One intriguing answer to the challenge of restricting social media for kids in a way that is compatible with the First Amendment is provided by the new model law known as SHASM—Stop Harms from Addictive Social Media. Its sponsors pronounce the abbreviation SHAZAM.
Unlike age-verification laws, SHASM does not bar anyone from creating a social-media account. Social-media companies already use sophisticated means to estimate the ages of account holders so that they can sell targeted advertising. SHASM imposes on major social-media companies (those with advertising revenues in excess of a billion dollars) a continuing obligation to shut down accounts of users it detects to be 15 or younger, unless those users obtain parental consent. For kids 15 or under who have obtained parental consent to maintain an account, SHASM prohibits those companies from using addictive features, such as continuous scrolling, “like” metrics, and alerts, and it also prohibits them from targeting paid advertising based on kids’ personal data.
Because of the way that it is structured, SHASM does not need to set forth exemptions of the sort that have (rightly or wrongly) raised content-based First Amendment concerns for age-verification laws. The vast majority of adult users will never need to provide age verification. Only those adults who act online like 14-year-olds will need to.
SHASM has already been enacted in three states—Minnesota, Idaho, and South Carolina—and it has had overwhelming bipartisan support. In Minnesota, for example, the House passed the bill by a vote of 132 to 2, the Senate passed it 66 to 0, and Democratic governor Tim Walz—yes, Kamala Harris’s VP candidate—signed it into law. Walz proclaimed that SHASM “puts families back in the driver’s seat and makes sure technology works for our kids, not the other way around.”