Urge Your Lawmakers to Protect Youth From Addictive Social Media

Teens spend an average of 20% of their day on social media platforms. Additionally, nearly 1 in 5Minnesota high school students are on their phones every school night in a week from 12am-5am. The bottom line is that youth are experiencing many negative effects from much of their day being spent online.  

That's why Minnesota Family Council is working to advance H.F. 4138 and its Senate companion S.F.4696, a bill with bipartisan authorship, which seeks to resolve some of these harms by doing two main things:

1. Requiring platforms to get parental consent for a user 15 years old or younger to have an account on a social media platform

2. If parental consent is given, the youth user experience must be different:

• No commercial advertising
• No addictive features like autoplay video, infinite scroll, or personal metrics such as “like” count
• All privacy settings must be turned on and preserved unless a parent gives consent to change
• Parents can set time limits on when their child uses the platform
• Parents can set time frames during the day for when their child can be on the platform

There are multiple hearings for these bills this week in House and Senate committees - please take action and ask your State Representative and State Senator to vote 'yes'!

Social media platforms are designed to addict users, regardless of age. It is hard enough for adults to battle addiction to social media due to features such as infinite scroll, autoplay video, custom feeds, and personal metrics. It is even harder for teens who have not known a world without social media.

The tech companies managing the platforms make profit from time spent on the platform, collecting data to sell to third parties for use in advertising, which in turn makes the platforms more profit. For no other product do we allow minors to sign a contract which consumes a fifth of their day.

Just recently in committee, several legislators from both sides of the political aisle added supportive comments.

Representative Cha, representing the Woodbury area, commented, "These algorithms are getting more sophisticated day by day...our children, our families don't have tools. We as a state need to protect our consumers, our children."

Representative Elkins, representing the Bloomington area, shared, "I think the idea of basically using the information that the social media companies themselves are compiling in order to target advertising to kids, as the criteria for determining age, is ingenious..."