They Just Took A Blow Torch To Your Privacy.
The State House
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Yesterday the House passed a bill that took a blow torch to your privacy. I voted no. I’ll share with you what this bill does, because the alarmingly harmful part can get obscured in the headlines.
The bill requires every social media platform to verify your age. This does not just apply for children, it’s for everyone to verify their age. And it sets zero standards for how it’s done and zero protections for your privacy.
So if your 14-year-old wants to use Instagram and you want to say yes, you’re handing your driver’s license and your child’s ID and face to a company in California. Every account you have, every platform you use, linked to your real identity. Everything you do on that platform, tied to your real name, permanently, in a database that can be breached, subpoenaed, or sold.
Right now you can browse, you can search, you can find the communities you need without a corporation knowing exactly who you are. This bill ends that.
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Florida passed largely the same social media ban bill in 2024. And even Florida didn’t require age verification. Their bill is still being challenged in federal court. Here in Massachusetts, we went a step further than Florida. |
The bill also requires 14- and 15-year-olds to get parental consent for social media. While that might sound simple enough for many families, 62% of LGBTQIA+ youth live in homes that don’t affirm or accept them. This bill tells those kids to go ask their parents for permission to access the online communities that serve as a lifeline. According to the Trevor Project’s 2024 survey of over 18K LGBTQ+ youth, 74% go online to find connections because relating to people in daily life is difficult, and that figure is higher at 79% for transgender and nonbinary youth. Plus there are about 8,000 kids in state custody with no parent available to consent at all. This bill locks them out.
This is why I filed my amendments which include privacy protections directing the AG to find ways to verify age without platforms collecting your identity. A trusted adult pathway so a school counselor or doctor could provide consent when a kid isn’t safe going to their parent (same standard we already use for adolescent mental health care). The House chose not to adopt them.
This is why ACLU and leading LGBTQIA+ advocacy organizations including the Trevor Project, GLAAD, Lambda Legal, and the Transgender Law Center oppose age-minimum social media bans. Their coalition letter states clearly that we are attacking the wrong problem:
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“[T]hese bills take one of the broadest and most dangerous approaches possible: cutting young people off from account-based online spaces altogether instead of addressing specific product harms, business practices, or design choices.” |
Last summer the Senate voted on a ban on cell phones in schools, yesterday the House tacked on the social media ban to the cell phone ban bill. The bill now goes to conference committee. But we’re not done with this fight. Not even close.
What you can do: Share this email. The more people who understand what actually passed, the harder it is to ignore in conference.
P.S. This is the work I do every session on every bill. Filing amendments, fighting for things that aren’t popular with leadership but matter to you and our communities, and voting no when the bill is invading our privacy and harming us. If you want to make sure this work continues, support my campaign here.