tweeted<\/a> that the settlement \u201cmakes clear the gravity of the dangers facing our children and underscores the need for comprehensive legislation to protect them from online harms.\u201d<\/p>\n\u201cWithout further legislation, the threats facing our kids will continue,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
Duty of care<\/p>\n
Dani Pinter, chief legal officer and director of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation\u2019s law center, said that Congress should feel \u201cconfident\u201d in starting with the Senate bill to set an industry-wide standard.<\/p>\n
\u201cKOSA is like the very, very, very\u2026 lowest denominator. It\u2019s asking for the very bare minimum, a duty of care,\u201d Pinter said.<\/p>\n
The duty of care standard, which would require providers to design their platforms to prevent harms like anxiety and depression or eating disorders, is largely opposed by the technology industry and by speech groups, who say it could lead platforms to remove large swaths of speech to avoid liability.<\/p>\n
Pinter said the settlement could help clarify for lawmakers what role platforms like Facebook and Instagram play.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe the members were not sure \u2026 was it the platform\u2019s responsibility or is it sort of [an]\u2026 inevitable byproduct of the internet age?\u201d<\/p>\n
Rather than a duty of care, the Meta settlement is specific about limits to design features like push notifications, which it would stop by default at night and during school.<\/p>\n
The House and Senate legislation would both require platforms to provide safeguards, set by default to the most restrictive setting, to allow teens to limit certain features associated with \u201ccompulsive usage.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cody Venzke, an attorney in the ALCU\u2019s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, praised the settlement\u2019s requirement that teens or their parents be able to opt young users out of personalized algorithms. Both bills in Congress also include the opt-out.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose are all driven by our personal information, and if we have the ability to control our information and protect our privacy, it will really go a long way to ensuring that people\u2019s experiences online are not in the hands of Big Tech, but themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
Age verification<\/p>\n
But Venzke was largely critical of the settlement and the possibility that it could become a wish list for lawmakers focused on social media.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of our chief concerns is that the government \u2026 being the 52 attorneys general that signed on to the settlement here, is seeking to do through a settlement agreement what they could not do through legislation,\u201d Venzke said.<\/p>\n
He also noted that \u201csome policymakers have been eager to try to avoid hard age verification because of the potential privacy implications.\u201d<\/p>\n
Privacy advocates have raised concerns over age verification leading to large collections of government IDs or facial scans.<\/p>\n
Kate Ruane, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology\u2019s Free Expression Project, which advocates for speech protections online, said verification would put burdens on speech.<\/p>\n
\u201cApplying age assurance to all of their users in order to access certain speech on the platform, I think goes beyond what the Constitution could require,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Rather than requiring age verification, the House and Senate bills would apply their requirements to users that platforms \u201cknow\u201d are minors, though they differ in their knowledge standards.<\/p>\n
Several states have passed laws requiring age verification to access social media, but almost all have been enjoined from enforcing the laws on First Amendment grounds.<\/p>\n
Ruane added that courts have also found legally mandated curfews, time limits and blocking young users from seeing the like counts on their posts to be \u201cconstitutionally problematic.\u201d<\/p>\n
The settlement includes all three. Teen users would by default be blocked from Facebook and Instagram between midnight and 6 a.m. They would also be limited to two hours per day total on the platforms.<\/p>\n
Ruane also noted a provision of the settlement in which Meta agreed to continue its current content moderation policies to decide what content is appropriate for teens. She said those policies are Meta\u2019s own exercise of speech rights, but there\u2019s still room for concern.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut what\u2019s unclear is the degree to which the government is now going to have control over Meta\u2019s interpretation of its own content policy,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
When states or Congress pass laws that limit speech, users and platforms have the ability to sue for violations of their rights. With a voluntary settlement, recourse for users could be a little more complicated.<\/p>\n
Ruane said that teens would first need to demonstrate their standing to sue and then demonstrate that an injury to their speech can be traced to the government\u2019s actions through the settlement, rather than just to Meta.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Those who\u2019ve fought on Capitol Hill to rein in social media platforms see last week\u2019s settlement between Meta…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":214972,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[154],"tags":[55683,477,467,2935,96,961,18292,16637,747,618,1072,72,96201,1075,494,2110,584],"class_list":["post-214971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mark-zuckerberg","tag-brett-guthrie","tag-congress","tag-energy","tag-facebook","tag-florida","tag-house","tag-indiana","tag-kathy-castor","tag-kentucky","tag-mark-zuckerberg","tag-media","tag-national","tag-payout","tag-policy","tag-senate","tag-tech","tag-technology"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/117213254813093287","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=214971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214971\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/214972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=214971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=214971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}