New Utah Law Restricts Social Media Usage By Minors

The Salt Lake Tribune reports:

Utah is the first state in the nation to begin restricting how minors can use social media apps. Gov. Spencer Cox signed a pair of bills on Thursday that will regulate when and how minors in Utah can use of social media and aims to stop those companies from designing addicting features.

Those new laws will likely lead to a protracted legal fight with the tech industry over privacy and First Amendment issues.

Those rules include: Age verification for all users before they can open or maintain an account. Permission from parents before a minor can open a social media account. Restricts minors’ use of social media from 10:30 pm to 6:30 am unless a parent changes those settings.

Read the full article.

The bill also requires that parents be given access to the private messages of their children. Platforms must also ensure that minors are unable to bypass the restrictions. Yeah, good luck with that.

We’re no longer willing to let social media companies continue to harm the mental health of our youth. Today we signed two key bills in our fight against social media companies into law:

➡️ SB152 requires social media companies to verify that users in https://t.co/GVAcSi9zHx… pic.twitter.com/M1Kbya1xQi

— Utah Gov. Spencer J. Cox (@GovCox) March 23, 2023