There is a new law Impacted in Texas which requires parental approval for a child to create a social media account.
Parts of the SCOPE Act, or House Bill 18, took effect Sunday after Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed it into law last year.
In a committee hearing last year, Republican state Rep. Shelby Sloss cited threats that include cyberbullying and child predators for children with unsupervised social media use. Fox 4.
“A Texas teenager was rescued from a shed in North Carolina where she was caught by a predator who allegedly lured her through a chat app,” she said.
However, the law in its current form would not directly flag those types of contacts, Fox 4 reports.
Last week, a judge blocked provisions that would have required social media companies to filter harmful content. But the judge upheld the requirement of parental consent for children creating accounts and the authority for parents to monitor their child’s online activities.
Some social media companies have argued that there are already safeguards in place to protect children online.
“While we strongly agree with the underlying intent of the bill, we oppose the bill as filed,” Antigone Davis, a spokeswoman for Facebook parent company Meta, told Fox 4.
Davis added, “We’ve built over 30 tools to help young people stay safe and have a positive experience on our platform. “We have parental monitoring tools, set time limits and the ability for parents to see who their child is following.”
In the same hearing last year, A Meta representative Testifies that Facebook and Instagram already have safeguards in place to protect children and use AI to screen for fake dates of birth being entered by teenagers to create accounts.
Meta also said it blocks targeted ads for various topics on its platform.
Brian Dixon, a child psychiatrist at the Texas Medical Association, spoke at the hearing about what he has observed in his young patients about the impact of social media on their mental health.
“Now kids have access to everything all the time, and there’s no filter. They have no perspective of when they are being advertised and when they are not,” he said.
The courts have blocked it the same Law Passed in other states seeking to regulate social media access for youth.
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