The Florida House will move quickly to pass limits on social media for children

Share
social media
Social media apps on an iPhone. Illustration by hapabapa via iStock for WMNF News.

©2024 The News Service of Florida

The House will start moving quickly on bills that would try to prevent children from having social media accounts and seek to prevent people under 18 from having access to “material harmful to minors” on websites and apps.

The House Regulatory Reform & Economic Development Subcommittee will take up the bills, which are priorities of House Speaker Paul Renner, R-Palm Coast. The bills were filed late Friday.

One of the measures (HB 1), sponsored by Rep. Tyler Sirois, R-Merritt Island, and Rep. Fiona McFarland, R-Sarasota, would require social media platforms to bar minors under 16 from creating social media accounts and use “reasonable age verification” methods to check the ages of people when accounts are created.

It would require platforms to use independent organizations to conduct age verifications and would require the denial of accounts for people who do not verify their ages.

Also, it would require social media platforms to terminate existing accounts that are “reasonably known” by the platforms to be held by minors younger than 16 and would allow parents to request that minors’ accounts be terminated.

The other bill (HB 3), sponsored by Rep. Chase Tramont, R-Port Orange, would require age verification to try to prevent people under age 18 from having access to online content such as pornography.

Leave a Reply

  • (will not be published)

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

You may also like

student meal
Next school year Hillsborough public schools are offering free meals

Hillsborough Public Schools are offering students free meals for the...

Correspondence Through Poetry. A Mind-Numbing Week.

Father Verses Sons: A Correspondence in Poems by Herbert Gold...

The sound of change: Music’s influence on anti-war and human rights movements

Throughout history, music has served as a powerful catalyst for...

a man in a tye dye shirt talking on a radio microphone
Recreational pot for Florida is on the ballot this fall—let’s talk about it

In four months, Florida voters have the opportunity to vote...

Ways to listen

WMNF is listener-supported. That means we don't advertise like a commercial station, and we're not part of a university.

Ways to support

WMNF volunteers have fun providing a variety of needed services to keep your community radio station alive and kickin'.

Follow us on Instagram

It's The Music Thursday
Player position: