The State House just took a blow torch to your privacy.
The House passed a bill requiring every social media user in Massachusetts to hand their identity to a company in California. I voted no.
The State House just took a blow torch to your privacy.
Yesterday the House passed a bill that took a blow torch to your privacy. I voted no. And I need you to understand what this bill actually does, because the harmful part gets obscured in the headlines.
The bill requires every social media platform to verify your age. This does not just apply for children. It is for everyone. And it sets zero standards for how it is done and zero protections for your privacy.
What this means for you
If your 14-year-old wants to use Instagram and you want to say yes, you are handing your driver's license and your child's ID and face to a company in California. Every account you have, every platform you use, linked to your real identity. Everything you do on that platform, tied to your real name, permanently, in a database that can be breached, subpoenaed, or sold.
Right now you can browse, you can search, you can find the communities you need without a corporation knowing exactly who you are. This bill ends that.
Florida passed largely the same social media ban in 2024. Even Florida did not require age verification. Their bill is still being challenged in federal court. Here in Massachusetts, we went a step further than Florida.
This bill forces LGBTQIA+ kids to choose: out yourself or lose your lifeline.
The bill requires 14- and 15-year-olds to get parental consent for social media. For many families, that is fine. But 62% of LGBTQIA+ youth live in homes that do not affirm or accept them. This bill tells those kids to go ask their parents for permission to access the online communities that serve as a lifeline.
According to the Trevor Project's 2024 survey of over 18,000 LGBTQ+ youth, 74% go online to find connections because relating to people in daily life is difficult. That figure is 79% for transgender and nonbinary youth. Plus there are about 8,000 kids in state custody with no parent available to consent at all. This bill locks them out.
What I fought for
I filed amendments to fix this. Privacy protections directing the AG to find ways to verify age without platforms collecting your identity. A trusted adult pathway so a school counselor or doctor could provide consent when a kid is not safe going to their parent (the same standard we already use for adolescent mental health care). The House chose not to adopt them.
This is why the ACLU and leading LGBTQIA+ advocacy organizations including the Trevor Project, GLAAD, Lambda Legal, and the Transgender Law Center oppose age-minimum social media bans. Their coalition letter states clearly that we are attacking the wrong problem.
These bills take one of the broadest and most dangerous approaches possible: cutting young people off from account-based online spaces altogether instead of addressing specific product harms, business practices, or design choices.
— ACLU, Trevor Project, GLAAD, Lambda Legal, Transgender Law Center coalition letterThe bill now goes to conference committee. But we are not done with this fight. Not even close!
What you can do
Please share this page. The more people who understand what actually passed, the harder it is to ignore in conference. This is how we win: you tell your neighbors, they tell theirs, and suddenly the conference committee knows that the people are watching.
This is the work I do every session on every bill. Filing amendments, fighting for things that are not popular with leadership but matter to you and our communities, and voting no when the bill is invading our privacy and harming us. If you want to make sure this work continues, please support our campaign!