Arizona Representative Has The Solution To Cyberbullying: Require Social Media To Wave A Magic Wand And Make It Go Away

Look, I’m getting exhausted trying to follow every attempt around the country (coming from both Democrats and Republicans) to pass obviously, blatantly, unconstitutional bills to “protect the children on social media,” that make it clear that their authors have no idea (1) how the 1st Amendment works, (2) how social media works, or (3) how children work.

Here’s another to throw on the increasingly long list of ridiculousness. It comes from Arizona State Rep. Seth Blattman, who is still in his first term. The bill is HB 2858 and it is a hodgepodge of ideas, many of which have already been found by courts around the country to be unconstitutional. Like all of these silly bills, this one has a name that makes it sound like pointing out its problems means you hate kids. It’s the “Protecting Children on Social Media Act.” Because who’s against that?

It appears modeled on a federal bill of the same name, which has so many problems we dedicated two separate posts to detailing all of them.

I don’t have time to go through all of the many different requirements of the bill, so we’ll just hit a few of the sillier ones. It effectively requires age verification, because it puts very different rules on how kids and adults can be treated. This has already been found to be unconstitutional over and over and over and over again, and at this point, it’s legislative malpractice for elected officials to keep introducing it.

Second, it puts clear restrictions on speech that kids can access, which has also been found unconstitutional. Kids have First Amendment rights of their own, even if legislators want to ignore that.

It also tries again with a “parental consent” model requiring sites to get consent for kids to use social media. You know, like Ohio’s parental consent bill that was just found to be unconstitutional. Once again, this is the kind of thing that only a completely out of touch elected official introduces. It, incorrectly, assumes a family model where kids have a good relationship with their parents (or a relationship at all). It assumes that an LGBTQ kid can openly talk to their parents about why they need to access a certain online community.

The bill also includes some real whoppers, like imagining that if you just tell social media to filter out “cyberbullying” that will magically help. Seriously:

This is just so disconnected from reality. First off, pretty much every platform already has a massive effort within their trust & safety teams to deal with bullying, but it isn’t done by just waving a magic wand and creating a filter. Bullying takes all forms, and pre-dates social media by a few millennia. If you filter out certain words, kids will use different words. Or they’ll use forms of bullying that you can’t filter out. Just as an example, in a recent conversation I observed about cyberbullying, kids explained how one form of cyberbullying was just posting photos of other friends hanging out together, to make someone feel jealous that they weren’t invited.

How do you filter that?

Bullying is a problem, but thinking that you fix it with a magic mandated “filter” is just disconnected from reality.

Another problem with the bill: it says sites need to prevent those over 18 from messaging those under 18. And if you don’t think through anything, you can understand why this might have sounded like a good idea to someone who thinks the only reason that someone over 18 might talk to someone under 18 is for nefarious purposes or “grooming” or whatever.

But there are plenty of legitimate reasons why someone over 18 might want to message those under 18. Most obviously: parents texting their kids. Or, as happens quite frequently these days: grandparents texting their kids. Or teachers texting their students.

But, also, under this law, high school seniors would have this bizarre situation in which on their 18th birthday, they’d no longer be able to message their friends who were still 17. Because, apparently, Blattman thinks kids all turn 18 on the same day?

This isn’t a serious bill. It’s the kind of bill someone proposes when they want to campaign on “I’m trying to protect your kids, so I will propose a very bad bill that won’t protect your kids, but which says it will so I can make these claims.”

But, seriously, can people start electing people who write bills that are based in reality?