Bill to protect children from compulsive use of social media met with concerns from senators
By Fred Knapp 
, Senior Reporter/Producer Nebraska Public Media
25 de Febrero de 2025 a las 13:00 ·
A proposal that supporters say would protect children from compulsive use of social media ran into First Amendment concerns in the Legislature Tuesday.
Sen. Carolyn Bosn introduced the bill (LB504) for Gov. Jim Pillen, targeting design features used by online companies to appeal to children. The legislation says it aims to prevent compulsive use and psychological harm, including anxiety and depression. It would restrict features like infinite scrolling and push notifications, and prohibit targeting advertising to users under age 18.
Bosn said it’s that targeting, not the content of the advertising, that she’s trying to address. She used an analogy to illustrate the difference.
"I can listen to Froggy 98 and hear an ad for Tide Free and Clear," she said. "‘If it's got to be clean, it's got to be Tide.’ That's their ad. I hear that on the radio. If I turn on Pandora, and I am targeted towards those things because I do a lot of laundry, the ad is still the same. The content of the Tide Free and Clear ad is what I'm hearing on the streaming service. They have just targeted me for that, and what this bill does is say ‘You can't do that to children."
Sen. George Dungan said he agrees with the goal of the bill, to prevent psychological harm. But he criticized the way it is written, which he said gives the attorney general the power to decide whether specific content being pushed through features like infinite scrolling causes that harm.
"My concern is this empowers an entity, the attorney general, to make that determination," he said. "What if somebody makes the decision that a covered design feature like infinite scroll is pushing LGBTQ content, and a determination is made by the supervisory figure that that might lead to depression, so therefore that company is now in violation of that?"
Sen. John Cavanaugh said that was an example of the proposal’s possible threat to free speech. Cavanaugh read the language of the bill about another harm it seeks to prevent.
"‘Highly offensive intrusions on reasonable privacy expectations.’ I don't know what that means, and I don't know who is the one that defines ‘highly offensive.’ Is that the Attorney General's definition of highly offensive?," he said. "I think when you start making a determination about what's offensive to some people, you are inherently implicating speech."
But Sen. Tanya Storer argued that decisions about what to target toward children aren’t even being made by humans, so their First Amendment rights aren’t being violated.
"There's not an individual sitting there monitoring a child's activity and punching in what ads are going to be directed to them," Storer said. "It is computer generated. I contend that computers do not have First Amendment rights."
The Legislature adjourned for the day without reaching a vote on the issue.
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