By DjelicN @ Adobe Stock
Have you gone to a restaurant lately and witnessed a family dining together, but the parents are glued to their phones and the children don’t look up from their tablets? Is that what family dining means now? It’s obvious that constant access to online technology and social media has driven families apart, and children are being hooked at younger ages. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed a law that will protect children from social media by banning social media accounts for kids under 14 and requiring parental consent for accounts for 14 and 15-year-olds. Brendan Farrington reports for the Associated Press:
Florida will have one of the country’s most restrictive social media bans for minors — if it withstands expected legal challenges — under a bill signed by Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday.
The bill will ban social media accounts for children under 14 and require parental permission for 14- and 15-year-olds. It was slightly watered down from a proposal DeSantis vetoed earlier this month, a week before the annual legislative session ended.
The new law was Republican Speaker Paul Renner’s top legislative priority. It takes effect Jan. 1.
“A child in their brain development doesn’t have the ability to know that they’re being sucked into these addictive technologies and to see the harm and step away from it, and because of that we have to step in for them,” Renner said at the bill-signing ceremony held at a Jacksonville school.
The bill DeSantis vetoed would have banned minors under 16 from popular social media platforms regardless of parental consent. But before the veto, he worked out compromise language with Renner to alleviate the governor’s concerns and the Legislature sent DeSantis a second bill.
Several states have considered similar legislation. In Arkansas, a federal judge in August blocked enforcement of a law that required parental consent for minors to create new social media accounts.
Supporters in Florida hope the bill will withstand legal challenges because it would ban social media formats based on addictive features such as notification alerts and auto-play videos, rather than on their content.
Renner said he expects social media companies to “sue the second after this is signed. But you know what? We’re going to beat them. We’re going to beat them and we’re never, ever going to stop.”
Read more here.
If you’re willing to fight for Main Street America, click here to sign up for the Richardcyoung.com free weekly email.
