Massachusetts House advances unconstitutional social media ban bill that will harm LGBTQ youth and human rights

For immediate release: April 9, 2026

The Massachusetts House has advanced H. 5349, a draconian and laughably unconstitutional bill that would ban minors from social media, force social media platforms to enable parental surveillance of teenagers’ online activity, and subject everyone to privacy-invading online ID checks in order to access information or speak out online.

Dozens of civil liberties, racial justice, LGBTQ+, press freedom, abortion access, and human rights organizations have spoken out against these dangerous and misguided “age verification” laws, several of which have already been struck down as unconstitutional in other states.

And a Massachusetts-based coalition of LGBTQ groups including the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition, ACLU of MA, The Queer Neighborhood Council, and the Transgender Emergency Fund have specifically been pressuring local lawmakers on this issue. Late last year, the Boston City Council introduced a resolution condemning “age verification” and censorship legislation, citing harm to the city’s LGBTQ youth.

The following statement can be attributed to Evan Greer (she/her), a Boston-based transgender activist and the director of Fight for the Future:

“Do Massachusetts lawmakers believe that young people have nothing valuable to contribute to society? That’s what this bill seems to say. This legislation would have kicked Greta Thuneberg off social media before she organized her first climate protest. How does that make kids safer?

Trans youth in Massachusetts are already terrified of losing their health care. They’re being terrorized by a bigoted administration. Now Massachusetts lawmakers are advancing legislation that would cut them off from access to lifesaving online resources and support? Shameful doesn’t begin to cover it.

Big Tech social media companies cause real harm, and lawmakers are right to want to do something about it. They should pass privacy, antitrust, and algorithmic justice legislation that actually makes sense and is enforceable., Instead, Massachusetts legislators are actively helping Trump’s authoritarian takeover by pushing for legislation that expands censorship and surveillance. This bill is a gift to the Palantirs of the world –– expanding Trump’s surveillance state by forcing everyone to associate their government ID with everything they post at a time when the DOJ is sending subpoenas to social media companies demanding they hand over the names of people running accounts critical of ICE.

This legislation would make kids less safe, not more safe, while forcing everyone to upload their government ID or submit to a facial recognition scan in order to post online. The definition of “social media” in the bill is so wildly broad it would sweep in almost the entire Internet, including educational resources like Wikipedia.

This is one of the worst versions of this type of legislation we’ve seen. Even red states with conservative supermajorities have avoided some of the parental surveillance provisions present in the Massachusetts bill because they raise such serious concerns for the safety of LGBTQ youth and young people’s right to privacy. Requiring social media platforms to verify parental consent is unconstitutional and completely unworkable. Are parents supposed to upload a birth certificate to Instagram? How will platforms protect such sensitive information given their history of massive data breaches? What happens if there is a custody dispute and parents disagree on social media use? What prevents an abuser from falsely claiming they are their victims’ parent in order to access their social media data? This is a completely unworkable idea that has been abandoned in almost every other version of this type of legislation across the country.

Age verification and censorship legislation will hurt kids and benefit Big Tech. If Massachusetts lawmakers want to address harm, they should listen to experts, scrap this terrible bill and instead advance privacy legislation that strikes at the heart of social media companies’ harmful business practices.”

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