I am writing to express grave concerns about HD.3070/SD.654, a proposed law to regulate technology use by young people. I am as hostile to social-media megacorporations as anyone; indeed, I was telling people not to use Facebook fifteen years ago. As an old hand from bygone days, let me tell you: This bill is attacking the problem in the wrong way and will result in severe collateral damage while making Meta and X stronger. I co-moderate a small online forum for people to discuss the hype, excesses and anti-democratic practices of the tech industry. This bill could crush my forum out of existence or force it to block participants from Massachusetts, while Meta and X will roll happily along, using the bill as license to invade the privacy of adults and youth alike. That’s not what I want, and I don’t think it’s what you want either.

On top of that, the bill includes demands that are at best dubiously constitutional. I think we Democrats should be standing up for the Constitution in the present moment, rather than trying to make an end-run around it.

HD.3070/SD.654 comes in two parts. The first is about technology use within schools. The second aims to regulate how young people use technology in any location at at any hour of their lives. I will confine my comments to the second part.

The bill defines a “social media platform” as “a public website, online service, online application or mobile application that displays content primarily generated by users and allows users to create, share and view user-generated content with other users.”

Perhaps this was written to try and articulate what Facebook is, but its scope is far more vast than that. This definition encompasses everything from Wikipedia to a local community forum for birdwatchers. Consequently, it imperils the survival of community-owned and hobbyist online platforms, i.e., the very alternatives to Facebook that we should be trying to encourage.

The bill declares, “A social media platform shall present a warning to minor users on the negative effects of social media use on social, emotional and physical health. The warning shall be presented to a minor user upon account activation and every 30 days thereafter and shall require the minor user to acknowledge the warning before proceeding to use the social media platform.” This is compelled speech. The state has a high legal bar to clear when telling people what to say. And, frankly, I am not going to lie and say that the evidence about social media harming minors is incontrovertible, when in fact the research results to date have been highly equivocal. (More on this point below.)

There’s a requirement about “restricting a minor user from accessing the social media platform for more than 1 1/2 cumulative hours of use in any 24 hour period”. Even with parental approval, this can’t be changed “to more than 2 hours in any 24 hour period”. Likewise, the bill imposes a 10-minute break after “20 minutes of continuous use” (how is this supposed to be measured?), which even parental authorization cannot increase beyond a half-hour threshold. First, why is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts telling parents how to parent? There is no room in this law for a parent to trust their child, even so far as letting their child have a diversion while sick in bed. Moreover, these restrictions would apply to all “social media platform” activities, with the extraordinarily broad definition of “social media platform” noted above. This would forbid a minor from editing Wikipedia — an activity that has even been a classroom assignment — for more than 20 minutes at a time. Do we not want to teach our children how to write? In addition, the bill states that “A social media platform shall restrict from public visibility a minor user’s account within 1 hour of receiving a request for a restriction by a parent of a minor user 15 years old or younger or by a minor user and shall delete a minor user’s account within 3 days of receiving a request for a deletion by a parent of a minor user 15 years old”. I am a volunteer, running a website in my own free time. There is no way that I can promise I will even see a request within an hour. I teach, and lecture duties alone will keep me offline for intervals of two hours and more. Nor do I, a volunteer covering expenses out of pocket, have the ability to authenticate that any request is actually coming from the parent of a minor. Nothing in a web forum like mine could sensibly be called harmful to minors, but this bill would put me on the legal hook regardless. Furthermore, this bill would open serious avenues of abuse. For example, a homophobic parent could shut down an account that a minor uses as a literal lifeline. Even in our fair Massachusetts, there are MAGA parents. Do you really want to give them a new way to punish a queer or trans child?

On top of that, the bill defines “parent” as “a parent or legal guardian”. Right away, there’s a big problem: This bill would empower parents who have lost custody of their child to control the life of that child.

Lambasting social media as “addictive” is rhetorically tempting, but it obscures the variety of the human costs and benefits. Empirically speaking, the big picture is equivocal: Many young people have neutral-to-positive experiences, while some have it much worse — and within that smaller proportion, the direction of the causal arrow is not so clear. Teenagers who struggle with depression and who lack other resources, for example, will turn to social media for help, and even if this exposure exacerbates their problems, it is not the underlying cause. As the developmental psychologist Candice Odgers wrote in The Atlantic (21 May 2024):

Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.

Many other researchers have found the same. In fact, a recent study and a review of research on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. The most influential factors include a family history of mental disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report concluding, “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.” […] The reality is that correlational studies to date have generated a mix of small, conflicting, and often confounded associations between social-media use and adolescents’ mental health. The overwhelming majority of them offer no way to sort out cause and effect. When associations are found, things seem to work in the opposite direction from what we’ve been told: Recent research among adolescents — including among young-adolescent girls, along with a large review of 24 studies that followed people over time — suggests that early mental-health symptoms may predict later social-media use, but not the other way around. […] Two things can be true: first, that the online spaces where young people spend so much time require massive reform, and second, that social media is not rewiring our children’s brains or causing an epidemic of mental illness. Focusing solely on social media may mean that the real causes of mental disorder and distress among our children go unaddressed.

Like many other attempts at legislating in this vein, HD.3070/SD.654 declares by fiat that a website offering an unlimited scroll is offering an addictive feature. Really? Would a website that lets the user scroll through the Oxford English Dictionary from A to Z and back again truly be addictive? What if Mass Audubon made a mobile app that provides an endless scroll of waterfowl pictures? Conversely, sometimes it is the absence of new content that is psychologically compelling. Ask any journalist who reports on the US Supreme Court about refreshing the SCOTUS website on opinion days! Laws that opt for easy outs instead of actually understanding human psychology will do no good.

On the flipside, the bill says that “a social media feed that only presents content chronologically” is a good default, unlike the evil “features that prolong minor engagement”. I prefer a chronological feed myself, as a matter of personal taste, but the idea that it should be established as the default by force of law is just silly. A non-chronological feature could act as a means to reduce time spent online (e.g., boosting the visibility of suggestions to go for a walk). The question of how to create a healthy online environment is simply too complicated to be legislated in blunt terms like these.

The bill mandates that I fork out cash for an “age assurance system” consisting “of the best technology available in the age assurance and verification industry with measures reasonably calculated to accurately identify a current or prospective user’s age and determine the proper level of access to the social media platform’s features pursuant to this chapter with 99 per cent accuracy.: This is a demand that I buy snake oil. The people who say that “age assurance” can deliver 99% accuracy are the people who sell “age assurance” systems. A child can fool the computer into calling them a 46-year-old by holding a dachsund up to the camera. Let’s not kid ourselves and regard the people trying to make a buck off anxious parents as trustworthy sources.

Any requirement that an online service treat adults and young people differently is a requirement to invade the user’s privacy, because the online service must know, one way or the other, the user’s age. Moreover, age checks online are more burdensome than age checks elsewhere in daily life. To quote Eric Goldman, Professor of Law at Santa Clara University:

• Greater privacy risks. Compared to offline, online age authentication requires minors and adults to make more disclosures of private and sensitive information and put themselves at greater risk.
• Greater security risks. Because of the online mediation, the highly sensitive online authentication information is more susceptible to theft or exfiltration, posing huge dangers to the exposed data subjects.
• Greater barriers to access. Compared to offline, online age authentication adds a mandatory speed bump to content access online in ways that break ordinary Internet browsing and deter people from accessing constitutionally protected material.
• Greater publication costs. Compared to offline, online age authentication raises publishers’ costs that will shrink the availability of constitutionally protected material for minors and adults.
• Surveillance infrastructure. Compared to offline, mandatory online age authentication provides governments with much greater control over people’s movements online. Worse, it teaches citizens—especially minors—that the standard price of reading constitutionally protected material is the forced disclosure of highly sensitive and personal information. As that message becomes normalized, it will become easier for the government to degrade civil liberties in the future.

Finally, many provisions in this law echo those that have already been found unconstitutional in other states. For example, Section 3(a)(vii) disables notifications about a minor’s social media feed during certain hours of the day. A nearly identical provision in California’s SB 976 was recently struck down for failing intermediate scrutiny. Notifications from services to which SB 976 did not apply are equally capable of being disruptive: “a sports website such as ESPN can send notifications about, for instance, a minor’s favorite team winning a national championship during prohibited hours, but Facebook could not send the same notification” (Netchoice v. Bonta, 2024 WL 5264045). The same objection applies here. The Massachusetts bill exempts “email, cloud storage, SMS, MMS, RCS, or similar text messaging telecommunications services”; the ability of text messages to disrupt one’s concentration is obvious to anyone who has received them. Because the law is radically underinclusive, it fails even under intermediate scrutiny. Likewise, compelled disclosure requirements akin to those in section 4(a) were found to be subject to strict scrutiny, a standard they failed.

In summary, HD.3070/SD.654 is underinclusive in some ways and overbroad in others, all to the detriment of the people of Massachusetts. I urge you to split the portion of the bill regarding school policy from the rest and consider it as a separate item of legislation, so that we do not choke on a raw omnibus.

You want to go after Meta and X? Fine. They’re run by Nazis. Taking them on is the Lord’s work. But this bill misses the target and hits those of us who have spent years building alternatives. The plain fact is that Meta and X have gotten away with so much, not because of any detail of the law, but because they are disgustingly rich. Change the law, and they will still be disgustingly rich. You will drive community-based alternatives out of existence, and only the platforms run by Nazis will be left standing.

UPDATE (18 July 2025): The original bill discussed in this post has been replaced by S.2549, which focuses on the use of personal electronic devices on school grounds. However, H.4229 has been introduced, which carries forward the tradition of the ludicrous definition of “addictive social media feed”. The logic of this bill is like saying that gambling is addictive, and casinos use dice, so therefore dice are addictive and we must regulate the use by minors of board games.