ways it was the way we vote. Obviously, we're not there yet with kids, but we're talking about young, impressionable minds that are just starting to figure out the world, and if they're being fed a biased narrative or a targeted narrative, that will absolutely have an impact on what they see. So that's what the bill does generally. It also puts some protections and some implementation in place where the social media companies can be held liable for creating accounts that are that did not have parental consent. It also has liabilities in there for the data mining and things like that, and these are all actions that would be brought by the state attorney general. They could be bought individually, it could be brought for a group and the fines range from $2,500 for an initial offense for per child, up to $5 million on the upper end for large scale violations, and all of that money goes back into a state fund that is to be used for education and protection. So there are real guidelines here and it's a real onus on the social media platforms to actually take this seriously.

Speaker 1: 5:41

Now I was curious and I did a little research as to what other states have actually passed legislation like this, because this is a pretty sweeping, you know, wide reaching thing and you could easily see where the politics would come into play. There are a lot of balancing interests here. Right, there's the general First Amendment freedom of speech. There is the overprotective or the kind of thought of we need to protect our children from the internet, which could kind of it's a common concern and a valid one, but it can a lot of times be kind of filtered by political bias in different ways in terms of what should we be protecting our kids from? That then gets into content limitations. You can see it's a slippery slip right. We can very easily go down a weird path.

Speaker 1: 6:32

Interestingly, the first state to pass something like this was Arkansas. Just, I don't know why that surprised me. It just surprised me, right. There aren't any things that you're like oh, arkansas leading the way. The next one and it was interesting, it wasn't legislation, it was actually folded into their fiscal code. So it's not it wasn't as easy to find was Ohio. So you have two states that are very conservative that have passed. It's not exactly the same, but it's similar. It's not anything fundamentally different. And so the question is is this a good idea?

Speaker 1: 7:07

And I think one of the things that's crucial is there are real statistics now that are starting to come out about this, about the young children social media use and the impact that it has. And, for reference, I came of age pre-social media, pre-internet. I'm 45 years old. I started using social media in, like most people, 2006, 2007,. To varying degrees of success. As I think anybody that's familiar with me knows, live by the social media, die by the social media, but I've always considered myself to be an early adopter and someone that saw the benefit of social media, as evidenced by the fact that I'm using social media platforms to promote this podcast. Now I will say that my opinion of social media has really changed and my use of social media has really changed over the years to where I'm much more selective about what I share. I'm much more selective about things I talk about, and I think some of that had to do with recent election cycles. I think some of it had to do with COVID and the way that it was just raw nerves stacking up. I've gained and lost friendships based on social media activity and it's a difficult thing to navigate for an adult, let alone a child, so let's talk about that for a minute.

Speaker 1: 8:33

The statistics are real. Kids who use social media for more than three hours a day are one and a half times more likely to develop depression. 27% of kids who spend significant time on social media report experiencing anxiety. Over 60% of teens using social media extensively report poor sleep quality and exacerbating mental health issues. There's huge concerns about body image. 55% of girls, 35% of boys, age 12 to 16, report that social media makes them feel more self-conscious about their body image, victims of cyber bullying or at a higher risk of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation. About 37% of kids under 16 have been reported being bullied online. It also increases FOMO fear of missing out, that they see these idealized social media feeds. They don't realize that they are very filtered, in most cases staged, and they think that that's what they should be having their life be like and they feel like they're missing out on that. There's an inverse relationship between screen time and happiness in kids. Those who spend more than two hours a day on social media report lower levels of satisfaction with life. Around 60% of teens say they often compare themselves to others on social media, leading to feelings of an anacostia and low self-esteem.

Speaker 1: 9:53

One in six young people exhibit patterns of social media use that are consistent with addictive behaviors, which obviously can impact mental health, and kids who spend excessive time on social media are more likely to report Attention problems and symptoms related to ADHD. So they're the lot there, and you know these are things that we are now getting into the point where there's enough information Out there that we can start to do these studies, put it all together and get a feel for what action with the actual impact of Social media use is on kids. You know, obviously that's something that takes some time. For my own Personal experience as a parent, my kids again Almost ages nine and ten the only Social media, if you want to call it that, that we allow them to be on is YouTube kids, which, I have to say, I think is a fantastic platform. The parental controls are amazing. The ability to really you know, kind of screen the content is fantastic. One of the subscriptions I don't even hesitate for is YouTube premium, because it takes all the ads out. My kids don't see those ads, which is great. Neither do I on my YouTube, which is also great. So you know, it's a good 10 bucks a month to so I don't have to worry about those kinds of things. So but that's it. That's all we allow them to do.

Speaker 1: 11:14

You know they have iPads. You know that was a COVID thing. You know we got to the point where it was like well, you know, we're stuck in a house for, you know, the foreseeable future. We got to figure out a way to let these kids do something, and the other part of that is is kind of a realization. It is something we've come to realize as parents is this is the future. Right, kids are going to be on screens for the rest of their lives, just like adults were all on screens. Right, I'm looking at screens right now as I'm doing this. That just because that isn't the experience we had as children Doesn't mean that it's necessarily a bad thing.

Speaker 1: 11:48

Kids use iPads in school all the time and it's amazing, you know, if you see, especially young kids now, it's super intuitive, right, they just know how to use these devices. It's crazy, and you know they play games and you know, and that's what they do on there. The one I could say there's one game you know, because I check everything that they're on and you know we have it said they can't download or do anything without parental authorization, which is a nice thing that the Apple ecosystem does. I will say the one app, that game that we did get rid of was Roblox, because it allowed for like games within the game, so it allowed for these, and there were so many of them that were Garbage, really, right, just kind of like knockoffs of popular content, and you know they were like all from these, like Chinese vendors, and so there were data concerns. But it also, you know, the golden rule in our house is, if it allows you to talk to anybody outside of our house, it's a no go, no bueno, that's it and that's the line that we've drawn, and anytime they want to get a game or whatever, you know, I check it out first and make sure there's no chat function, something you know there have been a couple instances where there have been chat functions that I disable or you can make it so they can only talk to, like you know, their cousins or something like that. So the good news is those control mechanisms, mechanisms are there and but even with all those mechanisms in place, you know social media.

Speaker 1: 13:21

You know Social media, the content they see, even on just YouTube kids, and now what they hear in school for people and stuff like that it really has a substantial impact on their development, both positive and negative. I mean my youngest son, gus. I mean the things he comes up with in terms of random facts and pieces of knowledge are amazing, and we don't even ask anymore like, oh, youtube kids, right, you know they don't watch pure garbage, they watch some garbage, but we all do right. But they also watch science videos and they watch, you know, instructional videos and my youngest loves to watch cooking videos. And the other thing that I came to realize is during COVID, especially when they couldn't have that socialization with anybody these YouTubers, you know, or these content creators they became their friends.

Speaker 1: 14:14

I know that sounds really corny or whatever, but it's the truth. They it was someone they could hear from every day and that wasn't terrible, you know. And our house wasn't as bad. I have two kids that are a little over a year apart. They had each other right and they get along and they're basically best friends. But I can't even imagine for parents that you know had only you know, an only child or kids that were way far apart in age, the socialization concerns there during that period of time have real impacts. So it's not all negative.

Speaker 1: 14:46

But as they start to get older and yeah, this is something in our house as they start to get older, we know there's just gonna come a point where they're gonna wanna be on those platforms and how that's gonna look and what. That's how we're gonna navigate. That is something that is gonna be really difficult Because, well, everybody in class is doing it, okay, well, that doesn't mean you're doing it, but you can't keep them off of it forever, right? And the question then becomes well, what's the fine line of what are you? How do you expose them to this in a way that they can understand what they're looking at and navigate it as best they can, as compared to saying, no, you can't see any of it? Then, once they're old enough that I can't stop what they do or monitor what they do, they can get real trouble because they're not familiar with what to look for.

Speaker 1: 15:35

Those are tough, tough calls for every parent to make, and our biggest fear is the cyber bullying. I am quite certain we're gonna have to have a very difficult conversation about selfies and what kind of pictures you send to people online, even your friends, and what can happen with those, because the stories are out there, right? Kids are dumb. They're kids, just like adults. We're dumb, we make mistakes in the heat of a moment, and that can be used to extort you, embarrass you and, if you don't understand that, the results can be devastating. Right, I mean, these kids are killing themselves.

Speaker 1: 16:20

So it's not nothing, and it's interesting that this is one issue where I feel like it kind of it actually goes above politics right, like your politics could influence what you might think about it and kind of where the limit should be, but it's one of those rare issues where it's a real present danger that needs to be discussed. That kind of impacts everybody across the board, so I applaud it. I think the Monroe bill and again you can check it out yourself at House Bill 2017. And I think it's a good start, and I think there's no reason why these social media companies that are making ungodly amounts of money and have ungodly amounts of technical ability shouldn't be accountable for helping to curb some of the problems that their content has created and will continue to create as we go forward. So I applaud it.

Speaker 1: 17:23

Is there room for debate, discussion? Sure, but I think that the time has come to look at those safeguards. I think it's a debate we should be having. I think it's one of those ones where we can hopefully keep the politics out of it as a way to actually get something done, and I think it's something we're definitely gonna revisit. As a policy person, as a political person and, perhaps most importantly, as a parent, I think this is something that is definitely worth discussion and enacting in some way, shape or form. So this is obviously a hot topic we could talk about as we go forward, but for now, let's call it a day. Again, thank you for listening to the Keystone Recording Podcast. I'm your host, jesse White. Have a good one, and we'll see you tomorrow.