The Matt Walsh Show - A Few Reasons Why Kids Shouldn't Use Social Media [Weekly Walsh Original]

Episode Date: March 30, 2024

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legislation that would ban TikTok in the United States, unless its Chinese owner divest from the company, is currently making its way through the Senate. It's still not clear what's going to happen to that bill exactly. It overwhelmingly passed in the House by hundreds of votes, but it appears to be significantly less popular in the upper chamber. And that's true in no small part because of the most intense lobbying campaign in recent memory is underway to kill the legislation. So that's why legislation that was just signed into law by Governor Ronda Santos of Florida is so significant. It hasn't got much attention, but it should because it addresses the legitimate concerns about apps like TikTok without granting the government any kind of sweeping new, unprecedented powers to regulate the lives of American citizens. Instead, it regulates the behavior of children in a manner that's consistent with all sorts of other regulations that already apply to minors. Watch.

His grandpa says Bryson's screen time is limited, and of course, he's entirely too young for social media. But just how young is too young. It's done. There you go. Look how fat that little thing. Look how fat that little fish is. Talk about fat. Look at that. House Bill 3 would require social media companies to ban accounts belonging to someone under the age of 14 to be on sites like Instagram and TikTok.

Fatty. Let's go home. Let's go home. So generally speaking, under this bill, children on the age of 14 can't have social media accounts. and 14 to 15-year-olds will need permission from their parents to have a social media account. The bill is set to take effect at the beginning of next year. Although, as you heard, there are undoubtedly going to be legal challenges on First Amendment grounds. Several months ago, a federal judge blocked a similar law in Arkansas, which

banned minors from creating social media accounts without parental consent. But the Florida bill is meaningfully different from the legislation that was struck down in Arkansas. And it's important to get into the specifics because, as we've learned, the media will misrepresent the substance of every Florida bill they possibly can. well, they misrepresent everything all the time, but especially legislation in Florida, as we've seen, that's when they really go to town. So here are the details. The Florida bill is not a blanket ban on any particular app. Instead, it's focused on banning apps that have particular features, which are designed

to keep children on the app at all times. In order to fall under this ban, according to the text of legislation, the app must have one of the following. Infinite scrolling, which the bill defines as continuously loading content or content that loads as the user scrolls down the page without the need to open a separate page. Two, push notifications or alerts to inform a user about specific activities or events related to user's account. Or three, auto play video or video that begins to play without the user first clicking on the video or on a play button for that video. The point of the law isn't to ban content per se. It's to regulate how much of it children are being exposed to. And that's a significant distinction because there's a lot of evidence that these addictive

features harm children. In fact, rewire their brains. Are you tired of seeing that receding hairline getting deeper and deeper, or is that thinning spot in the back of your hair getting larger every time you look in the mirror? Well, don't worry, you're not the only one. Provia is here to help with premature thinning and loss. Don't be the guy in the group chat that everyone calls the Hat Fischer. Show off your beautiful head of hair and no hat is needed. The Provia secret is a powerful natural ingredient called ProCampal that effectively targets the three main causes of premature hair, thinning, and loss by supporting healthy scalp circulation, the delivery of nourishing nutrients and healthy hair follicles anchored to your scalp. Provia guarantee

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the primary hypothesis on how the internet affects our attentional capacities is through hyperlinks, notifications, and prompts, providing a limitless stream of different forms of digital media, thus encouraging us to interact with multiple inputs simultaneously. Now, these are the kind of notifications that are specifically banned in the fordibill, and there's more research along those lines. Researchers at UNC, for example, found that, quote, checking social media repeatedly among young teens ages 12 to 13 may be associated with changes in how their brains develop over a three-year period. In their analysis, which was published

in JAMA Pediatrics, the UNC researchers specifically determined that, quote, the brains of adolescents who check social media often, more than 15 times per day, became more sensitive to social feedback. Now, there's much more research on this point, but intuitively, we all know this is true. The social media companies know it too, which is why they have these kinds of features. Their goal is to rewire children's brains so that they seek positive social feedback from apps instead of from people in their day-to-day life. And that is obviously concerning because when their brains are developing, children are especially prone to falling into addictive behaviors that once learned can affect them for the rest of their lives. We are mentally and emotionally

deforming entire generations of children who do not know how to interact with the world unless it is filtered through a tiny screen. And this isn't just concerning. This is a crisis. It is impacting the future of our civilization. If we could look into a crystal ball and see what the world will look like 100 years from now, it would probably terrify us so much that we would call for the ban of every social media company and every smartphone in existence. And this is why we need to protect children in particular. We already protect them from all kinds of other things that we have judged to be toxic or inappropriate for them. We don't allow children to say gamble or smoke or drink alcohol. We also already regulate how companies can engage with children on the internet. There's

something called the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, for example. And among other things, that law requires the websites get parental consent before they allow children to post photos, videos, or audio recordings of themselves or any other identifying personal information. This law is the reason why major social media platforms, including Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook already prohibit children under the age of 13 from using their platforms. So what Florida's law does is slightly expand limitations like this to social media platforms that are targeting young children. Now, in response to the Florida law, one of the most common counterarguments you'll hear

is that children will just circumvent the ban, as they've already circumvented the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. All kids have to do is provide a few. fake birth date and they can make an Instagram account. But all this tells us that the feds aren't concerned with enforcing that law. Florida is taking a different approach. And we've already seen that when states actually want to enforce these laws, they can get results. Many of the laws that we call unenforceable, it's because there's no real attempt to enforce them. But when there is an attempt, you know, it's amazing. How many laws can be enforced if you actually try to enforce them?

The other common counter argument you'll hear is that parents should be in charge of policing this sort of thing, not the government. From now on, we're going to limit the time. we spend looking at our stupid phones. That's one of the major arguments that came up in Florida. It's why DeSantis vetoed another version of legislation, which would have prevented 14-year-olds from accessing these apps, even with parental consent. So the final bill was kind of a compromise position,

which addressed the concerns of the parental rights dissenters. But the truth is that although parents should be the ones policing their children's social media use, many parents don't. Or many parents try, and they're not able to do it, you know, sufficiently. It's also true that parents should stop their kids from drinking alcohol or using tobacco products, but they don't always do that either. You know, that's why we still have laws against those things,

and most people don't think that those laws should be repealed for good reason. What this means is that Florida, without much fanfare, has found a solution to the TikTok debate that has dominated Congress for the past several weeks. All we have to do is what we've done before. They don't have to open the door to future government bans on Twitter or any other social media platform. We just need to do something that's fallen out of favor recently, which is to protect children from strangers on the internet and from the internet itself, which wants to harm them.

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