The future of social media interactions when it pertains to children receiving solicitations for drug sales and other dangers took another step towards potentially becoming California law.
This past week, the California State Senate Judiciary Committee voted 9-0 to move SB 1444, also known as the Let Parents Choose Protection Act of 2024 or Sammy’s Law, onto the Senate Appropriations Committee. Authored by state Senator Henry Stern, D-Calabasas, the bill would require large social media platform providers “to create, maintain and make available” a set of third-party software applications to manage a child’s “online interactions, content and account settings,” which would notify parents or guardians when a child’s account is interacted with by harmful solicitors such as drug or firearm dealers.
Fighting for this bill are a group of parents who have linked their childrens’ interactions on social media platform Snapchat, run by Santa Monica-based company Snap, Inc., to drug-related deaths, including the death of 16-year-old Sammy Berman Chapman on Feb. 7, 2021 in his Santa Monica home.
Laura Berman, Chapman’s mother, came to the Judiciary Committee hearing to advocate for the bill and tell her son’s story, who she said will be “forever 16.” Berman added that if a law allowing parental figures to be privy to specific social media interactions had been in place, Chapman would still be alive today, and said while she couldn’t save her son’s life, she could save other children.
“He was a straight A student, he was on the football team, he was getting ready to apply for college,” Berman said of her son. “And as we all know, because we’ve all been kids, any anyone who’s a parent knows, good kids make dumb decisions, and thanks to Snapchat, via Snapchat, a drug dealer found him, solicited him and offered to deliver drugs to him as easily as a pizza. He was sheltering at home during the pandemic, isolated and bored, and accepted the offer, and his brother and I found him dead on the floor.”
State Senator Dave Min, D-Irvine, presented the bill to the committee on behalf of Stern, who did not attend due to observing the Passover holiday. Min noted that California is seen as a leader on many issues, and hopes it will keep that directive in the realm of child safety, adding that the bill is a “complementary approach” to allow parents to protect their children.
Other proponents for the bill present for the hearing included Organization for Social Media Safety CEO Marc Berkman and Sammy Chapman’s father Sam Chapman.
Opponents of the bill stated that third-party platforms miss protections when it comes to the “preservation” of social media platforms’ “own safety and privacy settings for minors,” and would likely result in platforms being required to provide children’s data to parties that “have not been properly vetted or approved.”
“This bill provides very little in the way of protections for user data and additional requirements would be necessary just to match the current standards that platforms require third party providers,” said Dylan Hoffman on behalf of technology industry advocacy group TechNet. Khara Boender, on behalf of Computer and Communications Industry Association, added that she thinks the goals of the bill can be achieved without opening up social media interfaces “to potential security risks and vulnerabilities.”
According to the bill text, the third-party software provider would be able to monitor these accounts only upon authorization by a child or parent/guardian, and would prohibit the software provider from disclosing user data with specified exceptions, and would authorize the child or parent/guardian to revoke the third-party authorization or disable the account with the large social media provider. In addition, any third-party safety software provider accessing the social media platforms would have to register with the Attorney General’s office as a condition of access, affirming that the provider meets specified requirements “including that it is solely engaged in the business of internet safety.”
While in support of the bill, several Judiciary Committee members did share the privacy concerns about third-party providers having access to children’s online interactions, with Senators María Elena Durazo (D-Los Angeles) and Angelique Ashby (D-Sacramento) wanting bill framework to be developed with oversight of third-party providers in mind.
“I want to keep our kids safe, but I also want to know that there’s an ability to make that happen and [that] it’s not an adversarial process,” Ashby said.
In response, Berkman stated that other social media platforms already contract third-party software providers, being used by millions of families across the country with “real effective results,” while singling out Snapchat for not having such contracting.
“The problem is that there’s a conflict of interest with business motives and safety, and so if we create a level playing field, we can allow parents to have access to all the platforms that their children are using, and we can also have good players come into the industry and not be at a disadvantage in negotiating with the large social media platforms,” Berkman said.
If the bill passes the Appropriations Committee, it will return to the state senate floor for a third vote, and then onto assembly for a final vote.