Social Media Warning Labels Proposal Receives Strong Support in California
Noting the harms social networks pose to children, several California senators supported a bill Wednesday that would add warning labels to the platforms. Though several groups and members of the public supported the legislation, several senators raised concerns that AB-56 would be challenged in court and industry attacked warning labels as an inadequate solution.
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Sen. Akilah Weber Pierson (D) said social media companies are aware of how they harming children. The companies "have some of the best and brightest in every imaginable field -- engineering, science, technology -- [and] they know what they're doing,” she said. “They know how [the] adolescent brain works. They know the developmental stage, how these young kids are at a very impressionable age, and they have targeted them, and they prey on them.”
Sen. Susan Rubio (D) agreed, adding that since there are many ways of "getting information in front of our kids ... there's certainly [a] way to figure out how to make" the process safer.
Weber Pierson also denounced companies that oppose the bill without offering solutions. “Part of your opposition is that you don't think [AB-56] essentially goes far enough," she said. “My question is, what have you done, or what are you doing right now, to fix it?”
“You talk about the fact that … it's just a warning sign,” Weber Pierson added. “It doesn't really tell people where to go to actually get help. [But] you shouldn’t need legislation to do it; you can fix it yourself. You can fix the problem that you've created, but instead, you choose to try to put up these obstacles for financial reasons.”
Committee Vice-Chair Suzette Martinez Valladares (R) said she worries AB-56 will end up in court. The legislature has a “responsibility to ensure that the policies are grounded in evidence and hold up constitutional scrutiny,” she said.
Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D), a bill sponsor, said she's “confident we will get sued” since social media companies have filed suit against every social bill California has passed. She said the question is: will it win in court?
The bill's warning label was "very carefully tailored to follow the research" on social media warnings, said Bauer-Kahan, who chairs the Assembly Privacy Committee. “I can't predict what courts will do, but [the careful wording] give[s] us a good chance of prevailing."
In a blog July 11, Sheppard Mullin privacy attorneys predicted state requirements for social media warning labels will likely face legal challenges (see 2507110032).
Victoria Hinks, who said her daughter died by suicide after getting sucked into social media, testified for AB-56. “We are raising our kids in this unregulated social experiment that's going on, and our kids are the first generation of guinea pigs,” she said. “These social media companies have a huge amount of intellectual horsepower and resources at their disposal. They could protect our kids and change the algorithms if they wanted to.”
Other supporters included Common Sense Media and the California Medical Association, though they didn't testify.
Aodhan Downey, state policy manager of the west region at the Computer and Communications Industry Association, said the bill isn't a helpful solution. “A one-size-fits-all warning label misleads users and risks undermining trust,” he said. The bill also includes "significant technical challenges" and requires "platforms to collect more user data than they otherwise would" and "imposes unnecessary government-mandated privacy risks on users.”
TechNet and the California Chamber of Commerce also opposed AB-56.
“I just hope that at some point we all recognize that we must be good stewards for our communities and for our country,” said Weber Pierson. “Otherwise, we will all perish.”