MASSACHUSETTS LAWMAKERS have arrived at a clear consensus that state government needs to curtail the ever-present eyes and addictive features of Big Tech. Now they just need to tackle the not-so-small task of untangling a web of intersecting proposals scattered across multiple bills.
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Following the latest vote last week, the House and Senate now have multiple proposals in play that would craft new limits on the collection and transmission of personal data or change the way young users interact with social media platforms.
One of the first tricky decisions legislative negotiators need to make is whether to keep any regulations designed to protect minors on apps such as Instagram tied to a ban on cell phone use during the school day, as the House proposed, or to divorce the two topics and tackle them with standalone bills, as the Senate did.
Legislative negotiators started meeting in June to hash out a final, compromise version of the cell phone ban, about a month before the Senate unveiled and approved a separate social media bill.Asked whether the existing conference committee would stick to just phones in schools or expand its scope to include social media, Senate Majority Leader Cynthia Creem replied, “I think we’re all curious.”
The Senate advancing its own social media bill, Creem said, provided a chance for every senator to take a recorded stance regardless of whatever final compromises emerge.
“We wanted to give all of our members an opportunity to vote on social media,” she told reporters earlier this month. “For the conference committee to take it up without us ever having worked on it wouldn’t really be right.”
Senators voted 38-2 to approve the bill. Sen. Peter Durant, a Spencer Republican and one of the two no votes, said he worried it did not sufficiently balance protections for young users with parental rights.
Gov. Maura Healey got into the debate earlier in the year, too, tucking language into a spending bill that would have required social media platforms to offer less-addictive settings by default for young users.
There are some big policy differences between the House- and Senate-approved approaches that will provide ample fodder for negotiators. The House’s bill would ban anyone younger than 14 from using social media altogether, while the Senate’s did not include any age-related prohibition. Instead, it would require some potentially addictive features like infinite scroll to be turned off by default for younger users and allow adults to opt out of those features as well.
“We want to be honest about human behavior. We want to be honest about the realities of technological advancement, and the reality that young people and people of all ages find connection online,” Sen. Julian Cyr, one of the proposal’s architects, told reporters while unveiling the bill. “We don’t want to pass a law with a blanket ban that will be toothless for anyone who has knowledge of how a VPN works.”
Then there’s data privacy. The House and Senate each also approved legislation that would crack down on companies — including social media platforms like Meta — collecting and transmitting sensitive data from all users, not just minors.
Those bills are also already before a conference committee for negotiations. It’s not clear whether legislative leaders want to land on consensus about their data-privacy proposals before finalizing social media reforms, or if the order of operations will be entirely up to which negotiators achieve a breakthrough first.
Kade Crockford, director of technology and justice programs at the ACLU of Massachusetts, said that although reforms to data privacy and social media are “operating on separate tracks,” one would impact the other.
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“A strong, enforceable data privacy bill is going to have trickle-down impacts to ameliorate some of the issues that drove lawmakers to propose these social media bills,” Crockford said in an interview. “But it’s a much bigger piece of legislation that really is aimed at transforming, broadly speaking, how companies — not just social media companies, but all manner of companies — are collecting, processing, even selling our personal information in the 21st century.”
Because those proposals reach beyond social media to affect how a whole host of companies operate online, the pushback has come from a wider front. A coalition of local business groups including the Associated Industries of Massachusetts and the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce last year voiced concerns about the Senate approach to data privacy, arguing that customer data plays a key role in targeted marketing. An AIM survey of member companies found nearly six in 10 worry their businesses would be negatively impacted by state restrictions on data collection.
Another statewide officeholder could play a particularly key role in executing any new restrictions: Attorney General Andrea Campbell. Both the data privacy bills and social media bills assign various implementation and enforcement duties to the attorney general’s office, in some cases without prescribing many particulars.
The Senate bill, for example, tasks the AG with crafting regulations that would govern how social-media users could verify their ages. Under an amendment from Sen.Cindy Friendman that the chamber adopted, companies must offer at least one age-verification method that does not hinge on use of a government ID or biometric data.
Friedman told CommonWealth Beacon that a “signal” system, in which device operating systems securely store a user’s age range and send that information to other apps as confirmation, could prove fruitful in Massachusetts.
“It exists, and the AG feels that it is ready to use,” Friedman said.
Crockford is less convinced about the technological prospects, arguing that biometric data in particular is “not reliable” at proving someone’s age.
“It’s one of the outstanding, unanswered questions about this process that the attorney general is going to have to figure out: Is there technology available that will address the concerns that lawmakers have about young people’s access to certain features on social media that is reliable, that does not require the stripping of a person’s anonymity, and that doesn’t inappropriately compromise a person’s privacy?” Crockford said. “I’m not aware that that anyone has answered that question yet.”
Campbell’s office did not make clear if the AG is, in fact, a backer of such technology. Asked about the specifics of Friedman’s suggestion, a Campbell aide said only that the attorney general’s office supports protecting young social media users and is working with the Legislature on possible approaches.
The attorney general herself has argued that lawmakers often give her team new responsibilities without first soliciting their input. In May, during her appearance at a Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce event, chamber chief Jim Rooney asked Campbell about wide-reaching data privacy legislation.
“Your office will have a large role in implementation, so I’m assuming that your office is at the table as the Legislature considers this,” Rooney said.
“You assume,” Campbell replied. “I’m smiling because folks will just file bills and say, ‘Who’s going to enforce it?’ ‘The AG, of course,’ and we’re never asked, we’re never engaged.”
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