AB 56: Social media: warning labels.

SECTION 1.

The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:

(a) Social media provides an important tool for communication and information sharing. Approximately 95 percent of minor teenagers say that they use at least one social media platform, and more than one-third report using social media almost constantly.

(b) As the United States Surgeon General has reported, recent evidence has identified “reasons for concern” about social media usage by children and adolescents. This evidence includes a study concluding that the risk of poor mental health outcomes doubles for children and adolescents who use social media at least three hours per day and research finding that social media usage is linked to a variety of negative health outcomes, including low self-esteem and disordered eating for adolescent girls.

(c) Further, per the Surgeon General’s Social Media and Youth Mental Health advisory, “Excessive and problematic use of social media can harm children and adolescents by disrupting important healthy behaviors. Social media platforms are often designed to maximize user engagement, which has the potential to encourage excessive use and behavioral dysregulation. Push notifications, autoplay, infinite scroll, quantifying and displaying popularity (i.e., ‘likes’), and algorithms that leverage user data to serve content recommendations are some examples of these features that maximize engagement.”

(d) Heavier usage of social media also leads to less healthy sleep patterns and sleep quality, which can in turn exacerbate both physical and mental health problems.

(e) Evidence cited in lawsuits against social media companies for the harms caused against children supports the use of warning labels to advise users of the potential harms of these features. Lawsuits have cited internal documents from companies detailing their deliberate targeting of children in order to bring them on the social media platform and to keep them on the platform. Internal documents have also revealed that social media platforms are aware that their features can impact the health and development of children’s brains and mental health. They understand that children cannot resist some of these features using their underdeveloped discipline and capitalize on this in order to keep them on their platforms.

(f) Both California and the United States as a whole are facing an ongoing youth mental health crisis, with rates of adolescent suicides, depressive episodes, and feelings of sadness and hopelessness on the rise in recent years.

(g) Governments across the globe have effectively employed black box style warnings to educate the public regarding goods that pose a risk of harm to public health.

(h) For these reasons, it is essential that California act to ensure that users, their families, and the public are warned of the risks of social media use, and requiring the display of a black box style warning is an appropriate mechanism for doing so.