Virginia House Bill 1624 would heavily regulate social media

A version of the following public comment was submitted to the Virginia House Communications, Technology and Innovation Committee on January 26, 2025.

Virginia House Bill 1624 (H.B. 1624) intends to require that minors have parental consent to access social media. Along with the many heavily debated pros and cons of online age restrictions and parental consent in general, H.B. 1624 opens the door to negative unintended consequences due to how it is written.

H.B. 1624 attempts to define which features and services offered by social media platforms are potentially risky for minors. Concerns over the personalized algorithms social media uses to recommend content (“addictive feeds”) stem from some highly publicized recent studies about kids and screen time, as well as features of algorithms some worry have addictive properties.

Using this definition, H.B. 1624 breaks down the activities performed by social media algorithms and provides a list of features for which minors must have verifiable parental consent. Algorithms recommending, displaying, and moderating content provided by others based on information obtained from the user would require minors to have parental consent, though the bill sets forth several exemptions.

Social media in our society is still quite new. It has changed and evolved quickly, often in ways that experts were not able to predict. By almost all accounts, this path of rapid and hard-to-predict change will continue. One major example is the unforeseen ways in which social media is starting to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI).

When regulating new technology, our well-intentioned efforts to make concrete rules that are easy to interpret can lead to unintended consequences down the road. The framework defining “addictive feeds” in H.B. 1624–with dozens of terms defined and several exemptions set forth–may do a good job of describing the ways we use social media algorithms today. However, a similar effort five or ten years ago would likely have looked very different, and the framework of H.B. 1624 will likely be obsolete in ways we can’t predict five or ten years from now.

This will reduce the effectiveness of H.B. 1624. Enforcement will grow more complicated, and new features and activities provided by social media will lead to new arguments about what is and isn’t covered in the bill. As compliance and enforcement grow more complicated, the playing field will tilt toward larger, more experienced firms and away from small firms and new entrants.

The “addictive feeds” framework, particularly if adopted by more states, could ultimately distort future innovation, once again in unintended and undesirable ways. By concerning itself with the specific nuts and bolts of how social media operates in 2025, innovative platforms may stick to old processes because they make compliance easier, even when new processes or features could be of greater value or even safer for users.

Finally, the same factors that make the “addictive feeds” framework problematic–high-profile and rapidly changing technology–raise questions about whether the research on potential harms will stand the test of time. The studies noted above are both recent and controversial. Our understanding of yesterday’s media revolutions (recorded music and television, to name just two) and their possible harms have changed with time. Our understanding of any harms from social media and the sources of those harms will no doubt change as well.

These potential consequences of adopting the “addictive feeds” framework are but one small part of the complicated set of debates over kids and social media. However, they suggest that the “addictive feeds” framework is the wrong approach for an industry defined by rapid and unpredictable technological change. The potential unintended consequences of this method of requiring parental consent, in our view, outweigh the potential benefits.

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