Ella Adams
State House News Service
The Senate is poised Thursday to take up youth social media regulations that dramatically differ from those the House passed months ago. And as the topic draws state, national and international attention, digital rights advocates in Massachusetts are cautiously getting on board.
The Senate Ways and Means redraft (S 3164) of a Sen. Cindy Creem bill would require all social media platforms to adopt "default" settings for minors that disable things including addictive feeds, "autoplay" and "infinite scroll," and that turn off notifications between midnight and 6 a.m. Those default settings would also apply to users who decline to go through an age assurance process; a user could only turn them off by going through that process and proving they aren't a minor.
"Why are we OK with this? We do not believe there is any safe or practical way for platforms to verify the age of every user, right? But we also don't think that anyone needs autoplay, infinite scroll, or surveillance-driven algorithmic recommendations to participate in society, or to speak out in a meaningful way, or to access the benefits of social media," digital advocacy group Fight for the Future Director Evan Greer told the News Service.
Senators on Thursday will be adding to a conversation that began in Massachusetts in April when the House embedded youth social media regulations into a bill (H 5366) that also would ban student cellphone use in schools. The House proposal would ban kids under 14 from using social media platforms and require that platforms obtain parental consent for users aged 14 and 15. The branches will have to find compromise for anything to become law.
Groups like Fight for the Future, a coalition of more than 50 organizations that has been meeting with lawmakers, Gov. Maura Healey and others, pushed back against age verification provisions within the House's bill, which the group said would require every user to provide a government ID or biometric data to verify their exact age.
Creem said last week that Senate leadership's bill was crafted not to infringe upon users' First Amendment rights or limit young people's ability to find community online, concerns that were among the issues advocates and progressive Democrats raised about the House's ban.
"There is a national debate across the country happening about how to address the harms of big tech social media platforms that are surveillance-driven business model[s], and balance that with respecting the rights of young people and adults to use the internet privately, anonymously and be able to access speech," Greer said. "Does the Senate completely nail it? No. There's still work to be done, and we will be very vigilant."
The bill expected to pass the Senate relies heavily on the attorney general, who would have to create implementation regulations by March 1, 2027 and "promulgate regulations identifying commercially reasonable and technically feasible methods for covered operators to determine if a user is a covered minor." Those regulations must "set forth multiple methods" for platforms to determine if a user is a minor, including but not limited to "at least 1 method that either does not rely solely on government issued identification or that allows a user to maintain anonymity."
A Sen. Cindy Friedman amendment (#9) would replace that section of the bill with one that dictates at least one method of age assurance does not "rely on government issued identification or a user’s biometric data" while still allowing users to remain anonymous. Friedman's is one amendment among 32 filed to the Ways and Means Committee bill, which address topics including age verification tactics, private right of action and reporting requirements.
The bill advancing in the Senate is "fundamentally" different from the House approach, Greer said, "in the sense that you can create an account, post, go viral, read content without ever having to go through an age assurance process."
"That's really kind of the core of the concern about these types of bills from human rights, civil liberties and free expression groups, is preserving the right of people to speak out, criticize their government, organize a protest or a party or a concert, while protecting their own privacy in the process," Greer added.
The Senate Ways and Means Committee bill also creates a category of protections that platforms must implement if they have "actual knowledge that a user is a minor," including disabling the visibility and sharing of a minor's precise geolocation data, limiting minors' direct messaging and content sharing to their connected accounts, and limiting the visibility of posts and other content on minors' pages to their connected accounts.
The default setting for a minor's geolocation data could only be changed by the minor with a parent or guardian's consent, but minors could change the settings for sending or receiving messages and sharing content on their own.
A Larger Conversation
House Ways and Means Chair Aaron Michlewitz told reporters in the spring that his chamber's proposal is "probably more in line with, closer to, what Florida has done," and dubbed it "among the most restrictive in the country." The California State Assembly in late May also unanimously passed a bill that would prohibit social media platforms utilizing addictive feeds from allowing kids under the age of 16 to hold accounts.
A Pew Research Center survey conducted from May 26 to June 1 found that 56% of Americans support a social media ban for people under 16 years of age, while 23% are "not sure" and 21% are in opposition. The survey also found that support for such a ban spans demographic and partisan groups.
Aside from an all-out ban, support for parental consent, age verification and time limits on social media platforms has increased since 2023, the Pew survey suggested. The data came from Pew's American Trends Panel of randomly selected U.S. adults, in which 9,750 panelists responded out of 11,184 who were sampled.
The U.S. surgeon general included in an advisory about social media and youth mental health that adolescents who spent more than three hours each day on social media faced twice the risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes. Lawmakers across the country have birthed social media age verification proposals, deeming them necessary to protect youth from those impacts, though the industry has challenged a number of them, often on First Amendment grounds.
After years of congressional debate on how to address kids' internet safety, the U.S. House on June 29 passed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act by a vote of 267-117, POLITICO reported. The package, which was fast-tracked through the House, includes provisions addressing age verification, AI chatbots, data protections and more, per The Hill. The bill now heads to the U.S. Senate, where it has already met pushback in a chamber that has its own landmark Kids Online Safety Act.
Major social media litigation has played out in court this year, too, including when a Los Angeles jury in March found Meta and YouTube liable for harms to youth using their platforms in a landmark social media addiction trial. A New Mexico jury also recently found that Meta violated state law by knowingly harming children's mental health.
In April, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that Attorney General Andrea Campbell's 2023 complaint against Meta could proceed. The suit alleges that Meta purposefully designed its apps to addict young users and is publicly deceptive about the danger of overuse to young people. The SJC refused to throw out the suit after Meta attempted to get justices to dismiss Campbell's complaint.
Campbell said in May that she sees the issues around minors and technology as among the most pressing matters in the state. Later that month, she was one of a bipartisan group of 44 attorneys general who urged Congress to reject the U.S. House bill. The letter argued that "While the KIDS Act claims to 'protect children and teens online, empower parents and strengthen families,' the bill would instead insulate Big Tech from appropriate oversight and accountability and imperil the young people it purports to protect."
Youth social media regulations are also internationally circulating. Australia passed the world's first outright ban for kids under the age of 16, which went into effect in December 2025 and some research shows hasn't necessarily reduced social media use for the targeted age group. The United Kingdom in June announced that it plans to implement a ban on social media access for people under 16 in 2027.
The Days and Details Ahead
The attorney general's regulations, per the Senate Ways and Means draft, must "limit the collection of personal data of a user to data that is strictly necessary for determining a user’s age," and would require platforms to delete personal data collected to determine age "immediately." Regulations would include a review process to enable users to appeal an age assurance determination.
Asked what Campbell thinks about how much the bill relies on her, the attorney general's office said it supports enhanced social media protections for young people and is working through the approaches under consideration with the Legislature. The office said it's "ready to meet our obligations to enforce the law."
The Senate's "default" provision is akin to, but not the same as, one that Healey proposed in April. Healey tucked youth social media provisions into a spring supplemental budget, but the House removed it before passing that bill in June. Healey's social media language would have put in place a "default" setting disabling addictive practices and limiting users under the age of 18 to two hours on social media each day.
"I do think that, coming from the start, where the House and governor just sort of rushed out some legislation without really consulting the public — the public has now spoken, and the Senate bill sort of reflects that," Greer said. "But the public is going to need to keep speaking to ensure a good outcome here, and so we have our work cut out for us for the next weeks and months as this process plays out."
Fight for the Future has its eyes on several potential changes, including a Sen. Dylan Fernandes amendment (#19) that Greer said would ensure users are only asked to verify their age if they actively attempt to turn on something, like autoplay, that's barred within the default setting, as opposed to having to "opt out" or verify their age immediately upon creating an account.
A Sen. Lydia Edwards amendment (#3) would clarify the definition of "social media" so that it doesn't include platforms like Wikipedia or other nonprofit, noncommercial sites. And another Edwards amendment (#4) would address the "age signal" language within the proposal. The Senate bill states that the attorney general can consider an "age signal" among age verification measures and "may, by regulation, require an operating system provider to provide covered operators with such age signal."
Some operators like Apple and Google, Greer explained, have started using age assurance tools that allow a guardian to designate their child's iPhone or computer at initial setup as one that belongs to a minor. That system can tell a platform like Meta that the user is a certain age.
"If an operating system is already collecting an age signal, we think the attorney general can regulate what they do with that age signal, but we don't think the attorney general or the Massachusetts government can force a software developer to start collecting information on users that they wouldn't otherwise collect," Greer said. "If that issue doesn't get fixed, that would take the bill from sort of, 'We have some concerns, but we don't oppose,' to, like, 'We're trying to nuke this from the sky, because this could literally end the ability of people to create privacy-preserving open source operating systems.'"
Other amendments include one from Sen. John Keenan (#6) that would change the default time frame in which platforms cannot send notifications from between midnight and 6 a.m. to between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.
A Sen. Becca Rausch amendment (#10) would strike out the AG's "exclusive authority to bring civil action" against an operator in violation of the law, instead writing that the "attorney general shall enforce this chapter; provided, however, that nothing herein shall preclude a private right of action asserting violations thereof.” Part of a Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr amendment (#15) delineates that enforcement lies exclusively with the AG, stating that "Nothing in this chapter shall be construed to create a private right of action for any individual, class, or entity to enforce the provisions herein."
Tarr filed all of the Republican caucus' six amendments, one of which (#12) states that a platform "shall not mandate the collection of government-issued identification or biometric data to ascertain the age of its users."