social media bans – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Schools’ Social Media Ban Backfires, Jeopardizing Student Privacy

from the think-this-through dept

What if banning social media from schools actually put kids at even greater risk?

One of the more annoying things in talking about tech policy is how many people refuse to think one step ahead about how the world reacts to their policy proposals. We’ve talked about this in many contexts, but one that keeps coming up as illustrative is eating disorder content, where getting big social media companies to ban such content backfired.

That’s because the issue with eating disorder content online wasn’t a “supply side” problem (kids getting eating disorders because they stumbled upon such content online), but rather a “demand side” problem (kids with eating disorders seeking out such content). When social media sites banned that content, the kids still went looking for it, but often found it in less reputable places, and (even worse!) often in places that didn’t also try to provide resources or other community members to guide people towards recovery.

For every effort to “ban” something, we need to think about what impact it will actually have.

Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about “banning social media in schools.” And you can see why this feels like it makes sense intuitively. There are concerns about how much time kids spend on social media, what content they see, and certainly whether or not it’s relevant in schools. I mean, we already have school districts across the country filing ridiculous lawsuits against social media companies claiming that they’re melting kids’ brains.

So shouldn’t banning social media in schools be a no-brainer?

Turns out it’s a lot more complex than that. The always excellent reporter Emily Baker-White has a piece at Forbes that, among other things, is looking at what happens in schools that have banned social media. And it’s not making kids any more safe. If anything, the reverse is happening.

As with the eating disorder issue discussed above, it appears that the kids these days want their social media. And if schools try to ban social media, the kids are finding ways around those bans, often using questionable free VPNs to route around network level blocks. And those free VPNs are… pretty bad about the privacy of people using them:

It’s common practice among most school districts to restrict the internet access of their students to prevent them from browsing porn and “inappropriate” websites — from social media platforms to educational sites about racial identity, mental and reproductive health. And, increasingly, it’s common practice among many kids to use apps that bypass those restrictions so they can view those sites anyway.

Today, 1 in 4 high American school students now use workarounds to avoid schools’ internet restrictions, which, in addition to blocking websites, can also monitor their personal online lives, including their social media posts, emails, and browsing history. The most common of these workarounds is a VPN, or virtual private network, which obscures a user’s IP address from the websites they navigate to and the apps they use. But VPNs — especially the free types that teens are most likely to use — often collect sensitive personal information like location and browsing history.

Many unscrupulous free VPN companies then sell that information to data brokers. Some of them have ties to China, where the Chinese Communist Party has the authority to force any company to hand over such data. And others may contain malware that allows hackers to take control of devices on which they are installed.

Yeah. So, for all the hyped up fear about TikTok supposedly shipping all our kids’ data to China, it appears a more effective way for China to get data on American kids is to… have more American schools ban social media at school, leading them to use sketchy VPNs that suck up data and keep that data in China.

And yes, this can lead to very real risks:

Just last week, the U.S. Justice Department indicted a Chinese national for allegedly using free VPNs to gain access to 19 million IP addresses, more than 600,000 of which were in the United States, and renting them out to criminals who used them to stalk and defraud people and engage in child exploitation.

Of course, rather than recognizing that maybe banning stuff outright might lead to worse results, I’m pretty sure all this is going to lead to is the next mole to whack in this never-ending game of whac-a-mole, and politicians and schools will be looking to figure out ways to… ban free VPNs.

The article has lots of concerned quotes from policymakers… focused on the problem of VPNs. But not so much on how their own moral panics drove up the usage of these VPNs.

Still, this is yet another example where when folks like Jonathan Haidt insist there are really no downsides to his policy proposals — which include banning social media for many kids — they may not understand at all what they’re talking about.

Filed Under: china, privacy, social media, social media bans, teens, vpns

Utah Governor Absolutely Positive That Social Media Harms Kids Despite Study After Study After Study After Study After Study Saying He’s Wrong

from the do-we-believe-your-kids-or-the-study-looking-at-a-million-kids? dept

Okay, look, at this point, we need to start calling out those in positions of power who insist that it’s unquestionable that social media is harmful to kids when the don’t present any evidence at all to back up those assertions. Because as we’ve been documenting, every single study that comes out these days seems to say the exact opposite. I know that I’ve posted this a few times lately, but I’m going to do so again, because it’s important to understand just how the research consensus is shaping up these days:

That’s not to say there isn’t some sort of mental health crisis going on these days. Almost every expert believes there absolutely is. It’s just that the rush to blame it on social media is simply unsupported by the data. If anything, as the Journal of Pediatrics study shows, it’s the lack of open spaces where kids can be kids without parents watching their every move (which predates the rise of social media) that may contribute the most to the rise in mental health issues among children. Thus, the simplistic, and almost certainly wrong, argument that social media is to blame may even make the problem worse, because social media has become the one place left where kids often can just be kids without parents hovering over them.

Much of the research above — including the APA and Surgeon General’s report — also find that for many teens, social media is actually very useful and helpful for their mental health, in giving them a place to explore, figure out who they are as a person, and to interact with people beyond the narrow set of folks they might meet otherwise.

However, many of the studies also agree that for a small — but still important — group of teens, social media can exacerbate existing mental health problems, when they seek to use it alone as a kind of medication, allowing them to go deeper. And it’s quite clear that we should be looking for, promoting, and encouraging efforts to help those at risk teens, and provide better tools and resources for them.

But that’s very different from insisting (and regulating) social media as if it is universally bad for kids.

That’s all preamble to what this post is actually about. Utah Governor Spencer Cox has already made it clear he hates social media. He signed one of the first bills in the country that (unconstitutionally) tries to ban kids from social media, and mocked those who pointed out it was unconstitutional (we’ll soon find out, as Utah was just sued over that law).

So, I guess it shouldn’t be much of a surprise when he goes on TV and claims that he’s absolutely positive social media is bad for kids.

“I think it’s obvious to anyone who spends any time on social media or has kids — I have four kids. I’ve seen what’s happened to them as they’ve spent time on social media, and their friends, that this is absolutely causing these terrible increases, these hockey stick-like increases that we are seeing in anxiety, depression, and self-harm amongst our youth,” Cox, the chair of National Governors Association, said during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” that aired Sunday.

Now, if Meet the Press were actually concerned about accuracy, its host might have, you know, pointed out all the studies that say otherwise, and questioned Cox on how his anecdotal insistence can possibly stand up to all of those studies. But, that’s not how the mainstream media acts these days (and especially not those that have a vested interest in slamming the internet).

Cox went even further, though, insisting not only does it harm kids (despite the evidence to the contrary), but also that big tech knows this and doesn’t care:

“They know this is harming our kids,” Cox said of big tech companies. “They’re covering it up. They’re doing everything possible to take advantage of our kids for their own gain. And we’re not going to stand for that. And so we’re still pushing forward.”

Now, it’s always possible that some companies are doing this, but from what I’ve seen, the opposite is true. The research that has come out to date has shown companies studying this stuff in order to figure out ways to minimize the harm.

Of course, with some of the spin on things like Meta’s internal research (which, again, was to look at ways to minimize any harm), which was falsely portrayed as Meta “covering up” or “ignoring” harm caused to kids, it’s actually now going to drive these companies to do less research, and do less to stop any harms. Because politicians like Cox, and media outlets like NBC, are still going to spin any such research as “proof” of “covering it up.”

The whole thing is stupid beyond belief. The evidence shows what the evidence shows, and it’s that right now there’s a giant moral panic going on. There is no evidence that social media is inherently bad for teenagers. There is a ton of research suggesting it’s helpful for most kids, and that any interventions should be clearly targeted to the small group of at risk kids.

But, Spencer Cox is absolutely positive he’s right, apparently because of what he has observed with a tosample size of his own kids. Maybe, given all of these studies, it suggests that Cox has been spending so much time raging about culture war moral panics when he could have, you know, taught his kids how to use the internet properly.

Notably, the other guest on that episode of Meet the Press was the governor of Utah’s neighbor to the east, Governor Jared Polis from Colorado. And despite the GOP constantly insisting it’s the party of “parents’ rights” and “keeping government out” of everyone’s business, it’s Polis who argues that Cox is doing the opposite, and suggests he (correctly) thinks these are issues that parents themselves should deal with:

“I think the responsibility belongs with parents, not the government,” Polis, the vice chair of the NGA, said during the joint interview with Cox.

“I certainly agree with the diagnosis that Governor Cox did, and I have some sympathy for that approach. But I do think at the end of the day, the government can’t parent kids,” he added later.

Polis is still wrong regarding the diagnosis. The evidence pretty clearly says that. But he’s correct that this is an issue for parents and schools, not for the government to step in and effectively ban children from the very social media that many of them find so useful.

Filed Under: anxiety, colorado, depression, evidence, jared polis, mental health crisis, protect the children, social media, social media bans, social media harms, spencer cox, teens, utah

The Protecting Kids On Social Media Act Is A Terrible Alternative To KOSA

from the they're-both-bad dept

We have covered the Protecting Kids On Social Media Act a few times, when it was first introduced back in April, where we highlighted how it was both unconstitutional and the rationale behind it was not supported by any actual evidence, and then again just recently when Senator Chris Murphy (one of the bill’s co-sponsors) wrote a ridiculously confused op-ed for the NY Times, claiming it was necessary because kids these days get too many music recommendations and no longer could discover new music on their own.

Backers of the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act are floating it as an alternative to the equally bad KOSA as we head to the fall “Senators need to a grandstanding win to show their constituents they’ve done something this year” season. EFF has a useful post detailing all of the many problems with this bill, and we’re running a copy of their post here.

A new bill sponsored by Sen. Schatz (D-HI), Sen. Cotton (R-AR), Sen. Murphy (D-CT), and Sen. Britt (R-AL) would combine some of the worst elements of various social media bills aimed at “protecting the children” into a single law. It contains elements of the dangerous Kids Online Safety Act as well as several ideas pulled from state bills that have passed this year, such as Utah’s surveillance-heavy Social Media Regulations law. The authors of the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act (S.1291) may have good intentions. But ultimately, this legislation would lead to a second-class online experience for young people, mandated privacy-invasive age verification for all users, and in all likelihood, the creation of digital IDs for all U.S. citizens and residents.

The Protecting Kids on Social Media Act has five major components:

All Age Verification Systems are Dangerous — Especially Governments’

The bill would make it illegal for anyone under 13 to join a social media platform, and require parental consent for anyone between the ages of 13 and 18 to do so. Thus the bill also requires platforms to develop systems to verify the ages of all users, as well as determine the parental or guardian status for minors.

The problems inherent in age verification systems are well known. All age verification systems are identity verification systems and surveillance systems. All age verification systems also impact all users because it’s necessary to confirm the age of all people in order to keep out one select age group. This means that every social media user would be subjected to potentially privacy-invasive identity verification if they want to use social media.

As we’ve written before, research has shown that no age verification method is sufficiently reliable, covers the entire population, and protects data privacy and security. In short, every current age verification method has significant flaws. Just to point out a few of the methods and their problems: systems that require users to upload their government identification only work for people who have IDs; systems that use photo or video to guess the age of a person are inevitably inaccurate for some portion of the population; and systems that rely on third-party data, like credit agencies, have all of the problems that this third-party data often has, such as incorrect information. And of course, all systems could tie a user’s identity to the content that they wish to view.

An Age Verification Digital ID “Pilot Program” is a Slippery Slope Towards a National Digital ID

The bill’s authors may hope to bypass some of these age verification flaws by building a government-issued digital ID system for the (voluntary) use by all citizens and lawful residents of the U.S. to be able to verify their ages and parent/guardian-minor relationships on social media platforms (although this “pilot program” would likely not be completed before the age verification requirements went into effect). But this program risks falling down a slippery slope toward a national digital ID for all purposes.

Under the bill, individuals would have to upload copies of government-issued and other forms of identification, or people’s asserted identities and ages would be cross-referenced with electronic records from state DMVs, the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, state agencies responsible for vital records, “or other governmental or professional records that the Secretary [of Commerce] determines are able to reliably assist in the verification of identity information.”

EFF and other civil liberties organizations have long been critical of digital ID systems and policies that would move us toward them. While private, commercial age verification systems come with particular concerns, government versions that rely on digital IDs are also dangerous.

Mission creep is a serious concern. The intention of this ID system may only be to authorize social media access; the bill states that the pilot program credential “may not be used to establish eligibility for any government benefit or legal status.” But it’s unlikely that age and parental status verification would be its only use after its creation. Congress could easily change the law with future bills. Just look at the Social Security Number–once upon a time, it was only meant to allow Americans to participate in the federal retirement program. Even the Social Security Administration admits that the number “has come to be used as a nearly universal identifier.” Online government identity verification for accessing social media is already dystopian; who knows where the system would end up after it’s in place. Without very careful and thoughtful management and architecture, a digital ID system could lead to loss of privacy, loss of anonymous speech, and increased government surveillance.

TAKE ACTION: Stop the “Protecting Kids on Social Media Act.”

Data sharing concerns also don’t disappear because the government is involved—in fact, they may be more acute. In third-party age verification systems, a private company generally acts as a middle-man between a government and the requesting site or platform. In fact, the bill contemplates the use of “private identity verification technology providers” as part of the pilot program. The third party may collect a user’s documentation and compare that to a government database, or compare a user’s biometric information with government records. This creates the opportunity, without more protection via regulation or other means, for the third party to collect an individual’s personal data and use it for their own commercial purposes, including by selling the data or sharing it with others. The data is also at risk of being accessed by unknown and innumerable nefarious individuals and entities through a data breach.

Additionally, current and past practices of government data sharing should make anyone leery of uploading their private information to the government as well, even to an agency that theoretically already has it. All age verification systems are surveillance systems as much as they are identity verification systems. Government agencies sharing data with one another is already a danger—as of 2020, the FBI could search or request data from driver’s license and ID databases in at least 27 states. The total number of DMVs with facial recognition at the time was at least 43, with only four of those limiting data sharing entirely. That puts two-thirds of the population of the U.S. at risk of misidentification.

From a practical perspective, it’s unclear how effective or accurate such a system would be: it may sound simple to compare a person’s uploaded record with one that’s on file, but people without IDs, those whose names have changed, and anyone who has ever experienced a snafu in government document processing know better. As an example, in 2022, the IRS backed away from a decision to use a third-party identity verification system—ID.me—specifically because it forced people to use flawed facial recognition and endure four-hour waits to be verified.

Under this law, anyone age 13 to just under 18 will be required to obtain parental consent before accessing social media. We are against such laws.

First, requiring parental consent for teens’ use of these platforms would infringe on teens’ free speech, access to information, and autonomy—which also must include, for older teens, privacy vis-à-vis their parents. The Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized that young people enjoy First Amendment protections for expressing themselves and accessing information. The Court has stated, for example, that speech generally “cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them.”

Access to private spaces online for research, communication, and community are vitally important for young people. Many young people, unfortunately, encounter hostility from their parents to a variety of content—such as information about sexual health, gender, or sexual identity. (Research has shown that a large majority of young people have used the internet for health-related research.) The law would endanger that access to information for teenagers until they are 18.

Also, it is unfortunate but true that some parents do not always have their childrens’ best interest in mind, or are unable to make appropriate decisions for them. Those young people—some of whom are old enough to work a full-time job, drive a car, and apply to college entirely on their own—will not be able to use some of the largest and most popular online websites without parental consent. It goes without saying that those most harmed by this law will be those who see social media as a lifeline—those with fewer resources to begin with.

Second, Congress should not remove parents’ ability to decide for themselves what they will allow their child to access online, the vast majority of which is legal speech, by assuming that parents don’t want their children to use social media without parental consent. Parents should be allowed to make that decision without governmental interference, by using already available filtering tools.

Worse, not only would minors between 13 and 18 be required to gain parental consent, but under this law anyone below the age of 13 would be banned from social media entirely—even if their parents approve. This outright ban is a massive overreach that goes far beyond current laws like COPPA, which prohibits social media and other online companies from collecting data for commercial purposes from children under age 13 without parental consent. Under this law, children would be banned even from social media platforms that are designed specifically for kids—again, whether parents approve of its use or not.

Third, verification mechanisms will invariably stumble when dealing with a variety of non-traditional families. It’s unclear how age verification and parent/guardian consent will function for children with different last names than a parent, those in foster care, and those whose guardians are other relatives. Children who, unfortunately, don’t have an obvious caregiver to act as a parent in the first place will likely be forced off these important spaces entirely. Though it’s not explicit in the bill, if a person violates the law by misrepresenting their identity—say, if you’re a minor pretending to be a parent because you don’t have an obvious caregiver—you could be charged with a federal criminal offense, a charge that is otherwise rare against children. The end result of these complex requirements are is that a huge number of young people—particularly the most vulnerable—would likely lose access to social media platforms, which can play a critical role for young people in accessing resources and support in a wide variety of circumstances.

The Protecting Kids on Social Media Act is a Bad Alternative

While this bill is technically an alternative to the Kids Online Safety Act, it is a bad one. As we’ve said before, no one should have to hand over their driver’s license just to access free websites. Having to hand over that driver’s license to a government program doesn’t solve the problem. The world envisioned by the authors of this bill is one where everyone has less power to speak out and access information online, and we must oppose it.

TAKE ACTION: Stop the “Protecting Kids on Social Media Act.”

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

Filed Under: age gating, age verification, brian schatz, chris murphy, digital id, katie britt, kids' rights, kosa, protect the children, protecting kids on social media, social media, social media bans, tom cotton

Utah’s Governor Live Streams Signing Of Unconstitutional Social Media Bill On All The Social Media Platforms He Hates

from the utah-gets-it-wrong-again dept

On Thursday, Utah’s governor Spencer Cox officially signed into law two bills that seek to “protect the children” on the internet. He did with a signing ceremony that he chose to stream on nearly every social media platform, despite his assertions that those platforms are problematic.

Yes, yes, watch live on the platforms that your children shouldn’t use, lest they learn that their governor eagerly supports blatantly unconstitutional bills that suppress the free speech rights of children, destroy their privacy, and put them at risk… all while claiming he’s doing this to “protect them.”

The decision to sign the bills is not a surprise. We talked about the bills earlier this year, noting just how obviously unconstitutional they are, and how much damage they’d do to the internet.

The bills (SB 152 and HB 311) do a few different things, each of which is problematic in its own special way:

Leaving aside the fun of banning data collection while requiring age verification (which requires data collection), the bill is just pure 100% nanny state nonsense.

Children have their own 1st Amendment rights, which this bill ignores. It assumes that teenagers have a good relationship with their parents. Hell, it assumes that parents have any relationship with their kids, and makes no provisions for how to handle cases where parents are not around, have different names, are divorced, etc.

Also, the lack of data collection combined with the requirement to prevent addiction creates a uniquely ridiculous scenario in which these companies have to make sure they don’t provide features and information that might lead to “addiction,” but can’t monitor what’s happening on those accounts, because it might violate the data collection restrictions.

As far as I can tell, the bill both requires social media companies to hide dangerous or problematic content from children, and blocks their ability to do so.

Because Utah’s politicians have no clue what they’re doing.

Meanwhile, Governor Cox seems almost gleeful about just how unconstitutional his bill is. After 1st Amendment/free speech lawyer Ari Cohn laid out the many Constitutional problems with the bill, Cox responded with a Twitter fight, by saying he looked forward to seeing Cohn in court.

Perhaps Utah’s legislature should be banning itself from social media, given how badly they misunderstand basically everything about it. They could use that time to study up on the 1st Amendment, because they need to. Badly.

Anyway, in a de facto admission that these laws are half-baked at best, they don’t go into effect until March of 2024, a full year, as they seem to recognize that to avoid getting completely pantsed in court, they might need to amend them. But they are going to get pantsed in court, because I can almost guarantee there will be constitutional challenges to these bills before long.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, age verification, children, parental permission, parents, privacy, protect the children, social media, social media bans, spencer cox, utah