Federal bill could gut state protections for kids on social media

37% of Black youth say they are on social media “almost constantly,” and 47% say they frequently encounter racist comments on those platforms.

Minnesota is no exception to these statistics, taken from a 2024 survey by Common Sense Media.

“Social media companies have designed their products to be harmful and addictive, especially to children,” Minnesota state Sen. Erin K. Maye Quade said. “They know the harm that they’re causing, and they’ve decided to double down on the tactics that bring about that harm.”

When Instagram, owned by Meta, identifies that a teenage girl has posted a selfie and then deleted it, the algorithm is trained to push beauty products, disordered eating content and ads for GLP-1 weight loss drugs onto her feed. The company produces insecurity, and then profits off of it.

This is just one of the aggressive tactics that pushed Maye Quade to author HF 4138, also known as the Stop the Harms from Addictive Social Media Act. The bipartisan act, signed into law in May, requires age verification and parental consent for children under 15 to access social media, limits addictive design features, requires account settings to default to maximum privacy and limits targeted advertising to minors.

But if the federal Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act, known as the KIDS Act, passes, state legislators like Maye Quade won’t be able to impose those state-level protections.

“What the KIDS Act is intending to do is try to say, ‘Oh, don’t worry, the federal government will do something,’ but what it would actually do is override much stronger state-level protections that have been implemented with mealy-mouthed nothing,” Maye Quade said. “Big tech companies know that they’re harming kids and they know that people are concerned about it. This is their attempt to try and both get what they want, which is no regulation, and make it seem like there is going to be safety.”

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison also opposes the bill.

“The deck is stacked against young people online,” Ellison said in a statement. “Some of the world’s most gifted designers are building apps, programs, and websites to addict young people, and those young people need our help.”

Proponents of the KIDS Act argue that one federal framework would create consistent safety standards nationwide. However, federal preemption means the act limits states’ ability to enact separate requirements, and any less-lenient laws addressing online harms to children would be overwritten. A letter opposing the act was signed by 44 attorneys general and sent to Congressional leaders.

Ebony Eromobor, a therapist and owner of Village Support, a mental health practice that specializes in culturally responsive therapy, sees social media magnify what young people already experience.

“For youth who are struggling with, let’s say, self-esteem, belonging, or other mental health concerns, it can often intensify those challenges due to what they’re exposed to because there aren’t guardrails on social media,” Eromobor said.

For young people of color, that can mean encountering racist vitriol and threats online. According to the same Common Sense Media survey, 48% of Black youth say they have taken breaks from social media due to harassment.

Malicious adults can use social media to access and harass young people. Hateful language attracts engagement, positive and negative, which spreads the content further.

“The algorithms of social media are designed to keep us online as long as possible, and what keeps people on social media is outrage, anger and fear,” Maye Quade said. “One way that social media impacts youth of color is that it drives content about Black and brown communities to make people angry, and that endangers their lives.”

Eromobor sees growing rates of ADHD and behavioral issues that she connects to the “super stimuli” in social media that overwhelm kids’ brains.

“Think about youth and their developing brains,” she said. “And they’re not only consuming it throughout the day, they’re consuming it at night.”

Interruptions to sleep prevent the brain from growing and healing, which is specially critical for young people, for whom sleep is integral to growth and development. 49% of young people already say they can’t control their use of social media, and 46% say they feel it has impacted their attention span.

Operation Metro Surge showed this impact in real time, with an outsized effect on Minnesotan youth, particularly youth of color. The federal assault on the Twin Cities was heavily broadcast on social media, where news was distributed constantly via users’ feeds.

“I know a lot of youth who were struggling with not being able to focus on anything because of constant anxiety and the constant updates,” Eromobor said. “They felt they had to stay glued to their phone and glued to social media to stay up to date.”

Social media allowed information to spread easily, but had no fact-checking or censoring of violent imagery. “There have been very public murders that have been live-streamed, and people can see them just by being online, even if they’re not searching it out,” Maye Quade said.

Ellison supports the Kids Online Safety Act, known as KOSA, as an alternative. It includes a duty-of-care provision that requires online platforms to act in the best interests of minors and allows states to enforce their own, stricter legislation.

Maye Quade thinks regulating youth technology is straightforward. “We have consumer protections for cribs and mattresses and car seats. Those are absolutely regulations we can apply to tech companies: it has to be safe for a child to be on it.”

Anya Armentrout is a freelance journalist, a student at Macalester College and a contributing writer for the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder.