Social Media Act bans access to kids under 16

By Becky Ginos

WASHINGTON—Kids 14 and under spend approximately nine hours a day on social media, 9 year olds spend five. Congressman Chris Stewart is trying to find a way to protect children from getting caught in the social media craze. He introduced the Social Media Child Protection Act last week that would make it against the law for social media platforms to give access to children under 16.

“Of course the social media companies are against it,” said Stewart. “But not the people we’ve met with. We met with 100 students last week who are 14 to 18 years old and they were surprisingly supportive. Parents are hoping we’ll do this. We’ve condemned a whole generation of kids to wallow in this cesspool.”

Social media platforms know if they get kids addicted at 9 years old they’ll stay with them forever, he said. “When you look at kids there is something enormously wrong. We can identify the year this happened for 9, 10, 11, 13-year-old girls and boys. It was when Facebook bought Instagram.”

Stewart’s bill would hold social media groups accountable to check users’ ages. “They’ll be required to show a birth certificate or some kind of ID,” he said. “They claim they don’t know anything about the kids but they know all about them – their shoe size and what they had for breakfast.”

There are those who think this is big government, said Stewart. “I get that. I’m a small government guy. But we set limits on drinking and a minimum driving age of 16 and we require car seats so why not a law against signing up a 9-year-old on social media?”

Parents obviously want it, he said. “One young girl said she wanted it because she knows it’s not good for her and she spends too much time on it but all of her friends are on it so she’ll be ostracized if she doesn’t do it.”