By Annissa Essaibi George, Special to The Reporter
I have spent the better part of my adult life working with young people — first as a teacher and coach, then as a city councillor, and then through my work with Big Sister Boston, where every day I saw girls and young women navigating a world that is more complicated, more connected, and more demanding than anything my generation faced growing up.
The Massachusetts House has now voted to ban children under 14 from social media entirely and require every 14- and 15-year-old to obtain parental consent through each individual platform. I understand and I applaud the lawmakers’ intention. I really do. The need for action to protect our kids is urgent and our legislators are acting with that urgency. The anxiety that parents feel about their kids online is real. The stories of harm are real. Nobody who works with young people can dismiss them, and state legislation aimed at curbing harmful social media habits is well intended.
With the push for pursuing policies locally to protect our kids, it’s important to call out that there is a more concrete, effective answer at the federal level.
Good intentions are best achieved through the right policy, not simply new policy. With all that is being proposed and the urgency accompanying the proposals, it is critical that we stay laser-focused on landing on the right policies. We do not want policies that will push our kids down lesser-known paths and leave the most vulnerable among them without the lifelines they depend on.
I’ve seen what these platforms mean to the girls I have worked with. The group chats where a girl who is struggling at home finds out she’s not alone. The accounts where a young woman who grew up in a neighborhood where nobody who looked like her discovers a community that reflects her identity. The pages where a teen who has never felt safe enough to be herself finds language for who she is and people who understand. For young people who are LGBTQ+, who are navigating cultural identities that their immediate communities don’t always affirm, or who are simply going through something that feels impossible to talk about out loud — these connections are foundational.
Those needs do not go away when access to platforms goes away. Their absence just makes it harder for young people to meet them safely.
We don’t have to speculate about what happens when governments try to wall off teenagers from social media. Australia did exactly this — banning social media for anyone under 16 starting last December. Three months later, the country’s own safety regulator found that roughly 70 percent of the children who had accounts before the ban still have them.
Downloads of fringe, unregulated alternative platforms surged by more than 250 percent. Discord and Roblox — entirely exempt from the ban — became what one Australian policy institute called “new teenage town squares, complete with all the un-moderated risks the legislation was meant to address.” The ban didn’t wall off young Australians from these known outlets. It scattered them to places that nobody is watching over.
That’s the painful irony at the heart of seeking policy solutions here. Parents who want to protect their kids could end up with less visibility into their children’s online lives, not more. Imperfect as they are, the platforms covered by policies under consideration have moderation teams, reporting mechanisms, and parental control tools. The avenues teenagers will migrate to simply do not have these protections. We would be trading a known, if imperfect, environment for an unknown and potentially far more dangerous one.
If the internet teaches us anything, it’s that borders — by town, state, country — do not exist online. The answer is to give parents meaningful tools to be present in their children’s online experience. That’s exactly what federal legislation like the App Store Accountability Act would do, and why I support it.
Rather than placing the burden of age verification on each individual platform, this federal approach would require age verification to happen once, at the app store level. Trying to close off the dangers with an app by app approach is cumbersome for families, creates privacy risks by spreading sensitive information across dozens of different companies, and is trivially easy for a determined teenager to circumvent.
Parents would be notified and asked to approve before their child downloads an app. They would have a single, straightforward point of control, rather than being asked to navigate a different consent system on every platform their teenager wants to use. Any parent with a kid in organized youth sports or performing arts activities knows how impossible it is to keep up with all the apps. Now apply that to our kids’ mental health and safety. There’s a better way.
Both the Massachusetts House bill and new proposals made by Gov. Healey call for app-by-app age verification, putting a lot of trust, faith, and responsibility in tech companies and app developers. For age verification to work most safely, it must be carried out in one carefully regulated venue with strong oversight.
With our leaders in Massachusetts laudably focused on this crucial issue, and clearly well-purposed, there is an opportunity to bring clarity and light to the opaque thicket that the internet has become.
Massachusetts has a chance to lead on this issue — for parents, who lived through our own adolescence and are desperately trying to understand what our kids are experiencing, and, most importantly, for the kids who deserve for us to get this policy right.
Annissa Essaibi George is a former Boston City Councillor at-Large, non-profit leader and public school teacher.
