SACRAMENTO, California — Social media giant Meta is pushing California state lawmakers to shield it from pending legislation that would increase legal penalties in child-harm cases, according to two people familiar with the effort.
The people, granted anonymity to discuss private negotiations, told POLITICO that lobbyists for Meta have approached Senate Judiciary Chair and Santa Ana Democrat Tom Umberg with draft amendments that would create a pathway for social media companies to gain an exemption from the legislation, AB 2.
The bill from Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal, a Long Beach Democrat, threatens fines of up to $1 million per child for platforms found liable for harming kids through negligent product design. It’s set for a Tuesday hearing in Umberg’s committee.
Meta’s plea comes as it faces hundreds of lawsuits accusing the company of failing to protect kids’ safety on its platforms. The proposal is the latest example of how the company is maneuvering politically amid pending product safety lawsuits and surging global efforts to slap strict kids’ safety guardrails on social media platforms.
The draft amendments would exempt social media platforms from increased penalties in child harm cases if the companies activate a suite of default child safety settings. Those settings include disabling autoplay, restricting geolocation data sharing, silencing nighttime notifications, preventing kids from receiving direct messages from unknown adults, shielding minors’ profiles from public view and preventing explicit material from being shown to kids.
The amendments would also require the companies, if they want safe harbor from liability, to enable tools that allow parents to restrict their kids’ screen time, hide their kids’ profiles from public view, monitor who their kids interact with online and report misconduct.
If accepted by lawmakers, the amendments could lead to reduced payouts in the pending cases where parents and young people accuse Meta, Google, TikTok and Snap of designing platforms that fostered youth harms including addiction, depression and suicidality. Meta and Google were ordered to pay $6 million in damages after a Los Angeles jury found the companies liable in one such case in March.
Umberg declined to comment on the amendments, as did a spokesperson for Meta.
Just last week, Reuters reported the company was lobbying Congress for legal immunity from child-harm claims.
Meta deployed a similar lobbying tactic nearly two years ago when faced with another Lowenthal bill that was nearly identical to AB 2. Lowenthal pulled that legislation after he was asked to accept tech-friendly amendments that weakened its scope — language that matched Meta’s requested changes, as detailed in an email seen by POLITICO at the time.
Tech industry trade groups TechNet and the Computer and Communications Industry Association, both of which count Meta among their members, oppose Lowenthal’s bill, arguing it would violate platforms’ First Amendment rights.
from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/mUq6POn
via IFTTT
0 Commentaires