Restricting the use of social media for those under 16 in Florida

, Florida’s Republican-controlled state legislature passed a bill banning children under 16 from using social media without parental consent.

Supporters of this project have stated that the purpose of this action is to protect the mental health of people under 16 years of age against the dangers of cyberspace, because children use such networks a lot and may suffer from anger, depression and other mental illnesses.

This plan was approved by 108 votes to 7 among Republicans in the state congress, hours after Florida senators presented its final version.

According to this law, which must be signed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, social networking platforms are required to cancel and deactivate the account. Users under the age of 16 and the use of a parental approval system to identify children under the age of 16. Disantis said: The finality of this plan should be reviewed, but he believes that social networks are harmful for children, but parents can monitor and he is wary of a policy that might make parents dominate children in this field.

Meanwhile, critics of this plan say that this bill violates the protection of freedom of speech in the First Amendment of the US Constitution and that parents should decide about their children’s presence on social networks and The government should not do anything about this.

Also, Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, while announcing its opposition to this plan, stated that The measure limits parental decision-making power and raises security concerns because users’ personal information must be entered at age-approved levels.

Metta stressed that it supports a federal law for online app stores to require parental approval for downloads by people under the age of 16.

In this law, no specific social network is mentioned, but it is stated that it means all social networks that provide infinite scrolling and have the possibility of reaction scales such as liking, and have auto-play videos and also have live broadcasts. and push notifications. But in this law, websites and applications whose main function is based on sending emails, sending messages or texts between a specific sender and receiver are excluded.

According to the evaluations, in March 2023, the state of Utah was the first state in America to limit children’s access to social networks, followed by the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Ohio, and Texas. They gave. Many other states are developing similar legislation.

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