Meet the Press - March 26, 2023
Interview
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Hey, it's good to be with you again, Chuck. Thanks for having me back.
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Sure there are. And I'm an attorney myself. We looked very closely at this. We worked with our attorney general, my general counsel. We worked with experts across the nation, researchers as well. And all of the -- all of the law that is in question here around the First Amendment really was established in the late '90s, early 2000s before social media even existed. And so we feel very confident that we have a -- we have a good case here. We expect that there will be lawsuits, and we feel confident that we're going to prevail.
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So the Department of Commerce will be handling this. And we understand that there are definitely going to be enforcement issues. Anytime you wade into this type of an industry, it's going to be tough. And we don't expect that we're going to be able to prevent every, you know, every young person from getting around this. Kids are really smart. That's one of the problems. But here's what I would prefer, Chuck. Obviously, I would prefer that Congress act. That's where this should happen. And I think it will. It's amazing to me, we have very conservative members of Congress. Congressman Chris Stewart is running a bill right now, broad bipartisan support. The president, in his State of the Union, said we need to do this. And so I have President Biden, I have very conservative members of Congress working on this together. But the states have to lead out. And that's what we're doing. And I expect other states to follow, as you mentioned. And then that helps Congress kind of coalesce and come to an agreement on how we prevent these terrible harms from happening.
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Sure, sure. And there are legitimate concerns. And we'll be working through those. So one of the provisions in the bill, actually in both bills, these bills don't go into effect for a little over a year, which gives us time to work through all of those questions, making sure that we're protecting the data privacy of the citizens of Utah. Again, making sure that we're figuring out how these will work. In any custody battle, you have issues surrounding kids and their online activity and what they're doing. So those things are already being worked through in lots of contexts, and we will continue to work through. But this is about empowering families. It's about empowering parents. And it's about holding these social media companies accountable for what we know now. This is a data-driven approach. We've been working with Professor Jonathan Haidt at NYU who's been looking at this for many years, collecting research from around the world. And we know this is killing our kids. We have to start there. The harm being done to our children far outweighs. And again, this started well-before Covid. Since 2012, especially among young women, the rates of suicide, depression, anxiety, self-harm have skyrocketed. And every research institution that has looked at this is pointing to social media as the cause.
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Well, we think it's -- again, we don't think it's going to be foolproof. There's no question about that. But we are working with social media companies. Again, over the course of the year we will be going through a rule-making process to figure out what that's going to look like. Again, how do we protect data privacy? I suspect as we look at this that there will be third-party age verification companies that we will utilize to make this happen. We also don't want -- we've seen the leaks that have happened with some of these social media companies. We don't want them having copies of driver's licenses on hand. That's not what we're trying to do here. We believe that there are technical, logical fixes that we can work around this. And that's what we'll be working on over the course of the next year.
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We don't have to prove addiction. We'll be working, again, to look at these. And one of the things that the law does that I think is very interesting, now I think Congress is considering a ban under the age of 16. I think many states, I think Texas is considering a ban under the age of 16. We actually did something a little different. And that is that we gave a private right of action to parents and families to prove -- to be able to sue these companies if there's harm done to their child. And harm is presumed. So it will be up to the social media companies to prove otherwise.
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No. No, I don't because this is real harm. And we think that this will -- this will remove those types of protections. And, ultimately, what that means is social media companies are going to have to be very careful in giving access to these platforms to kids under the age of 16 where, again, brains are developing. It's crazy. Listen, Chuck, there is no other industry where we allow 14-year-olds to contract with major corporations to use their data for anything they want. We just don't do this. We're going to look back ten years from now and think, "What did we do? We destroyed a generation of kids with this stuff."
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That's exactly what we're doing.
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No, no, no. It's about adults too. And, we've got to figure this out for us as well.
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Me too.
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