Predators lurk on social media; this Florida bill might save kids

A beautiful woman with long blond hair and a blank smile sits in front of her computer. As comments flick across the screen, she begins to gesture and speak in a robotic tone: “Ice cream so good. Yeehaw, yes yes yes. Grrrr. Gang gang. Ice cream so good. Yes popcorn, yes popcorn.” It is a five-hour livestream, and she does not break character once as subscribers to her channel – many of whom are minor children – pay money to watch her “glitch.”

This is NPC (non-playable character) content on TikTok, and it came for your kids in the summer of 2023.

What most parents don’t know (unless they spend unhealthy hours researching internet trends on the internet) is that NPC content is firmly rooted in online kink and fetish communities. Individuals seek sexual gratification by “controlling” the NPC “character” on screen; when she is paid money, she “glitches” for the consumer using mannerisms that resemble NPCs in popular video games.

To the casual viewer, and to the majority of kids watching these livestreams, it’s simply weird and mesmerizing. They have no idea they’re engaged in a communal act of sexual gratification and social decay.

Children are not consuming the product; the product is consuming them. This is why House Bill 1 was introduced: to prevent kids who are 15 and under from having social media accounts and falling prey to an endless cycle of deranged beauty trends, sexual predation, and harassment online.

Yet some have argued that the bill is an overreach that would undermine parents’ rights to control their children’s social media use.

“Parental rights” has become a cynical political framing lately – a shortcut to calling out the “other side” for hypocrisy. But most parents whose young teens are on social media don’t want it that way. Instead, they feel powerless to stop it in the absence of institutional support. That support won’t come from the companies themselves, because they are making far too much money selling your children garbage online.

So while House Bill 1 might have First Amendment implications, it is a stretch to claim it meaningfully impinges on parents’ rights. Struggling to regulate a tween’s internet usage is a “parental right” that no parent ever asked for, and social media companies should have implemented these restrictions years ago. Back in 2017, the Florida legislature created a task force to examine why the rates of childhood Baker Acts (involuntary mental health holds) were increasing so much faster than the state population. The task force held several meetings, collected a lot of data, and received input from many stakeholders and experts. But ultimately, they couldn’t determine the root causes of why so many more kids were ending up in psych wards. They said there were too many “data gaps.” This need for more data is a can with an indefinite kick life.

We don’t need to keep kicking the can when it comes to kids and social media. Professor Jonathan Haidt and many others have done extensive research on the relationship between childhood social media use and adverse mental health outcomes. We can always use more information on the topic, but we have enough to act. The stakes are too high, and 16 isn’t an unreasonable age limit.

Are there potential benefits to social media use for younger children? Of course, although very few they can’t derive IRL.

It is clear that list of benefits will never be long or substantial enough to counterbalance the heinous consumerism, developmental delays, attention erosion, and sexual predation that we know belong on the side of costs.

The irony of social media is that it leaves kids feeling lonely. We have an urgent social responsibility to fix that problem, and I am curious to see whether legislation can be an effective tool.