Maryland Kids Code, a law that will require social media companies to do more to safeguard children, went into effect Tuesday.
“The biggest tech companies in the country will now be required to innovate in the name of Maryland kids’ well-being and respect their privacy, opening the door to a future where all children and youth can thrive online and parents can rest easier knowing basic consumer protections are in place to protect their families,” the Maryland Kids Code Coalition wrote in a statement Tuesday.
The legislation was sponsored in the Maryland General Assembly by Del. Jared Solomon (D-Dist. 18), who represents Chevy Chase and Kensington, and Sen. Ben Kramer (D-Dist. 19), who represents Silver Spring.
The primary focus of the law is to protect children’s privacy and prevent children from being inundated with harmful or inappropriate content that they weren’t looking for. This could result in tech platforms limiting autoplay videos for children, as YouTube has in the U.K. Another example is requiring new social media accounts to be set as private as a default. It would also implement strategies to prevent anonymous adults from contacting children online.
The legislation mirrors a child internet safety bill signed into law in California in 2022 that was modeled after landmark laws in the United Kingdom. known as the Age Appropriate Design Code.
Solomon explained in an April 8 interview at the General Assembly in Annapolis that there are two main pieces to the legislation with different start dates.
The part that became law on Tuesday says that internet companies “can no longer harvest the data, they can’t post location information, they can no longer use dark algorithms” when it comes to kids, Solomon said.
The other piece of the legislation will go into effect in 2025.
“It will be sort of an entire new framework for the way in which companies are supposed to look at their products,” Solomon said. “That’s through the use of data protection impact assessments, which will really require them to analyze their products for the potential harm that they might cause to young people. When weighing those harms, the harms have to weigh more than the potential profit.”
Kramer said during a May 9 press conference that the legislation was needed to prevent big tech companies from taking advantage of kids, and that the government had to get involved.
“The bottom line is big tech has been preying on and victimizing our children for way, way too long,” Kramer said.
Solomon introduced the legislation in 2023, but it didn’t get past the committee stage. In an interview with MoCo360 on opening day of the 2024 General Assembly session on Jan. 10, Solomon said he learned from lawsuits involving the California law and so reworked the language in the new version of his bill to make it stronger and more likely to pass.
While digital gaming platform Roblox put full-throated support behind the similar California law, not all tech industry groups are on board with this type of legislation. NetChoice, a trade group that counts Google, Meta and Amazon as members, sued to block California’s version of the age-appropriate design code law.
It argues that the law violates companies’ constitutional right to make “editorial decisions” about how they moderate content.
Litigation is ongoing. In August, a federal appeals court decided to uphold much of a lower court’s injunction of the California law, saying that Big Tech companies’ claims of potential First Amendment violations through product review could be valid, Maryland Matters reported. But the Maryland Kids Code Coalition praised some parts of the court’s ruling, which also said a lower court may have gone too far when it issued a preliminary injunction.
Solomon has consistently said he believes the Maryland law could face legal challenges.
“In regards particularly to the lawsuit in California, we tried to make our bill stronger to allow it to pass constitutional muster in federal court, because more than likely, opponents are going to try to litigate this,” Solomon said in April.
