Gong-Gershowitz-Led Landmark Child Social Media Bill Signed into Law

CHICAGO — A bipartisan effort led by state Rep. Jennifer Gong-Gershowitz, D- Glenview, that will help parents better protect their children online was signed into law by Gov. Pritzker earlier today.

“For far too long we’ve let Big Tech go unchecked, and our children have been paying the price,” Gong-Gershowitz said. “This legislation tells social media platforms to help fix an epidemic that they caused by designing addictive algorithms and putting revenue over the mental health and wellbeing of our kids.”

House Bill 5511 creates the Children's Online Social Media Safety Act, which will enable parents to manage the types of content their children can consume online, standardizing and improving on many existing private-market parental controls.

The bill requires device-makers to supply a setting where parents can input their child’s age while setting up a new device. When new software is installed or a new website is visited, the child’s device will supply their age range to automatically trigger a number of settings, unless a parent authorizes otherwise. These settings include:

• Prohibiting social media companies from using addictive algorithms to power social media feeds.
• Preventing notifications from social media apps between 10pm and 7am.
• Requiring apps to obtain parental consent for in-app purchases or any transaction between children and third-parties.
• Requiring companies to apply default privacy settings based on a user’s age to protect the user’s location data and profile information.

Gong-Gershowitz also served as a co-sponsor on Senate Bill 2427, which places new restrictions on the use of personal cell phones in schools, and as chair of the House Democratic AI Working Group, continues to lead discussions on how to protect consumers from the harmful effects of new technologies powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

“The research is clear; unbridled social media access and the ever-evolving nature of the digital age has caused harm to our children’s social lives, self-esteem and their work-product in the classroom,” Gong-Gershowitz said. “These common sense measures are about empowering parents to do right by their kids and ensuring that they can grow, develop and mature in safe spaces that aren’t online.”

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