Anyone under 18 years of age in Utah will need parental permission to use social media platforms ... [+]
As of last month, anyone under 18 years of age in Utah will need parental permission to use social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok after Republican Governor Spencer Cox signed new legislation into law. The governor also signed into a law a bill that prohibits social media companies from employing techniques that could cause minors to develop an "addiction" to the various platforms.
SB152 will require social media companies to verify that users in the state are 18 or older to open an account, while minors will need parental consent. In addition, HB311 now prohibits social media companies from using a design or feature that causes addiction for a minor to the company's social media platform. The law will also make it easier for people to sue social media companies for damages.
In a twist of irony, Cox took to Twitter to explain his decision – not that most teens are likely to follow the Utah governor.
"We're no longer willing to let social media companies continue to harm the mental health of our youth," Governor Cox (@GovCox) tweeted last week.
Well-Meaning But Too Extreme?
Some academics have suggested that attempting to regulate children's and adolescents' use of social media is still a complex issue, and these newly passed laws may not solve all the problems.
"While it sounds like a well-meaning and feasible approach to decreasing children's social media usage, it could harm youth by blocking their access to friends and hindering their creative expression," warned Cheryl Holcomb-McCoy, dean for the School of Education at American University.
"We need to increase our discussions about how to teach children to utilize social media more responsibly," Holcomb-McCoy suggested. "Also, I would like to see more teacher education programs integrate social media usage into their training curricula."
This could include teaching students to critically engage with information as well as lessening their time spent on social media.
"Overall, I would love to see a 'public health campaign' about how to use social media responsibly," said Holcomb-McCoy. "Banning social media will only prove to be difficult to implement and enforce."
Missing The Key Threats
The legislation may also fail to address a few key points, including the fact that most platforms already have an age requirement, but today's increasingly tech-savvy kids can just lie to get around this.
"Restricting and/or monitoring and supervising access to social media use by minors is an extremely difficult task and is part of the reason that many – if not all – of the major social media platforms have failed in this area," explained Sal Aurigemma, faculty director of the University of Tulsa Master of Science in Cyber Security program.
Requirements such as age limits have proven easy to bypass by lying or using someone that is over 13 to create an account. The situation is unlikely to be different by raising the age limit to 18.
"There are tools and practices that parents can use to limit social media use, but they are often complicated, such as blocking social media websites and app URLs in home routers; pricey, if using a paid application to monitor and block social media use; and difficult to ensure effectiveness and efficacy," added Aurigemma.
Moreover, there are now hundreds of applications and websites that qualify as social media sites, and many more apps that have social media-like characteristics built-in to allow easy communication.
"While the major media focus is on the current popular apps, like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, so many other apps offer similar risks to minors and there is no control over new apps that have yet to be launched or created," said Aurigemma. "There is currently no tool, or even set of tools, that provides complete coverage of all the many social media apps that minors can use, which means parents of minors will have to rely on providing guidelines and do their best to monitor compliance."
This is why content moderation, whether related to minors or not, has been an incredible challenge for all social media platforms. Moreover, to date, despite significant effort and money spent by many of these platforms, the problem remains largely unchecked.
Aurigemma warns too that this legislation fails to even address the cyber security risks of minors using social media. "Research has shown that people, and especially younger individuals, tend to overshare on social media applications and sites. Cybercriminals can use data harvested from users to send tailored phishing scams to users to harvest account credentials or spread malware."
Enter AI
The problem is only likely to get worse thanks to the recent explosion of accessible AI tools built on large language models, including GPT-4). This will make it even easier for cybercriminals to automate these types of attacks with much more detail and fewer of the mistakes we commonly use to identify phishing attacks, such as looking for misspellings and inaccurate information.
"A constant threat from oversharing on social media is identity theft," said Aurigemma. "Cybercriminals can use personal information posted on social media to impersonate a user and commit fraud long into the future. This can be especially troubling for minors who have their whole lives ahead of them to build and maintain credit."
Collection Of Data
It isn't just the hackers that could be a problem when it comes to oversharing. Yet, another longer-term issue that has yet to be resolved is how social media platforms continue to collect and share user data with third-party advertisers without the user's knowledge.
"Most social media sites have privacy policies and are required to state what data they collect and can share/sell, but people – especially minors – have been shown time and again to ignore those policies and just hit 'accept conditions,'" Aurigemma continued.
"Even if you do take the time to read any particular social media platform's data privacy policy, the language is difficult to understand for many highly educated adults; minors are at an even greater disadvantage," Aurigemma warned. "This privacy threat is a concern to all, but for minors that have the rest of their lives living in a digital world, the early assimilation of their private data into digital dossiers that are shared for marketing and other purposes is especially troubling."
