Statement: Amendments to the Massachusetts House social media bill did not address LGBTQ concerns

Human rights, LGBTQ, and civil liberties advocates in Massachusetts were alarmed when the state House of Representatives hastily passed social media “age verification” legislation earlier this month that would require everyone in the state to upload a government ID or submit to a face scan to post online.

Experts have warned that, as written, this legislation (as well as the Governor’s similar proposal), would make kids less safe, while helping the Trump administration attack free speech, undocumented folks, and LGBTQ youth. 

Backers of the bill have repeatedly claimed that concerns about impacts on LGBTQ youth were addressed by an amendment offered by the LGBTQ+ Legislative Caucus in the House. For example, Education Chair Ken Gordon writes this in his Boston Globe op-ed defending the legislation:

“The bill includes targeted safeguards to protect user privacy and preserve safe spaces, prohibiting social media platforms from disclosing a minor’s LGBTQ status or other protected characteristics … the bill passed the House overwhelmingly with bipartisan support, 129-25, including from members of the LGBTQ+ Legislative Caucus.”

Unfortunately, this is misleading. The amendments to the bill, now H. 5366, helped fix one problem with the bill, while making the overall harm of the bill significantly worse. 

The original version of the legislation included a dangerous “parental surveillance” provision that would have allowed any parent (or person claiming to be a parent) to request the data associated with their minor child’s social media account. This raises serious concerns for young people’s privacy, including concerns about LGBTQ youth being outed to unsupportive parents.

The amendment offered by the LGBTQ Legislative Caucus attempted to fix this problem, but in the process created a different, and deadly serious problem. They narrowed the parental consent measure to make it so a parent (or person claiming to be a parent) can now only request the age assurance data that was provided to the company, not all the data. The idea behind this, presumably, is that if my kid creates a TikTok account using a fake ID, I should be able to ask TikTok what info was provided to them during the age check. But I wouldn’t get all my kids messages or their browsing data.

This amendment does nothing to address the fact that many trans people (including adults) do not have a government ID that matches their current appearance, name, or gender marker. Or the fact that most facial analysis systems fail for trans people or systematically identify trans men as younger than they are. Trans youth with unsupportive parents would still be barred from access to lifesaving online resources and community. An estranged and abusive parent of an LGBTQ teenager, even one who doesn’t live with their parents, could still harass and harm their child by getting their social media account shut down, cutting them off from community and safety. It’s also unclear how social media companies would safeguard against abusers, stalkers, and other bad actors pretending to be parents and using forged documents to obtain data on other people’s social media accounts or have them shut down.

But here’s the deadly part: this amendment creates a requirement for companies to permanently store extremely sensitive age verification data (government IDs or biometric face scans) in case a parent requests this data in the future.

The core problem with age verification legislation is that there is no safe way for companies to verify the age of every user. The Massachusetts bills would require everyone to upload a government ID, or submit invasive biometric or other data, to create a social media account. That’s dangerous enough by itself, but even proponents of age verification would say the best practice is for the company to delete all age assurance data immediately following the age check. 

Requiring companies to make users upload their IDs to post is already unconstitutional. Requiring companies to store those IDs in a database forever is extremely dangerous. It also conflicts with the privacy designs in the bill itself, like the requirement “permanently delete all personal information held by the social media platform related to the terminated user”. That requirement has a single exception – “unless there is a legal requirement to maintain the information.” The requirement to hold age assurance information for parents falls under this category.

Companies have a terrible track record of safeguarding our private information. Discord’s age assurance provider, for example, leaked more than 70,000 users’ government IDs and face scans after a hack. Under the Massachusetts law, every single social media platform, from a tiny Mastodon server run out of a basement to giants like Meta, would have to hold on to a massive database of sensitive user information including government IDs.

Identity thieves, stalkers, and creeps of the world will rejoice. So will authoritarians like Trump. Not only are online ID checks unworkable for many undocumented people, they feed the surveillance apparatus that ICE is using to target activists and vulnerable communities. 

From our Boston Globe op-ed: “Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security sent subpoenas to social media companies demanding they hand over the information of people running accounts that monitor and criticize Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Many of those accounts are run anonymously, protecting the activists behind them from persecution. But in a world with mandatory online identity verification, it’s likely that those accounts would have a government ID, name, and address associated with them. Human rights activists have warned for years that online age verification mandates are a gift to dictators and a danger to journalists and dissidents.”

In summary: the amendment offered by the LGBTQ+ Legislative Caucus, while well-intentioned, did not solve the core concerns with H. 5366, and will not protect LGBTQ youth from harm. This amendment also made the surveillance and privacy implications of the bill even worse. 

The path forward is for lawmakers to work closely with civil liberties and human rights experts. There are positive aspects in the House bill, the Senate bill, and the Governor’s proposal, but all require significant changes to avoid doing more harm than good.