New Bill in North Carolina Would Ban Minors from Accessing Social Media.
The bill also establishes age verification for individuals under 16 years old.
A new bill introduced in the North Carolina House of Representatives seeks to prohibit minors under 14 from accessing social media and establish age verification mechanisms for certain sites, albeit differently from other similar regulations. The initiative, known as HB 301 or the Minor Social Media Protection Act, was introduced last Wednesday and has already passed its first reading, now moving to a committee for a more detailed review.
This bill, reminiscent of the social media ban for minors under 16 in Australia, aims to prevent children under 14 from creating accounts on social platforms that meet specific criteria, such as having at least 10% of their daily users under 16 years old and featuring characteristics deemed "addictive," like infinite scrolling. It stipulates that youths aged 14 to 15 would need parental consent to register, although it does not specify how that authorization would be managed.
Additionally, HB 301 proposes "anonymous" or standard age verification mechanisms to access sites containing more than one third of their content classified as "harmful to minors." This term references a Supreme Court case, Ginsberg v. New York, which established that content that is not obscene (and thus protected by the First Amendment) can be found harmful to minors. Typically, in age verification laws, this refers to explicit content, and this aspect of the bill aligns with other regulations requiring some form of age validation, such as the use of digital identification or facial recognition, to access adult sites.
Unlike other age verification laws implemented in the United States, including North Carolina's own law, this one only requires visitors to these sites to be 16 years or older, instead of 18. It's worth noting that the age of consent in North Carolina is 16. In January, the Supreme Court addressed the issue of age verification laws in the case Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, and its ruling is expected to be announced this summer.
A recent study on these verification laws suggests that they are failing to achieve their intended goal of keeping minors away from sites with explicit content, as they can access pages that do not comply with the regulations or circumvent them using a VPN.
