The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children blasted Meta in a response: “It is pleasing to see that regulation of social media is already focusing the minds of top tech executives on protecting children. Laws that hold different apps to different standards in different states will leave teens with inconsistent online experiences.” The company maintains it has supported legislation on “clear industry standards” on parental supervision and age verification since 2021. That said, we’re concerned about what is amounting to a patchwork of divergent laws across a variety of US states.

Neither Google nor Apple provided statements by press time.Īfter the publication of this story, Meta issued a statement: “We’ve always said that we support internet regulation, particularly when it comes to young people. The letter asks for the documents by 30 November. Utah, for example, began requiring the parents of people under 18 to consent to using TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and other apps in March to preserve, in the words of the state governor, Spencer Cox, “the mental health of our youth”.ĭavis’s call was published the same day that the Senate judiciary committee sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, requesting that he “provide documents related to senior executives’ knowledge of the mental and physical health harms associated with its platforms, including Facebook and Instagram”. Any legislation regulating children’s app downloads would target both.ĭavis argued that there was “a better way” to govern smartphone and internet usage than laws that require a parental thumbs-up for a child to create a social media account. Meta’s blogpost does not mention Google or Apple by name, but the two operate the biggest smartphone app stores in the world, the Play Store for Android and the App Store of iPhone’s iOS. Children under 13 are already prohibited from creating accounts and downloading apps without a parent’s go-ahead. Congress Can Make It Easier, Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety, called for federal legislation that would mandate app stores to notify parents whenever a child between the age of 13 and 16 downloads an app, and would solicit the parents’ approval.

In a blogpost titled Parenting in a Digital World Is Hard.

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