New Florida legislation to bar minors from social media would destroy privacy in and out of the state

Legislation to verify the age of social media users is becoming popular, but all attempts have faced core privacy, cybersecurity, technological, and constitutional problems. Florida HB 1 and its companion SB 1788 are no different, and they also fully remove the choice of parents to determine what is best for their children.

This legislation would prohibit minors under the age of 16 from using social media. If enacted, parental consent for their children to use social media would be meaningless. But parents are better suited than the government to decide what level of online engagement their kids are mature enough to handle. For instance, one of the authors of this piece used social media as a teenager to kickstart her career and find information about chronic illnesses—all with parental consent.

The legislation also faces massive cybersecurity and privacy concerns. Social media platforms would be required to employ an outside company to verify users’ age, whether by checking their ID or some other means. Face scanning is another common commercial method for age verification that creates serious privacy concerns. Some companies employ more than one of these methods to improve age-verification accuracy. While the technology to verify age while protecting privacy has improved, it remains imperfect and intrusive.

Although the bill would mandate that all of this personally identifying information (PII) is not retained after use for age verification, neither users nor the government may be sure that is the case. And giving up such personal information to every social media site is a massive cybersecurity risk. Private companies are hacked constantly, and Americans face growing battles to protect their private information. Hackers can also intercept this information in certain cases. TikTok would be included in this bill, and many people are concerned with their data practices and ties to the Chinese government. Sending them everyone’s ID and face scan would not be wise if these concerns end up being true.

Parents themselves may be less than thrilled with an age-verification mandate in practice. HB 1 allows parents to request that companies remove existing social media accounts for kids under age 16, but this would obviously require them to submit some sort of identification documents that verify they are, in fact, the parent or legal guardian of the minor in question. A poll run by Utah State University’s Center for Growth and Opportunity found that nearly two-thirds of parents were uncomfortable sharing their identifying documents with social media sites, and over 70 percent objected to their children having to submit personal information like biometric scans to verify their age online.

Finally, these proposals are unconstitutional. The First Amendment has long been understood to protect both anonymous speech and ease of access to free expression. Requiring that PII be provided to even post on a given site may chill users’ speech for fear of lack of anonymity. When laws cause people to quiet their own speech, they implicate the First Amendment as well. Children also have First Amendment rights (within limits), and preventing their speech or access to speech has constitutional implications too.

That doesn’t automatically mean these laws would violate the Constitution, but because they’re not narrowly tailored—meaning they apply to all speech rather than just unlawful or harmful speech—they don’t have much of a chance. These constitutional concerns have already caused a similar law passed in Arkansas last year to be halted in court, likely to be struck down.

The tools necessary for parents to restrict and monitor minors’ access to social media platforms are widely available—often free and built into our mobile devices, apps, and platforms. Rather than banning kids from social media and subjecting all of us to intrusive age verification, the key to protecting children from the real dangers that lurk online is to equip parents to wield the power they already possess.