Arkansas Passes Law Requiring Age-Verification by Social Media Platforms

The new Arkansas law closely resembles a law passed signed by Utah Governor Spencer Cox last month. Dubbed the “Social Media Safety Act”, the bill passed the Republican-majority House in an 82-10 vote last week. The bill was approved by the Arkansas Senate on Thursday and now heads to the desk of Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has already signaled her support for the legislation.

“This is just common sense,” Sanders said at a press conference announcing the bill last month. “One ill-advised moment online can mean a lifetime of pain offline. Kids are not prepared for that kind of responsibility, and they’re certainly not prepared for the world of dangerous content that big tech companies make readily available.”

The law’s restrictions apply only to social media platforms operated by business entities that have generated $100,000,000 in annual gross revenue. The law also contains exemptions for platforms that have the exclusive function of providing email, direct messaging, sending of files that are not posted publicly and “only visible to the sender and recipient or recipients”, along with a variety of other exemptions for platforms that offer “(n)ews, sports, entertainment, or other content that is preselected by the provider and not user generated.”

Critics of the Arkansas law and others like it have raised privacy concerns, as well as potential First Amendment implications with respect to the right to anonymous speech.

“People in Arkansas should not have to hand over their driver’s license just to access free websites,” Jason Kelley with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said in a statement. “By forcing people to do so, the law essentially stops people in the state from accessing vast parts of the web unless the government approves it.”

Under the law, a social media platform that “knowingly violates” the statute is liable “if the social media company fails to perform a reasonable age verification.” In addition to granting prosecutors the ability to initiate an enforcement action under state law, the Social Media Safety Act makes platforms liable to individuals for “penalty of two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500) per violation, court costs, and reasonable attorney’s fees as ordered by the court.”

The law also holds that the commercial entities and third-party vendors that participate in the age verification system “shall not retain any identifying information of an individual after access to the social media platform has been granted.” Any entity found to have knowingly retained identifying information after access has been granted “is liable to the individual for damages resulting from the retention of the identifying information, including court costs and reasonable attorney’s fees as ordered by the court.”

The Social Media Safety Act takes effect in the state on September 1 of this year.

In a post published last month explaining the organization’s opposition to age verification mandates in general, Kelly and his EFF compatriot Adam Schwartz opined that “age verification systems are surveillance systems.”

“Mandatory age verification, and with it, mandatory identity verification, is the wrong approach to protecting young people online,” Kelly and Schwartz added. “It would force websites to require visitors to prove their age by submitting information such as government-issued identification. This scheme would lead us further towards an internet where our private data is collected and sold by default. The tens of millions of Americans who do not have government-issued identification may lose access to much of the internet. And anonymous access to the web could cease to exist.”

You can read the full text of Arkansas’ Social Media Safety Act here.