California Bill Aims to Make Tech Firms Liable for Social-Media Addiction in Children

A pair of California lawmakers introduced a bill that aims to hold technology companies liable for social-media addictions that may affect children.

The bill would let parents and guardians sue platforms that they believe addicted children in their care through advertising, push notifications and design features that promote compulsive use, particularly the continual consumption of harmful content on issues such as eating disorders and suicide.

It would hold companies accountable regardless of whether they deliberately designed their products to be addictive.

The bill, called the Social Media Platform Duty to Children Act, was introduced Tuesday by State Assembly members Jordan Cunningham, a Republican, and Buffy Wicks, a Democrat. It arrives less than a month after Mr. Cunningham and Ms. Wicks put forward another bill, the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, which would force owners of web products to limit the collection of California children’s data, better protect them from other users, simplify convoluted privacy settings and agreements, and curtail addictive interfaces.

The bills were written to improve children’s experiences online from two different angles, according to Mr. Cunningham. Last month’s bill aims to guide companies’ practices, while the new bill is meant to push companies to “bear some of the social costs that they put on all of our children,” he said.

Parents and guardians may choose to sue for the cost of psychiatrists, for instance, Mr. Cunningham said.

The California lawmakers aren’t alone in their efforts. U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) and Cynthia Lummis (R., Wyo.) last month proposed federal legislation that they said would counter addiction to social media. Rep. Kathy Castor (D., Fla.) and Sens. Ed Markey (D., Mass.) and Bill Cassidy (R., La.) have also in the past year also introduced legislation designed to regulate the hold social-media usage can have on children and teenagers.

The number of bills on the topic has increased over the past two years, as has the confidence that some might eventually pass, said Josh Golin, executive director of the nonprofit Fairplay, which argues that social media can exploit children for commercial gain.

Bills introduced before 2020 tended to act more as warnings that regulation was possible, Mr. Golin said. But the 2020 documentary “The Social Dilemma,” which explored the psychological consequences of social-media companies’ business models, and other high-profile reports on social-media companies’ design practices intensified the move toward regulation, he said.

“This is a top issue for parents right now,” Mr. Golin said. “And so I think if one party or both together can get something done, there will be a political benefit to those folks as well.”

Mr. Cunningham said this week’s California bill was partly inspired by The Wall Street Journal’s 2021 reporting that Meta Platforms Inc., the company formerly known as Facebook Inc., found that one in eight of its users reported engaging in compulsive use of social media that affected their sleep, work, parenting or relationships, according to internal documents. Company documents obtained through Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee and whistleblower, also showed the company was aware that its Instagram platform can negatively affect the self-image of teenage girls in particular.

A spokeswoman for Meta said the company disagreed with the characterizations of its research, noting that another survey showed eight out of 10 U.S. teens who use Instagram said the platform either made them feel better about themselves or had no effect. The company also rolled out new features that aim to encourage thoughtful and age-appropriate Instagram usage, including notifications that remind heavy scrollers to “take a break,” and nudges that encourage teens to explore different types of content if they have been looking at one topic too long, the spokeswoman said. She declined to comment on the new bill.

A spokeswoman from ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok, an app popular with teenagers that counts more than 1 billion monthly users, also declined to comment on the new bill, but noted the company has rolled out a number of features to discourage children’s overuse, such as halting push notifications at certain nighttime hours for users under 18, and app time caps that can also be set by parents using its Family Pairing option.

Write to Katie Deighton at katie.deighton@wsj.com