States Are Saving Kids from Social Media Surveillance
Just say no to targeted advertising.
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Legislators across the country, in states running the gamut from deep blue to deep red, have taken steps this year to put new guardrails around how children access and use social media. With federal efforts stymied, more than 30 states and territories considered legislation this year to regulate how kids interact with social media platforms, according to the National Conference on State Legislatures, and that count hasn’t been updated since February, so it’s probably even higher.
New laws that actually came to pass at the state level have included: requirements for social media corporations to verify users’ ages; requirements for parental consent before children use particular apps or for those apps to collect data; limiting the use of cell phones in schools; limiting when children can receive push notifications from social media platforms; or, in the case of Montana, even trying to straight up ban TikTok.
The most recent action occurred in Maryland, where Gov. Wes Moore recently signed into law what’s know as the “Maryland Kids Code,” alongside the “Maryland Online Data Privacy Act.” Last week, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, Attorney General Tisch James, and several state legislators launched a major push for similar legislation — the SAFE for Kids Act and the New York Child Data Protection Act — to be approved before New York’s state legislative session ends early next month.
I’m going to break down why these efforts are so important, and what I think is the most promising part of the various reform bills and laws out there.
To start, the motivation for lawmakers to tackle this area is pretty clear: There’s increasing evidence linking social media use among children to depression, anxiety, and self-harm, as well as increased exposure to hateful, radical content or harassment. Research shows social media algorithms serve children harmful content within minutes of their starting to use a platform, and that children are becoming far too addicted to staring into their phones.
Social media corporations always pledge up and down that they’re working to clear their sites of harmful stuff aimed at kids and to address the health and well-being of all their users, but it never really happens. And that’s for a reason: Social media platforms depend on users staying engaged — i.e., scrolling along — as long as possible, because that enables those platforms to show them more ads and hoover up more data in order to create ever-more extensive individual profiles that are then sold to third-party advertisers, something known as “targeted advertising.”
As RJ Cross at the Public Interest Research Group put it, “it’s a feedback loop of getting people as addicted to their devices as possible so you can extract data about them so you can sell them stuff.” Breaking that loop undermines the whole profit-making endeavor, as I wrote here, which is why tech platforms never manage to actually do it: “Expecting Facebook to then solve a problem that is an inherent part of its business model is akin to expecting poachers to implement measures to protect rare wildlife: Doing so would put them out of business.”
To boil it down: Time equals data equals profits for everyone from Facebook to TikTok to YouTube (which, remember, is owned by Google). You, your attention, and the attention of your children is the product they’re hawking, so addiction is a feature, not a bug. Indeed, it’s not only state legislators taking aim at targeted advertising to children — President Joe Biden, the Federal Trade Commission, and members of Congress have also pointed to the same solution.
But it’s the state’s that have come the furthest to-date. The Maryland law includes a crucial short-circuiting of this process by eliminating the ability of social media platforms to sell children’s data for the purpose of targeting them with advertising. New York does the same, but with an allowance that parents can opt kids in to targeting. New York’s proposal also makes it illegal for social media platforms to use algorithms to suggest new content to kids that they haven’t already opted into.
Break the feedback loop, make social media a safer place to be — for children, sure, but honestly for everyone else too.
Kids are specifically targeted for advertising all the time online. According to a study released last year by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in 2022 Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube made a combined $11 billion in advertising revenue from ads targeted to users younger than 18.
As the study’s senior author wrote, “Although social media platforms may claim that they can self-regulate their practices to reduce the harms to young people, they have yet to do so, and our study suggests they have overwhelming financial incentives to continue to delay taking meaningful steps to protect children.”
Indeed, that’s 11 billion reasons not to sever the link between kids, their data, and the advertisers interested in purchasing it — and why tech lobbyists are fighting so hard to stop anything looking like the Maryland or New York proposals from spreading around. Facebook and Google have already spent nearly $1 million — which is a lot in the world of state lobbying — in an attempt to kill the two New York bills I mentioned above.
Addressing the business model of Big Tech is more promising than simply attempting to eliminate access — as anyone with a kid will surely tell you, saying they can’t have something is a surefire way to encourage them find a way to get it — or relying on parental opt-outs, which have no history of working as most people, understandably, don’t know what they’re agreeing to in exchange for the product they’re signing up for.
Simply put, reforms should follow the money.
Also, fundamentally, you shouldn’t have to cut yourself off from the world in order to be safe from corporate malfeasance, in any context. It’s the role of lawmakers to regulate corporate business models when their harm doesn’t outweigh their benefit. When it comes to Big Tech, that means saying the rapacious collection of young people’s data for the purpose of trying to sell them stuff is simply not worth the considerable downsides.
But won’t this put social media platforms out of business, you may ask? No, not at all! There was advertising long before targeting, and there would still be advertising in a world in which targeting individual users, children or otherwise, were eliminated. In fact, there’s plenty of research showing that targeted advertising is barely better, if it’s better at all, for people trying to find customers than the good old pre-surveillance-targeting model. Targeted advertising also facilitates monopolization, as the entities with the most data — Facebook and Google chief among them — become the world’s go-tos for advertising, to the detriment of every other entity that survives on ad dollars.
I’m not that old — at 38, an elder millennial — and I can remember a time when social media platforms just showed you your friend’s posts in reverse chronological order and advertising was based on the idea that someone visiting a publication, following a Facebook page, perusing a website, or initiating a Google search about, say, ice hockey, might be interested in buying hockey gear or hockey tickets. Somehow, the world functioned just fine! We’ve allowed the creation of a vast, private surveillance state in exchange for a slightly higher chance an ad is relevant to our interests.
It’s not a good trade, and it’s especially not a good one when targeting is doing concrete harm to kids. So kudos to the state legislators who are already there, and I’m ready for many more policymakers to follow.
SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION: The American Economic Liberties Project, where I work, held our second annual Anti-Monopoly Summit last week. You can give it a watch here if you weren’t able to attend or catch the livestream: Special shoutout to the panel on state and local issues two and a half hours in, which featured a great discussion between Virginia State Senator Stella Pekarsky and Arizona State Representative Analise Ortiz, moderated by the Huffington Post’s George Zornick (and with an intro by yours truly).
UPDATE: Minnesota recently became the second state to ban junk fees economy-wide, when Gov. Tim Walz signed a bill championed by Sen. Lindsey Port and Rep. Emma Greenman into law. Love to see it! Remember, you can always keep up with the effort to ban junk fees across the country at the End Junk Fees campaign hub.
UPDATE II: The Department of Justice and 30 state attorneys general last week sued to beak up Ticketmaster/Live Nation for monopolizing the live entertainment and ticketing industry. A key part of the case is Ticketmaster’s abuse of exclusivity clauses in its contracts with venues, an issue I explained here.
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— Pat Garofalo