Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday vetoed a sweeping social media bill that would have effectively banned Florida residents under the age of 16 from opening accounts on services like TikTok and Instagram, even if their parents gave them permission. .
In a post on X, Mr. DeSantis said he had vetoed the bill to ban social media for teenagers because the state legislature was going to create a different, superior bill that recognized parents’ rights. Last week, the governor suggested the measure went too far, superseding parental authority.
Shortly after the news of the veto, Paul Renner, a Republican who is the speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, said in a post on X that the new bill will be “an even stronger product to protect our children from online harm.”
While several states have recently passed laws requiring parental consent for children’s social media accounts, the Florida measure vetoed by Mr. DeSantis was designed as a more blanket ban. It would require some social networks to verify the ages of users, prevent people under 16 from signing up for accounts, and terminate accounts that a platform knew or believed belonged to underage users.
Parent groups, including the Florida Parent-Teacher Association, had urged Mr. DeSantis to veto the bill after the state legislature approved it last week.
The bill would almost certainly face constitutional challenges to young people’s rights to freely seek information. It would also likely spark online protests from teenagers who rely on social apps to communicate with friends and family, express themselves creatively, keep up with the news and follow trends in politics, sports, food and fashion .
NetChoice, a trade group that represents Meta, Snap, TikTok and other tech companies, said it welcomed Mr. DeSantis’ veto. In an email, Carl Szabo, vice president and general counsel of NetChoice, said the measure, if signed, would have “replaced parents with government and Silicon Valley.” He added that the bill’s provision requiring social media sites to verify users’ ages would have led to “data collection on a scale never before seen in the state.”
Now Florida lawmakers plan to amend a different bill that would regulate online sexual material “harmful to minors” by adding provisions to restrict certain social networks that have “addictive features,” such as endless scrolls of content.
This bill would require porn sites to verify the ages of users and block people under 18. In the past two years, Louisiana, Utah, Mississippi and other states have enacted similar laws.
In his post on X, Mr. Renner said the amended bill “will empower parents to control what their children can access online while protecting minors from the harm caused by addictive social media platforms.” .
The Supreme Court is weighing free speech challenges against other social media laws in cases that could reshape the internet. One of those cases involves a 2021 Florida statute, currently pending, that would prohibit platforms like Facebook and X from permanently banning political candidates. (NetChoice is one of two tech trade groups challenging the state laws in the Supreme Court cases.)
But Florida’s teen social media ban bill, which Mr. DeSantis vetoed on Friday, went further, representing one of the most restrictive measures yet passed by the state legislature amid a escalating national effort to crack down on services like TikTok and Instagram in the name. for the safety of children.
In the past 18 months, other states have passed new online safety rules that would allow younger people to use social media.
Utah, Arkansas, Texas and Ohio passed laws last year that would require social networks to verify users’ ages and obtain parental permission before giving accounts to children under 16 or 18. In 2022, California passed a law that would require social networks and video game apps used by minors to turn on higher privacy settings — and turn off certain features, such as autoplay videos — by default for those youngsters.
The crackdown on social media stands out as unusually bipartisan. California, a Democratic-led state, and Utah, a Republican-led state, recently enacted landmark laws that take different approaches to protecting young people online. Separately, Florida last year became the first state to require public schools to ban student cell phone use during class.
Balancing new restrictions on social media with free speech rights can be difficult. NetChoice successfully sued to stop the new laws in Arkansas, California and Ohio. Judges in those cases said child online safety laws likely violated NetChoice members’ free speech rights to distribute information as well as young people’s rights to access it.
Mr. DeSantis he said last week that he was “fighting” the Florida bill and weighing it against parents’ rights to make decisions about their children’s online activities.
“You have to strike that right balance when you’re looking at these things between policy that helps parents get to where they want to go versus policy that may be clearly an overreach for parents,” he said.
