New Jersey Is The Latest To Push A Harmful Moral Panic ‘Think Of The Kids’ Social Media Bill

It seems like the only bipartisan" support around regulations and the internet these days is... over the false, widely debunked moral panic that the internet is inherently harmful to children. Study after study has said it's simply not true. Here's the latest list (and I have one more to write up soon):

• Last fall, the widely respected Pew Research Center did a massive study on kids and the internet, and found that for a majority of teens, social media was way more helpful than harmful.
• This past May, the American Psychological Association (which has fallen for tech moral panics in the past, such as with video games) released a huge, incredibly detailed, and nuanced report going through all of the evidence, and finding no causal link between social media and harms to teens.
• Soon after that, the US Surgeon General came out with a report which was misrepresented widely in the press. Yet, the details of that report also showed that no causal link could be found between social media and harms to teens. It did still recommend that we act as if there were a link, which was weird and explains the media coverage, but the actual report highlights no causal link, while also pointing out how much benefit teens receive from social media).
• A few months later, an Oxford University study came out covering nearly a million people across 72 countries, noting that it could find no evidence of social media leading to psychological harm.
• The Journal of Pediatrics recently published a new study again noting that after looking through decades of research, the mental health epidemic faced among young people appears largely due to the lack of open spaces where kids can be kids without parents hovering over them. That report notes that they explored the idea that social media was a part of the problem, but could find no data to support that claim.
• In November a new study came out from Oxford showing that no evidence whatsoever of increased screentime having any impact on the functioning of brain development in kids.

And yet, if you talk to politicians or the media, they insist that there's overwhelming evidence showing the opposite, that social media is inherently dangerous to children.

The latest to fall for this false moral panic is the powerful Herb Conaway, a New Jersey state representative who has been in the New Jersey Assembly since 1997. He has a bunch of moral panic related quotes. He's claimed that the mental health epidemic among children can be laid at the feed of social media" (despite all the studies saying otherwise). He also has claimed (again, contrary to the actual evidence) that social media really has been horrific on the mental health and the physical health of our young people, particularly teenagers and particularly young girls."

This is not, in fact, what the evidence shows. But it is how the moral panic has been passed around.

And so, the greatly misinformed Assemblymember has successfully been pushing Bill A5750, which requires age verification and parental consent for use of any social media platform with 5 million or more accounts worldwide. It has just passed out of committee and has a very real chance of becoming the law in New Jersey (until a federal court throws it out as unconstitutional -but we'll get there).

Before we get to the legal problems with the bill, let's talk about the fundamental problems.

Age verification is a privacy nightmare. This has been explained multiple times in great detail. There is no way to do age verification without putting everyone's privacy at great risk. You don't have to take my word for it, the French data protection agency CNIL studied every available age verification method and found that they were both unreliable and violate privacy rights.

Why would Assemblymember Conaway want to put his constituents' privacy at risk?

Age verification only works by requiring someone to collect sensitive private data, and then hoping they can keep it safe. That's... bad?

Next, parental verification is crazy dangerous. It can make sense in perfectly happy homes with parents who have a good relationship with their children but, tragically, that is not all homes. And if you have situations where (for example) there is an LGBTQ child in a home where the parents cannot accept their child's identity, imagine how well that will go over.

And that's especially true at a time when we're seeing social media operations being created to specifically cater to marginalized groups. For example, the Trevor Project, the wonderful non-profit that helps LGBTQ youth, has their own social media network for those kids. Can you imagine how well that will work if parents of those kids had to get permission before they could make use of that site?

This law would put the most marginalized kids in society at much greater risk and cut them off from the communities and services that have been repeatedly found to help them the most.

Why?

Because of a moral panic that is not backed by the actual evidence.

The fact that this bill applies to any social media with greater than 5 million accounts means it would sweep in tons of smaller sites. Note that it's not even active accounts or active monthly users. And it's not just accounts in New Jersey. It's 5 million global accounts. There are many sites that would qualify that simply could never afford to put in place age verification or parental controls, and thus the only answer will be to cut off New Jersey entirely.

So, again, the end result is cutting off marginalized and at-risk kids from the services that have repeatedly been found to be helpful.

On the legal front, these provisions are also quite clearly unconstitutional, and have been found by multiple courts to be so. Just in the past few months federal courts have rejected an Arkansas age verification bill and a California one. Neither of these were surprising results as they had been litigated in front of the Supreme Court decades ago.

The parental controls mandate is equally unconstitutional. In Brown v. EMA the Supreme Court noted that the 1st Amendment does not allow for the government to prevent children from hearing or saying anything without their parents' prior consent." Children have 1st Amendment rights as well, and while they are somewhat more limited than for adults, the courts have found repeatedly that children have the right to access 1st Amendment-protected speech, and to do so without parental consent.

And, in cases like this, it's even worse than in Brown, which was about a failed attempt by California to restrict access to violent video games. Here, the New Jersey bill attempts to limit access to all social media, not just specifically designated problematic ones. So it's an even broader attack on the 1st Amendment rights of children than Brown was.

So, in the end we have a terribly drafted bill that will sweep in a ton of companies, even ones with limited presence in New Jersey, ordering them to invest in expensive and faulty features that have already been shown to put private info at risk, while doing so in a way that has also been shown to put the most marginalized and at-risk children at much greater risk. And all of this has already been found to be unconstitutional.

All based on a moral panic that has been widely debunked by research.

Yet the bill is sailing through the New Jersey legislature, and almost guarantees that the state of New Jersey is going to have to spend millions in taxpayer funds to defend this law in court, only to be told exactly what I'm telling them for free.

This is a bad, dangerous, unconstitutional bill.