1. United States
2. Calif.
3. Letter

Hello, my name is Maria Page and I am a constituent of San Clemente, CA. I’m writing to urge you to vote NO on SB976, the Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act. Although this bill intends to protect the mental and emotional health of California’s youth, the method this bill intends to use would be counterproductive to that goal or even endanger them further. One of this bill's primary measures includes requiring verifiable parental consent to allow websites to display “addictive” feeds to minor users. However, the ways to “verify” the identity and age of a responsible parent are often invasive and dangerous, especially since these methods have proven repeatedly to be vulnerable to data breaches that can leak sensitive information to bad actors— such as this year's largest discovered breach of AU10TIX, which supplies age verification to companies like TikTok, X, Uber, LinkedIn, Paypal, and many others. Determining whether age verification is necessary at all would also require collecting even more data on minors and non-minors alike to determine who would require these measures. This bill would require having control over someone's access to a website or application based on the time of day in order to “reasonably determine” the user is not a minor. The vagueness of this bill's text overall is dangerous as well. The broad-spectrum definition it gives of “addictive internet-based service or application” could cause an unintended censorship effect where minors and adults alike could be blocked from accessing information purely because some part of a website or application uses a “feed” which could arguably fit the bill's definition of “addictive.” Many news sites and non social media orgs have “feeds” such as RSS feeds which are an efficient and accessible way to bring information democratically to users. With all of this in mind, I urge the Assembly member to vote in opposition of this measure to protect the privacy and safety of California's minors and adults alike. Vote NO on SB 976.