Florida has unveiled its plan to implement a law aimed at keeping adolescents off social media, as parents and the tech industry closely watch how those restrictions could realistically be enforced.
While not mentioning specific platforms, the law applies to any platform where at least 10 percent of daily active users are children younger than 16 who use the app for two hours or more per day. It also applies to platforms that use “addictive” features such as infinite scrolling and algorithms that analyze user data to curate personalized content recommendations.
Companies will be liable for fines of up to $50,000 for each violation. Parents or caregivers may also file lawsuits against the platforms.
When it comes to age verification, the attorney general’s office made it clear in the newly proposed rules that simply asking users to check a box confirming their age will not satisfy the requirements.
Instead, the new rules requires social media platforms to develop a “commercially reasonable method of age verification,” a process that is regularly used by the government or businesses for that purpose.
This process affects another rule concerning “reasonable parental verification,” which will come into play if a 14- or 15-year-old child gets permission from a parent to use the social media platform.
The concept is defined as any method that’s “reasonably calculated at determining that a person is a parent of a child that also verifies the age and identity of that parent by commercially reasonable means.” In practice, that could involve platforms asking children for the names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses of their consenting parents, followed by contacting the people whose names were provided by the children to seek confirmation.
Paving the way for Florida to punish social media companies that allow minors access, a third proposed rule says that platforms will be held accountable for “willful disregard” if they have access to “facts or circumstances” that would reasonably cause them to suspect a user might be a child but fail to verify the user’s age.
“Willful disregard of a person’s age constitutes a knowing or reckless violation of [the state law],” the rule declares.
Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill into law in March after it overwhelmingly passed in the state Legislature. It has drawn skepticism from parents who question whether the restrictions are practical, as well as from tech advocates who say it won’t survive a judicial review of its constitutionality.
Tech industry trade group NetChoice, whose members include Meta and X, called the law “unconstitutional.” It argued that the law essentially means that everyone in Florida—regardless of their age—will need what resembles an “I.D. for the Internet,” making businesses collect more, not less, of their sensitive personal data.
