by Jake Goldstein-Street, Washington State Standard
Avery Ping had a knack for noticing who in a room might be having a bad day and checking in on them. He wanted to be a psychiatrist.
But the Olympia teen was addicted to his screen, his father Aaron said. He wanted to get away from his phone, and Aaron was adamant about limiting his screen time.
“For a developing teenage brain, it’s going to be training that brain for impulsive behavior,” Aaron Ping said. “Dopamine reward schedules, it has a really harmful effect on the developing mind.”
Aaron Ping feels that effect is what led Avery to seek out the hallucinogenic drug MDMA on Snapchat in late 2024, leading to his overdose death. He was 16.
Now his father is pushing for a measure in Washington state to set up safeguards for children online.
House Bill 1834 aims to protect youth in multiple ways.
It would block companies like Instagram, YouTube and TikTok from providing “addictive feeds” to minors. Youth consumers would still have access to the platforms to search for specific content and follow users they’re interested in.
Under the bill, companies also couldn’t send push notifications to minors overnight or during school hours without parental consent
“It’s really the first step that has to happen before we can start to make it safe online,” Ping said in an interview.
The Senate passed its version of the legislation last year with some bipartisan support, but it stalled in the House amid constitutionality and privacy concerns. The bill comes at the request of state Attorney General Nick Brown. It also had Gov. Bob Ferguson’s support last year.
As attorney general, Ferguson sued TikTok and Meta over the platforms trying to reel in youth users and get them hooked. Both cases are ongoing.
Lawmakers and advocates, including former tech executives, are renewing their push for the state guardrails this year.
The tech industry isn’t happy.
Rose Feliciano, the executive director of TechNet in the Northwest, said in a statement that the organization “and its member companies are committed to providing safe, age-appropriate online experiences for young people.”
“But we are concerned that the bill, as currently drafted, would limit companies’ ability to offer the full range of parental controls needed to help keep children safe,” said Feliciano, whose organization is made up of a bipartisan network of tech executives. She also noted constitutionality concerns.
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TechNet members include Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Meta and Google.
In a letter to lawmakers Thursday, the tech lobbying group NetChoice said the issue should be left to parents, and that legislation like this replaces “parental judgment with state diktat.”
Amy Bos, the group’s vice president of government affairs, argued the proposed regulations violate the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. NetChoice prefers focusing on digital literacy and helping parents guide their children’s internet use to address the problem.
Children’s Alliance Executive Director Soleil Boyd said advocates have worked hard to ensure the legislation is “legally defensible and really will make a difference.”
“You bring in these algorithms that really are targeting young people, children and kids to make sure that they stay online for as long as absolutely possible,” Boyd said. “It’s more than most parents can do to really fight and combat that.”
View from the inside
Kelly Stonelake worked at Meta for nearly 15 years, including leading the expansion of the company’s virtual reality software, Horizon Worlds, to kids and teenagers.
For much of her career, Stonelake, who also worked at Apple, believed that her company was going to do right by its consumers. She would’ve argued against overregulation.
But she said it was an open secret within Meta that with Horizon Worlds, children were using a product they weren’t allowed to without parental oversight, meaning the company was collecting their data in violation of federal law. The only concern was for how issues would affect the company, not the young users of the products, she said.
“The executive team got into the product to play test it and kind of understand it better ourselves, but we could not even hear one another over the sounds of screaming children,” Stonelake said.
Stonelake, who lives in Normandy Park, believes she was laid off from Meta in retaliation for raising concerns. She is suing the tech giant over the alleged retaliation and gender discrimination. (Meta didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
She’s now become passionate about working on bills like Washington’s, which she calls “common sense regulations that we need to protect kids.”
“Because I’ve seen firsthand that these companies won’t,” Stonelake said.
In 2023, about 70% of Washington 10th graders reported using social media several times a day. Those students were likely to have worse grades.
Nearly half of 10th graders were at risk of what is called “problematic internet use” that could be risky or impulsive and lead to bad consequences. Those students were likely to get less sleep than their peers. And 8% reported increased social anxiety due to internet use.
“If we can get way upstream and we can prevent it from happening in the first place, and this is exactly that,” said bill sponsor Rep. Lisa Callan, D-Issaquah. “Let’s prevent some anxiety and depression from happening in the first place.”
In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General recommended policymakers limit social media access to keep youth safe and better protect their privacy online.
Another bill under consideration in Olympia looks to protect young people online by requiring kids age 16 and younger to get parental consent to make social media accounts. Last year, Democratic lawmakers proposed a new tax on social media companies to fund youth behavioral health care.
The legal state of play
A number of states have enacted legislation tackling this issue, but such laws have faced legal challenges.
Washington’s measure is modeled after a California ban on addictive feeds that has withstood court scrutiny. Last year, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the law’s requirement of parental consent for minors to access addictive feeds. Meta, Google and TikTok have since sued to block the California law.
Tech groups like NetChoice argue regulating internet content and restricting what feeds minors can have is unconstitutional.
Seann Colgan, a state assistant attorney general focused on consumer protection, argued the Washington bill doesn’t run afoul of freedom of speech protections.
“It doesn’t restrict kids’ access to speech,” Colgan told a state Senate panel Thursday. “Kids can still access the speech, they just need to look for it themselves instead of having it fed to them in an addictive manner.”
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