“Social media is the pre-1964 cigarette,” Texas state representative Jared Patterson said in a release.
A Texas state representative wants to ban everyone under the age of 18 from accessing social media sites like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat.
Republican State House Representative Jared Patterson cited concerns over mental health and self-harm among minors as the motivation behind the proposed bill when introducing it last week.
Patterson’s bill comes amid a series of moves by Texas Republicans that aim to scrutinize and reign in the power of certain Big Tech companies. Last week, Gov. Greg Abbott banned all Texas state employees from TikTok, and in November Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton launched an investigation into a nonprofit founded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The attorney general also filed a lawsuit alleging that search engine giant Google is collecting users’ face and voice recognition data without consent.
HB 896 aims to block anyone under the age of 18 in Texas from creating a profile on social media sites using a variety of methods, including a photo identification mechanism as a means of age verification and requiring social media sites to provide pathways for parents to request removal of their kids’ accounts.
The bill would also allow the Texas Attorney General’s Office to pursue enforcement of Texas’ deceptive trade laws if social media companies fail to comply with its age verification and account removal requirements. “We absolutely want the AG’s office to be able to go after the social media companies to hold them accountable,” Patterson said, adding that his office is working on legislation that would “more clearly identify the role that either families or prosecutors would have to be able to go after social media companies.”
Rep. Patterson painted the stakes around his proposed bill in stark terms: “[Social media companies] are doing everything they can do to hook kids on their product. Just as a drug lord would do to hook a child onto their product,” Patterson said.
“Social media is the pre-1964 cigarette. Once thought to be perfectly safe for users, social media access to minors has led to remarkable rises in self-harm, suicide, and mental health issues,” Patterson said in a release issued last week. “The Texas legislature must act this session to protect children because, thus far, the social media platforms have failed to do so. HB 896 is a solution to this crisis,” Patterson added in the release.
TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat are the top three social media sites the proposed bill aims to hold accountable, Patterson told Chron.
Patterson isn’t the first lawmaker to raise concerns about the potentially harmful impact of social media on young people. Last year, the U.S. Congress’s Joint Economic Committee released a report highlighting associations between social media use and declining mental health among teenage girls. The report states that the results of the studies highlighted do not prove a conclusive link between youth mental health declines and social media use: “these findings cannot tell us whether social media use causes poorer mental health…” the committee said in the report.
