Social media. – © AFP Denis Charlet

Utah on Thursday became the first US state to require social media sites to get parental consent for accounts used by under-18s, placing the burden on platforms like Instagram and TikTok to verify the age of their users.

The law, which takes effect March 2024, was brought in response to fears over growing youth addiction to social media, and to security risks such as online bullying, exploitation, and collection of children’s personal data.

But it has prompted warnings from tech firms and civil liberties groups that it could curtail access to online resources for marginalized teens, and have far-reaching implications for free speech.

“We’re no longer willing to let social media companies continue to harm the mental health of our youth,” tweeted Spencer Cox, governor of the western US state, who signed two related bills at a ceremony Thursday.

The bills also require social media firms to grant parents full access to their children’s accounts, and to create a default “curfew” blocking overnight access to children’s accounts. 

They set out fines for social media companies if they target users under 18 with “addictive algorithms,” and make it easier for parents to sue social media companies for financial, physical or emotional harm.

“We hope that this is just the first step in many bills that we’ll see across the nation, and hopefully taken on by the federal government,” said state representative Jordan Teuscher, who co-sponsored the bill.

Michael McKell, a Republican member of Utah’s Senate who also sponsored the bill, said it was a “bipartisan” effort, and praised President Joe Biden’s recent State of the Union address, in which he raised the issue.

Biden last month called on US lawmakers to restrict how social media companies advertise to children and collect their data, as he accused Big Tech of conducting a “for profit” experiment on the nation’s youth.

California has already introduced online safety laws including strict default privacy settings for minors, but the Utah law goes further.

Lawmakers in states such as Ohio and Connecticut are working on similar bills.

Platforms including Instagram and TikTok have introduced more controls for parents, such as messaging limits and time caps.

At Thursday’s ceremony in Utah, McKell pointed to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which he said highlighted the toll social media apps can have on young minds.

“The impact on our daughters — and I have two daughters — it was incredibly troubling,” he said. 

“Thirty percent of our daughters from ninth grade to 12th grade had seriously contemplated suicide. That’s startling.”

Hackers are trying to capitalize on the enormous popularity of ChatGPT to distribute malware, security experts have warned.

A report from cybersecurity researchers CloudSEK has detailed an elaborate scheme that includes stolen Facebook accounts, groups, and pages, malicious Facebook ads, and fake ChatGPT software.

With Twitter Blue take-up failing to reach expectations, Elon Musk is taking drastic action to drive more adoption, announcing today that, as of April 15th, the only tweets that will be displayed in the ‘For You’ tab – i.e. the main tab of the app – will be from paying, Twitter Blue verified accounts.

As Musk notes, voting in Twitter polls will also become a Twitter Blue exclusive option, which will severely restrict the reach of non-paying accounts, while also limiting general user functionality.

Twitter’s also removing ‘legacy’ blue checkmarks later this week, which will mean that, as of April 15th, your Twitter feeds are going to look a lot different, with the only blue ticks being from paying users, and only paying users showing up in For You feed recommendations.

You’ll still be able to view tweets from the accounts you follow in your ‘Following’ tab, and you’ll still be able to see tweets from non-Twitter Blue accounts in other areas, like Explore trends. But it will limit visibility, which could prompt more accounts to pay up, and boost Twitter’s revenue intake from subscriptions.

Twitter Blue, which, as of last week, is now available in all regions, currently has around 450k subscribers, which equates to 0.18% of Twitter’s total user base. The risk for Twitter is that this small group of users is also largely aligned with Musk, and his political and ideological stances, which could turn your For You feed into a very one-sided discussion, in relation to political and world events.

That could turn a lot of users away – because as Parler and various other right wing social media apps have shown, nobody really wants to engage in a partisan chatter fest. But brands, in particular, do want visibility for their tweets, and maybe, by restricting their exposure based on subscriptions, that’ll lead to a big uptake in Twitter Blue, which, by extension, as Musk notes, could help to combat bots and spam in the app.

The logic here is that spammers and scammers won’t be able to afford to pay $8 per account to run their schemes. Right now, a scammer can set up hundreds of thousands of Twitter accounts, free of charge, then use those profiles to make certain opinions or angles trend, amplifying whatever side of an argument they choose to take.   

But if the majority of Twitter users pay for verification, that will eventually mean the only non-verified accounts will belong to spammers that can’t afford it. That, theoretically, will make these scams much easier to identify – but in order for this to be a viable approach, Musk will need really high take-up of Twitter Blue, which, thus far, is not even close to happening.

Which is why Twitter’s now taking steps to make paid verification a thing.

Will that work? I’m tipping the majority of users still won’t pay, while the potential downside is that it could make a lot of people less likely to tweet, and less likely to switch over to the ‘For You’ tab, hampering discovery, and thus usage.

But it seems like Musk is going to find out for himself.

At least he’ll know, definitively, if this is a workable option or not.