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  • February 11, 2025
California is considering requiring mental health warnings on social media sites

California is considering requiring mental health warnings on social media sites

California lawmakers will consider a bill to require labels on social media platforms warning of their impact on young people’s lives.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – California, home to some of the largest tech companies in the world, would be the first U.S. state to impose requirements mental health warning labels on social media sites as lawmakers pass a bill introduced Monday.

The legislation sponsored by Attorney General Rob Bonta is necessary to increase children’s safety online, supporters say, but industry officials vow to fight the measure and others like it under the First Amendment. Social media warning labels quickly received bipartisan support from dozens of attorneys general, including Bonta, after U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called on Congress to determine the requirements earlier this year he said social media is a contributing factor in the mental health crisis among young people.

“These companies know the harmful impact their products can have on our children, and they refuse to take meaningful steps to make them safer,” Bonta said at a news conference Monday. “Time is up. It is time we step in and demand change.”

State officials did not provide details about the bill, but Bonta said the warning labels could appear once a week.

To 95% of youth ages 13 to 17 say they use a social media platform, and more than a third say they use social media “almost constantly,” according to 2022 data from the Pew Research Center. Parents’ concerns prompted Australia pass the world’s first law ban on social media for children under 16 in November.

“The promise of social media, while real, has turned into a situation where it turns our children’s attention into a commodity,” Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, a California lawmaker and author of the bill, said Monday. “The attention economy is using our children and their well-being to make money for these California corporations.”

Lawmakers should instead focus on online safety education and mental health resources, and not warn about bills that are “constitutionally unsound,” said Todd O’Boyle, vice president of the technology policy group industry Chamber of Progress.

“We strongly suspect that the courts will set them aside as compulsory judgments,” O’Boyle told The Associated Press.

Victoria Hinks’ 16-year-old daughter Alexandra died by suicide four months ago after being “led down dark rabbit holes” on social media that glorified eating disorders and self-harm. Hinks said the labels would help protect children from companies that turn a blind eye to the damage caused to children’s mental health when they become addicted to social media platforms.

“There is not a bone in my body that doubts that social media played a role in leading her to that final, irreversible decision,” Hinks said. “This could be your story.”

Common Sense Media, a sponsor of the bill, said it plans to lobby for similar proposals in other states.

Over the past decade, California has positioned itself as a leader in regulating and combating the technology industry to increase online safety for children.

The state, in 2022, became the first to ban online platforms from using users’ personal information in ways that could harm children. It was one of the states that sued Meta in 2023 TikTok in October for deliberately designing addictive features that keep kids hooked on their platforms.

So did Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat signed several bills in September to help curb the effects of social media on children, including a ban to prohibit social media platforms from knowingly providing addictive feeds to children without parental consent, and one to restrict or prohibit the use of smartphones by students on the school campus.

Federal lawmakers have held hearings on children’s online safety legislation is in the making to force companies to take reasonable steps to prevent damage. The legislation has the support of X owner Elon Musk and the president-elect’s son, Donald Trump Jr. Yet the last federal law protecting children online was enacted in 1998, six years before Facebook’s founding.