Legislation that would have allowed California officials to sue social media for promoting “addictive” content to minors was quashed by the state Senate.
The legislation, which would have allowed the state attorney general, district attorneys, and parents to hold social media companies liable for features they consider addictive, was killed in the state Senate’s appropriations committee on Thursday. Several social media companies, including Meta, Twitter, and Snap, supported the end of this legislation.
“I am extremely disappointed,” said California Assemblyman Jordan Cunningham, one of the bill’s sponsors. “The bill’s death means a handful of social media companies will be able to continue their experiment on millions of California kids, causing generational harm.”
FACEBOOK PARENT COMPANY PUSHES BACK ON TWO CYBER-ESPIONAGE GROUPS
While the legislation had passed the California Assembly in May and had been sent to one of the state Senate committees, Appropriations Committee leader Anthony Portantino “made the unilateral decision” to halt the bill in its tracks, according to Cunningham. The committee used a process known as the “suspense file,” according to the Wall Street Journal. This legislative approach is a tool that lawmakers can use to stop legislation by alleging that it will have a fiscal impact on the state.
The bill was introduced on March 15 by state Assembly members Buffy Wicks, a Democrat, and Cunningham, a Republican. The bill was filed with the hope of forcing tech companies to “bear some of the social costs that they put on all of our children,” Cunningham said, according to the Wall Street Journal.
If the bill had passed into law, social platforms could be considered liable if they “developed, designed, implemented, or maintained features that were known, or should have been known, by the platform to be addictive to child users,” according to the bill’s text.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The bill also adopts a vague definition of addiction. If California had passed the bill, then a social media company can be held liable for “addiction” if it “indicates preoccupation or obsession with, or withdrawal or difficulty to cease or reduce use of, a social media platform despite the user’s desire to cease or reduce that use” and if it “causes or contributes to physical, mental, emotional, developmental, or material harms to the user.”
It is unclear if California legislators will attempt to pass a similar bill.
