SC weighs age requirement for social media, porn sites | Palmetto Politics – The Post and Courier

COLUMBIA The state House is pursuing a pair of bills to require users and content creators to verify their age to access social media and adult entertainment websites, drawing pushback over free speech concerns.

The two measures, both in the House Judiciary Committee, would create new regulatory requirements for pornographic websites and social media platforms to mitigate users under the age of 18 from accessing potentially harmful content.

The move comes amid a broader national conversation around child safety on the internet.

For adult entertainment websites, all users will be required to provide identification verifying they are at least 18 years of age in order to gain access.

For social media sites, social media providers will be required to obtain parental consent for all users under the age of 18, and subject underage users to stringent privacy and content management settings.

Proposed regulations include everything from bans on advertising in underage users' feeds torestrictions on personal data collection. Other suggestions include mandates allowing parents the option to limit the amount of time their children can spend on a website on any given day.

Both bills are not original to South Carolina. Similar bills requiring age verification on pornographic websites have been passed in other states, while court challenges to similar legislation enacted in states like Louisiana, Texas and Utah have so far been unsuccessful.

In his Jan. 11 testimony on the bill, state Attorney General Alan Wilson said his office would commit to defending any enacted law in court, saying he believed South Carolina was "primed" to pass a law of its own.

The bill, which proponents say is necessary to mitigate detrimental impacts social media can have on young people's physical and emotional well-being, is not without obstacles.

In Washington, D.C., social media companies like Meta are already working to broker a federal regulatory framework for social media companies that puts the onus for age verification on companies like Microsoft and Apple over concerns for user privacy amid concerns.

The companies are also trying to police themselves internally with many of the policies recommended in South Carolina's legislation a movesome seeas an effortto avoid having to comply with a mish-mash of state-level age verification requirements before Congress has had an opportunity to act.

"Individual apps like ours don't have to collect what could be potentially sensitive identifying information,"Caulder Harvill-Childs, a lobbyist for Meta, said during the Jan. 11 Senate hearing.

The pornography bill could yield result similar concerns for user privacy.

Rather than comply with state-enacted age verification requirements, Aylo an adult entertainment conglomerate that owns popular pornography sites like PornHub has already suspended user access in states like Mississippi, Utah, North Carolina, Louisiana, Virginia and Montana over concerns those respective states' verification requirements pose a risk to user privacy.

"While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk, an announcement provided to the website's users inMontana and North Carolina reads.

Others argue the legislation could pose constitutional issues.

In ensuring social media users are as old as they say they are, South Carolina's law could potentially require every social media user to verify their age with the platforms, a line conservative legal scholar and NetChoice vice presidentCarl Szabo told lawmakers could violate longstanding constitutional protections for anonymous speech on the internet.

When the laws have been challenged, enacting states have faced significant pushback. To date, NetChoice an internet trade group that favors minimal regulations has filed lawsuits against states including California, Arkansas and Ohio that have passed similar age-verification requirements. In each case, they managed to secure temporary injunctions to prevent the laws from going into effect.

"I already know how these constitutional issues play out because you've already seen them play out," Szabo said in an interview. "It's like doing the same thing time and time again and expecting a different outcome. You can't end-run the First Amendment."

"I want to get a solution that works," he added. "Not a solution that bans speech."

Both sides agree that something needs to be done. In 2023, the United States Surgeon General issued a public health advisory outlining multiple detrimental impacts that excessive social media consumption can have on children. Much of the cause, their office wrote, can be attributed to the proliferation of "extreme, inappropriate, and harmful content that continues to be easily and widely accessible by children and adolescents."

"Our children and adolescents dont have the luxury of waiting years until we know the full extent of social medias impact," the office wrote in its report. "Their childhoods and development are happening now."

Those who work directly with South Carolina children say those factors make the case the legislation should go even further.

In his own testimony Jan. 11, Patrick Kelly president of the Palmetto State Teacher's Association and a teacher at Blythewood High School said he'd seen the negative influence of social media first-hand, from an incident where his students watched a school shooting in Florida play out in real time on social media to a recent incident where his daughter texted him scared of a potential school shooting threat that was posted on social media.

Kelly said social media companies should also be subject to strict content moderation policies to ensure children are not exposed to, or allowed to produce, incitements to violence, self-harm, school fights or pornographic materials.

If a parent showed up to a adult entertainment venue and the bouncer stopped the 12-year-old, we wouldn't want the 12-year-old to go in, even with parental consent," Kelly said.

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SC weighs age requirement for social media, porn sites | Palmetto Politics - The Post and Courier