This week, Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed two bills into effect Thursday that prevent children from using social media from 10:30 P.M. to 6:30 A.M., require age verification to join social media, and offer the opportunity to sue companies on behalf of children who can claim they were harmed by social media.
Those under 18 will have special rules for their online activity, including curfews; more privacy from advertisers but less from their parents or guardians; and the ability to sue platforms over certain harms, including addiction.
While it raises many free press and privacy issues, such laws can be good, or the beginning of a slippery slope for freedom.
This is nothing new. The slippery slope launched 43 years ago (1980) when the first dedicated online chat service that was widely available to the public, debuted as the CompuServe CB Simulator. Chat rooms gained mainstream popularity with AOL and my former employer, Prodigy.
Originally designed as a new media way to encourage communication, it quickly morphed into a world of sex chat rooms, making it easier for predators to go after young children and for the simple spoken word, to morph into bullying, nameless and faceless.
Now, a great deal of blame has to be shared by parents who abdicated parental supervision and used the internet as a babysitter. This was also an issue back at MTV, where parents chose to plop their kids in front of a TV, unattended and unfettered. As a spokesperson for MTV, we had a great deal of pushback from legislators and religious groups, condemning the sex and violence they saw in videos, even going so far as setting up the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) which included ‘Tipper’ Gore, to require labeling of albums and songs. Many of those they objected to, never aired on the channel and the company had a standards and practices division to monitor. Sure, times had changed and there was a new generation influenced by MTV and while liberal in many ways, also took the responsibility seriously. There are many who would argue. So be it. I sleep well at night. It was not a free for all.
But the internet and other social media, over the decades, removed many of the safeguards and opened it up to the degradation of women, minorities, religions, and people based on their views and beliefs and often these attacks come from various world religions. It morphed into chaos, suicide, and violence and while many companies tried to reign in the hate and other forms of harm, they failed.
Now, everyone knows I am a fervent Facebooker. If I haven’t posted in two hours, people text me to see if I’m ok. And I have been called out on some of my posts and have always apologized if someone was offended or if my characterization of someone or some group was wrong. Yeah, there are some of you who will scroll back to 2007 and yell ‘bullshit.’
But we have seen such a rise in online terror, it needs to be addressed, if not by parents, then by law. Doesn’t sound very New York liberal of me, does it? Well, when I decided to be an Uber driver back in 2017 to get out of the house, I had many early morning school pickups because parents were ‘in the bag,’ or too ‘busy’ to take their own kids to school. They called them-and still do-helicopter parents, who hover above their kids’ lives and social interactions, barely landing on the ground.
Most-and I mean most of the parents I know are proud of their kids, the values they imparted, the wisdom, and the guidance. Acceptance of people comes from the home, not from the playground or schoolyard, or sports field where the behavior is not too closely monitored. Teachers these days are threatened with imposing upon free speech or open to lawsuits for confronting the ‘bad seeds.’
Back to social media and the law. Kara Alaimo, a Fairleigh Dickinson Assistant Professor of Communication, wrote an opinion piece for CNN on ‘Women and Social Media.’ She’s not too far off base. She nailed it with this comment: “.Despite these very real privacy concerns, it’s simply too dangerous for parents not to know what their kids are seeing on social media. Just as parents and caregivers supervise our children offline and don’t allow them to go to bars or strip clubs, we must ensure they don’t end up in unsafe spaces on social media.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/27/opinions/utah-social-media-laws-protect-kids-alaimo/index.html
Slippery slope indeed. The door to the barn opened 43 years ago and it cannot-nor should in many instances, be closed. But just as gun violence has become an everyday issue with young people and teens, so has social media. Where do we go? Where do we start? Where do we end?
The ACLU may ask me to give up my membership but Winston Churchill is falsely credited (but it sounds good) with saying: “If you’re not a liberal at 20, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative at 60, you have no brain.”
Not sure if it’s conservatism as much as it is creating a world that is safe for all.
True but many parents have failed to step up
I don’t think we’ll ever have a world that’s safe for all, although it’s a goal with striving for. It’s never been safe, although it always seems to be less and less so. Our parents and grandparents thought we were in decline, and I work hard avoiding asking myself “where are we going and what are we doing in this handbasket?”
My daughters discovered IRC when we kept them off AOL. Fortunately, I was a tech savvy guy and my wife watched them like a mama hawk. We encourage them to be vigilant with our grandkids. It would be good for the government to legislate some guardrails, but parental responsibility has no replacement. We do what we can; the rest is in God’s hands.