There is a bill, there is only a bill, and it's coming to ban your teens from social media.
On Capitol Hill.
That's right, it's talk linked. We're back with another episode about the Florida social media ban.
This is not another episode, we've never done it before. But Jacob is here to tell you all about it.
Hi. And I'll tell you about it too, we both will. What has happened?
Well Ron DeSantis just signed a law.
He's the Florida governor. He's the Florida governor, that's important to know. He's Florida governor.
He's not just some guy. He's also very red.
In both literally and metaphorically. He gets a lot of sun.
He seems to, he's a passionate man.
Okay. And what's-
And you can see in his face, but you know.
Okay, we need to actually like- Okay, so anyway, the point is, so he passed this bill that's being called one of the U.S.'s most restrictive social media bans for minors.
And when it takes effect, which I believe is January 1st next year, it will, children under 14 will not be able, those will just be banned from having social media accounts.
Yeah, you literally just can't do it.
Oh, you're 13 and a half, banned.
We're back to, we're back to the early days of social media when you had to be, I think over 13.
Yeah, well, you had to lie. I remember when I created my Facebook account, I lied.
You either had to be over 13 or be morally unscrupulous.
Yeah. Inscrupulous? Actually, I think my mom lied for me.
So, can't you, can you want me to create a Facebook account for me?
This is the joke you made earlier today. If you're gonna like tweets, I'd prefer you to do it at home.
If you're gonna post to Facebook, I'd rather you did it at home.
Mom, if you don't let me do it here, I'm just gonna go to the bar and swipe on TikTok.
They're just gonna go to the cyber cafe and they're gonna get unlicensed internet.
Yeah, so this is pretty wild.
I remember hearing that Florida was working on this and I know that a number of other states have tried to do similar social media bans where minors are prevented from creating accounts and using these platforms.
And it's worth noting as well, just keep your thought.
But the 14 and 15 year olds require parental permission to create social media accounts, so it also affects them.
Yeah, so once you're 16, destroy your body, melt your brain.
You can drive and also go on Facebook without mom's permission.
And we joke about it, but there have been many, many, many, many studies done.
And I feel like it's basically... Many done by Facebook themselves.
Yeah, it's basically an uncontroversial truth now that social media is not good for young kids.
Or anyone really. There's an argument to be made for society.
Yeah, yeah. And despite this, I feel like, you know, obviously it is a charged issue, like any other issue that requires people to make laws.
But I think it's somewhat uncontroversial at this point that social media is not good for people in general.
The debate is whether...
What we do about that. Yeah, so let's get a few more details about this.
This bill has been passed through both houses of the Florida state government and has been signed by Governor Ron DeSantis,
meaning that, as you said, it is an actual law now.
It is law. It just hasn't taken effect yet. Yes.
We're in the fun-waiting period, the bureaucracy. Right. And in other states where they've tried similar bills, they've encountered legal challenges from people who are saying,
you know, this is not constitutional or whatever, so then...
Like Mark Zuckerberg. As far as I'm aware, you know, we said it was the most restrictive social media ban in the country.
As far as I'm aware, other states haven't successfully gone all the way through in making such bans law, although we should check that.
Oh, I was wrong. Other states have already banned social media for minors without parental consent.
So I believe that's why this bill is being called the most restrictive, because I believe Arkansas, Ohio, and Utah...
I think California has a ban as well, although I don't know the details of theirs.
They've banned minors. I think each of the states has different age limits, but for people under a certain age, those states have banned social media without parental consent,
which is very interesting. So that already exists.
I didn't actually know that. We're in Canada, so we don't know.
Our parents let us do anything we want.
As long as we say please and thank you and sorry.
Especially once you're over 18 and you move out.
Now, what's interesting about this, and especially I believe a lot of the states that you mentioned is that they are red states.
And these sorts of things. Well, I guess you can make the argument because there's parental permission that it's still, it's not necessarily infringing on parents' rights,
though one issue that is normally championed by the Republican Party is small government, which this obviously is not.
Though, I will say about parental permission, one person that had an issue with this Florida bill in its original form was none other than a signer of this bill, Ron DeSantis,
who actually vetoed it initially because it initially was everyone 16 and under, no social media for you.
And then I guess he settled, he was like, all right, I'll give it to you guys if you like make it parental permission for 14 and 15 years.
I did find that interesting. One of the earlier articles I was reading about it was like mentioned that other people were opposing it, but it is interesting to see that,
because I believe this bill was not put forward by Ron DeSantis, it was put forward by the Republicans.
States and Republicans. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know.
Or I should say House Republicans, because I know that it was the top legislative priority, according to The Guardian, for Republican State House Speaker Paul Renner.
Right, right, okay, yeah. So like, we're going to try our best obviously to like not get too political with this discussion, but obviously it is a political issue.
And as you said, it's interesting, at the very least, to see that this is an issue where, you know, Republicans are at the front of the issue,
trying to institute these bans.
Well, in other scenarios, like say, changes to school curriculum, Republicans are for more parents' rights in that scenario.
In this scenario, one of the things that the Democrats have said against this bill is that, oh, it doesn't respect parents' rights enough.
So, you know, that's just interesting. At least one, because it's worth noting for accuracy and for, you know, nonpartisanship.
Some Democrats did join the majority of the Republican majority who supported this bill.
Like there were Democrats who were like, yeah, I'm for it.
Right, yeah. But like, you also have people like Anna Escamani, she's a Democratic State House representative,
and she said in a news release that the alternative would be better to ensure improved parental oversight tools,
improved access to data to stop bad actors, alongside major investments in Florida mental health systems and programs.
And I do think that's an interesting point, just because those seem like more general supports.
And so it wouldn't be so, the bill wouldn't be so one-sided.
It seems weirdly, weirdly surgical, because there's probably, I mean, there's areas of gray.
From what I understand from the law, what they're looking at specifically are like, they don't necessarily name any specific platforms,
but they name ones that have like infinite scrolling, liking as like an ability, these sorts of things.
So there are like, like with any law, there are things that maybe are similar to what they are trying to get rid of that aren't necessarily covered under the law.
So having something like to play, you know, I guess devil's advocate, depending on where you land,
this suggestion of just generally supporting parental oversight tools on all platforms and supporting mental health
treats sort of things that are like social media addiction, make some logical sense.
With any of these bills, there's going to be particularities that are brought up, because we haven't read the bill.
So like, even if you are broadly for the idea that, you know, children under a certain age shouldn't be allowed to create accounts and use social media,
you might have an issue with the way that these bills are presented and like some of the language in them.
And that's a lot of the opposition to certain bills in the process of government often comes down to like, okay, the bill is about this,
but they also have this little section that's like saying that they're going to do this and I'm against that.
So then you have to oppose the bill broadly and that's, you know, that's why things take so long.
In case you were wondering why nothing ever gets done, it's because, you know, there's so many safeguards in place.
If you want something else, then you might have to, you know, try to get that, I don't know, communist revolution going, if that's what you're into.
You alluded to something earlier that I think is important to remember when you're, when, you know, we're talking about all these like, tick-tock bands and social media bands and whatnot.
Spoilers. Yeah, spoilers. We are going to talk about the tick-tock band as well in a few minutes.
It's that these bands are targeting the features of the platform themselves, the kind of addictive qualities, the constant notifications you get,
the algorithmic like tendency to push certain types of content over other types of content.
It's not the content itself that's the problem, it's the way that the platforms are dealing with it that ends up being just like...
That are, you know, enticing you to spend more and more time on the platforms.
You know, at the risk of sounding like an old man, when I was young...
Well, there you go, you already did it. When I was in, when I was in high school, you know, we had MSN, chat or whatever.
Facebook really started once I was in second year university or first year and...
I remember asking some honeys for their MSN messenger.
That was a big deal when I worked up the courage to do that.
See, I was too busy talking to the chatbot.
There was a chatbot? They had a chatbot on MSN and you could go and talk to them.
I mean, it was talk to it. It was very, very, very simple and you could kind of exhaust all the possibilities of conversation with it in like a few minutes.
But it was like... Anyway. It was actually really interesting.
It was before LLMs and all that obviously. But regardless, I didn't have to deal with this like toxic sludge growing up.
Yeah. And there is like... And I can't imagine what it's doing.
I can see why people don't want their kids on social media.
Especially because like, you know, the one argument for why kids should be on social media is because their friends are on social media.
And that's not a good argument for everything. Parents have been dismissing that argument for years with bridge-based arguments.
Yeah. It's a bridge-based arguments at the core of...
Yeah, jumping off bridge arguments. This bill, as we've said, is far from being actually enacted.
They're definitely going to face legal challenges both from, you know, groups that oppose them, oppose the idea just on like political merits.
And they're also going to be definitely opposed by the social media companies because you can make a law as much as you want.
The people that make money? You can make a law, you can make regulations as much as you want, but then it's going to be up to the companies that you're regulating to enact those regulations.
We're seeing this with the EU and their attempts to wrangle Apple and Google and Microsoft are apparently being really easy on.
Doing some of the greatest bureaucratic work of our time.
Yeah, kind of. There are some missteps, but that's not what this video is about.
Again, we're not in Europe and Europeans probably have their own thoughts about this legislation and all that.
But regardless, you know, to use the EU as an example, they say, okay, you have to allow third-party app stores Apple, and Apple's like, okay, this is how we're going to do it.
Let us know. Weeks pass. In the comments.
Weeks pass. The EU finally says, hey, that's not okay.
And the Apple says, oh, okay, we'll come up with something else.
Weeks pass. Here's our new law. You know, now I'm going into the future.
This hasn't happened yet. But it's going to be a process.
And in the meantime, how many kids' brains will be melted and slurped?
By Mark Zuckerberg. Yes.
To fuel his reptilian regime and body.
To give him the fuel to BJJ Elon Musk.
Another thing to consider about this, you know, the fallout is how related companies.
I mean, I don't know if, if, uh, Prawn Hub, I think has how you can say without-
They have the best frickin' seafood.
Without the, without the algorithms catching you.
Uh, you know, are they a social media site?
Is YouTube, I think technically is a social media site?
There is a lot of interesting things that are post on Prawn Hub that are not prawn-based.
They may be shrimp or crawfish based. That's true.
But regardless, I mean, you could view that as a form of social media.
Yeah. People are in the comments saying things that they would also say in YouTube comments.
I know. I've read our YouTube comments. Actually, that's a great point.
Will YouTube, will these kids be allowed to go on YouTube?
Oh. YouTube has a whole kids app.
No, that's, that's gone now. You sure?
I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure they got rid of YouTube kids.
You can go ahead and check that out. But they definitely do have like infinite scrolling and liking and, um, all of that.
So YouTube could be one of those forms of social media that kids are not allowed on,
which YouTube's definitely gonna have a problem with, because that's big business.
YouTube, uh, child entertainment on YouTube is massive.
Look at Coco Melon as just one, as the most well-known example.
And that's just one. Oh, I mean, don't even get me started on crappy kids content.
Well, yeah, apparently YouTube kids, I think, is still a thing. Okay.
Um, which I know because I went to use it.
You have a YouTube kid? I have a YouTube kid.
He's got his own channel. We're gonna support him.
Uh, get him, get him sponsor brand deals. Welcome to my channel.
Today we talk about dinosaurs.
This, this Dimetrodon.
Anyways, Pronhub, uh, said they're prepared to block Florida if, uh, the child safety law takes effect,
because, um, they're gonna require IDs.
Yeah. And I think that a big part of- That's sort of the early example of this, of this sort of legislation,
is that there's, like, even California, they introduced laws to try and make, like, IDs,
like, try and ID users to prevent them from going and looking at adult sites,
like, like Pornhub. Right.
And that's actually, you know, as well, a fair criticism of this type of law,
is that, okay, your kids are going online and now you're requiring them to give social media companies
even more sensitive data about them in the form of, like, your government ID.
Yeah. So, you know, that's, that's one fair objection to the whole thing.
Or their frickin' biometric data, which is something that was, it's not been put into effect,
but it was something that was suggested by, I believe, the United Kingdom,
because that's something that they're looking into in terms of, uh, is, is,
is solutions to preventing, uh, children from, you know, accessing.
Right. Uh, let's say red band, red band content.
Right. Yes. So Pornhub, Pornhub is incentivized to, you know, stop this law from being enacted
because a lot of their users don't want to have to put in IDs and whatnot.
Uh, but at the same time, I don't want to be ID just to watch all of my math tutorials.
Math, math-ter. There is a dude on there just does calculus, like, tutorials.
Does he call it math-terbation? No.
The other argument that Pornhub gives, though, is the fact that, like, okay,
you're going to stop people from going on our site,
but, like, you're regulating, like, we're going to abide by this
because we're a big company and, you know, we're visible.
We can lose the penis of you, the United States.
Sure. But there's, no, I mean, they're just more visible.
But they're, they're, they're tons and tons and tons of more, uh, websites out there
that are less regulated and less visible that are still going to host porn.
And then you're just going to push kids and whoever
more towards these sketchier and sketchier sites. That's their argument.
Mmm. I, you know, I, I'm not going to give a take on this right now
because then we're just going to get into the weeds. Yeah.
Um, but we're going to, uh- People make similar arguments about, like,
really objectionable opinions and whether you should be able to share those on social media.
Moderation? Yep. I mean, this is such a deep conversation.
But the thing that I definitely wanted to mention while we're here is the Tiktok.
Mmm. Uh, you know, it's being, it's being widely called the Tiktok Band Bill.
Mmm. Which is a federal, uh, federal legislation.
Tiktok Band Bill, we want Bill back.
Bring him back, Tiktok.
It's being called the Band Bill, but it's not actually a Band Bill.
It's kind of like a, if you don't do this, then you'll get banned.
And the thing that they have to do is- It's an offer you can't refuse, Bill.
Yes. Yeah. They're, they're trying to legislate, uh, that a platform as large and influential,
uh, in American society as Tiktok- And foreign operated.
As Tiktok has to be owned by an American company.
So the deal is, ByteDance, the owner of Tiktok, has to sell Tiktok, uh,
divest itself of it in order for Tiktok to remain operating in the U.S.
Mmm. And- Without VPNs.
I don't, I really don't know where I personally sit on this,
but one thing that we do know is ByteDance doesn't want to sell.
Well, China doesn't want ByteDance to sell.
It's both. Well, I mean, yeah. I mean, but that's the whole reason.
Who wants to, who wants to get rid of a literal pile of money?
Yeah. No one. No one's gonna, you know, you're right, America.
I'm going to take this giant pile of money and I'm going to set it on fire Joker style.
Well, that's the, so this is the whole question.
It really comes down to, because ostensibly the reason why the U.S. government wants to ban Tiktok
is because of this whole thing that China has with certain, well, with all companies
technically. I think I'm not sure whether it's a threshold thing, but companies have to give the Chinese
government data when the Chinese government comes knocking.
And the U.S. knowing about this law is suddenly now, I mean, years ago.
They've done things. They've banned it from work phones for government officials.
But the reason, the reason they're doing all that is because now they're treating basically
every Chinese company as if it's the CCP.
Yeah. And I mean, that remains to be seen, whether that's kind of, because we don't know.
Not without reason, because there were reports that came out that ByteDance employees were
able to access the location of journalists.
Yes. Using Tiktok. I think that unquestionably, well, but the question is, are they giving that data to the
government? Yeah. It's one, like obviously social media companies are tracking our every thought, you know, but
the question is, are ByteDance and other big companies, Chinese companies that have been
the bad guy in the tech world for a spell, Huawei, are they actually guilty of just straight
feeding data from users to the Chinese government?
And I don't think you're crazy if you think that that's the case. I think that it's reasonable to think that if you're dealing with a Chinese company that
the CCP could easily get their hands on that data if they don't already.
However, I also don't know how much we should act as if when we're dealing with Tiktok,
the CCP owns all these companies, because they don't own them.
Yeah, but they have incredible influence on them. But even if they're not giving location to the CCP, another question that I would raise
because of the point I raised, because I double checked it and I looked at sources now, is
do you want to trust a company that even if they're not giving your location to China,
their employees can improperly access data on the location of journalists?
Yeah, and apparently they've done things to make that better.
They did, like, move their servers, so they store North American users' data in North
American servers, and I believe that elsewhere data is stored in Singapore.
I mean, they're located in Singapore. I think European users' data is stored on the European server.
But, you know, I don't know.
There's so many unknowns. The other argument, of course, is why is America just doing this for the one Chinese social media platform?
What about all the American ones? The real-time location of all those 14-year-olds is the property of the U.S. government.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, right.
Is that a double standard? This is kind of why when it comes to Chinese phones, I have, like, I don't know how to feel.
Because on the one hand, you have your North American phones, or whatever, or non-Chinese phones,
that is almost certainly giving data to these big social media companies
who may or may not give it to the government if they ask.
On the other hand, you have these Chinese phones who are like,
let's say, for the sake of argument, they're certainly giving it to the CCP.
Support American-made spyware. Which one's better?
It's almost like I would rather have my data being harvested by someone who barely,
like an entity that barely affects my life.
The CCP may be through, like, broad economic trends, like it gets around to me,
but, like, if they know, you know, my preferences and where I work, it's like,
do I care more about that or do I care about, like, a local company,
or a local government agency that is going to exert more power over my life directly?
Do I care about them having it? It's like, I don't know.
I don't know. We live in a world where, if I'm not mistaken, a few years ago,
there was a lovely young woman who was, I believe, the student body president
of the University of Toronto, and she just happened to be from Tibet.
And when she was elected, or when she made a certain post,
wouldn't you know what? She was bombarded with negative sentiments from Chinese-speaking people.
And one of the things that came up was whether or not that was foreign action.
Like, these are possibly foreign agents trying to fight the, you know,
what's the most diplomatic way for me to say this?
That Tibet exists?
To fight that, whether Tibet is its own thing or whether it belongs to China?
For a lot of people in the world, that may be a controversial statement. Yeah, it is.
It is for a lot of people in the world. So, like, that was something that straight up affected Canadians.
Right. And so, on the other hand, you might say that China having your preferences is the entity
that's going to least affect you on a daily basis. But on the other hand, it might be the one that most affects you on a daily basis
because they literally, they may or may not have agents that are just, their whole job
is to, like, just hurt people on social media. Yeah.
Well, I mean, so, like, you kind of bring up an important question because it's like,
you could view TikTok as a foreign agent if you're making this connection between them
and the CCP. And then it's like, okay, say, for the sake of argument, that there's a connection there.
We have already, like, as it regards this bill, there has been China influenced action
on American citizens. Yeah.
And once news of this bill came out, TikTok made a push note, they pushed a notification
to TikTok users saying, hey, this bill is being passed through Congress.
If they pass it. No TikTok for you.
TikTok could be banned. They're saying that it's not a ban, but, like, trust us, it's a ban.
And then all the people who depend on TikTok for their businesses and who, like, for them,
it's like a way of life. Or just like dancing.
Sure. They called, they were told by TikTok to call the representatives, and they did en masse.
Phone lines were flooded.
Threats were made. Well, I mean, that's just what happens.
Yeah. So, like, you have a foreign-owned company telling its American user base, which is huge,
to go and enact some thing, take some action that affects the U.S. government, and it happens.
That's a little scary. It is a little scary. It is a little scary.
I mean, I feel like... Like, it's just calling, but... I feel like Met has tried to do something similar, and they...
I don't know if they succeeded or failed, but does that...
What is China doing that the U.S. is failing at, that they can get this loyal following
and get young people actually interested in politics?
Well, apparently, the thing that TikTok is doing well is their algorithm.
Yes. It's widely regarded as the best recommendation algorithm in the industry, and a big reason
why... It works so fast. It's so fast, and it's so good at serving people exactly what they want to see and what
will be interesting to them. And so, like you said earlier, China doesn't want to sell, BiteDance doesn't want to sell.
The reason China is definitely...
They are invested in not selling is because in order to sell TikTok to an American owner
or whatever, they would have to grant a technology export license for the TikTok algorithm, which
in their mind is like, this is like a Chinese asset. This is like innovation that happened here, and now we're going to give it to someone
else. They don't want to do that, obviously. It would be like Oppenheimer granting an export license on the nuke to Russia.
It would be exactly like that. I haven't seen the movie, but I'm assuming.
He didn't grant it. They got it anyway. They did.
Via espionage. Yeah, but we've been trying. We can't build our own nuke, a.k.a. good algorithms.
So, yeah, apparently the bill, the TikTok ban bill, quote unquote, is stalled in the Senate
right now because the House passed it like crazy, the Federal Congress.
It was a landslide, and now it's got to the Senate, and now people are kind of like waking
up and realizing, wait a second, this is a bit more complicated.
This is a tech company. They're regulated by a buttload of different government committees and agencies, and so
that's going to be complicated. That brings up an interesting point on why this bill might be stalled.
This is the right way to go about this, because not only was this bill happening, but now
it's come out that apparently the FTC could sue them.
Now, if you don't know what the Federal Trade Commission is, you might know their little
known failure where they didn't stop Microsoft from acquiring Activision Blizzard.
They're still trying. Even though...
They're doing their darndest. Everyone else is acting like it's already happened. Yeah.
Well, it did already happen. What they're trying to do now is make them divest. Right.
Good luck. Reverse. Uno reverse card.
Shot, shot, slide. Reverse, reverse. But now it's come out, at least according to a few sources that we've seen, one from
Politico, that they are investigating TikTok over faulty privacy and data security practices,
and they could sue not just TikTok, but maybe also ByteDance, because they're weighing the
quote from the source, Politico source. They're weighing allegations that TikTok and its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance
deceived its users by denying that individuals in China had access to their data and also
violated the children's privacy law. So even if the TikTok ban bill doesn't go all the way through, they're still going to
be in trouble in one way or another. It's hard to see how this is going to end with TikTok just chilling.
It's like nothing changes, because the government clearly wants something's got to give.
They want their pound of flesh. So we'll have to see.
There's so many questions about whether government even has, whether this is actually the proper
role of government to try and regulate platforms in the way that it's trying to do.
Like obviously state governments are doing their own thing, and the federal government
has national security issues.
Those are at play here. But I don't know, it comes down to whether you believe that you have a fundamental constitutional
right to swipe up and down all day, and whether your kids do too.
And occasionally swipe left and swipe right. So that's all from us.
There's a little meandering today, but there's a lot of topics that we kind of wanted to
cover. There are a lot of questions to ask. Let us know in the comments what you think about the social media bands, and whether
you think TikTok is going to cause climate change.
And yeah, maybe we'll see you in the next one. And then also tell us, what is your favorite animal for a little bit of positivity?
Just tell us what your favorite animal is, and then tell us why we're wrong on everything.
And why is it the red panda, even though there's like 1,200 left of them in the wild?
I don't know why you chose the one, like one of the two Chinese animals, like they're
going to think we're... I love the red panda. They're going to think we're like false flags now.
We've been bought by China. Watch Three Body Problem, and then you won't think the CCP's so great.
Okay, subscribe to TechLink. See you later.
Bye. I love you too.
Oh, okay there.