Colorado lawmakers are considering three bills that would change the way children use social media, including age verification requirements and timed pop-up warnings about the impacts of social media use on mental health, as well as tools for parents that limit their child's access to features like appearance-altering filters, endless scrolling and private messaging.
"Our kids can't wait. We can't sit by and let the harms of social media continue to mount," says state Senator Dafna Michaelson Jenet, a sponsor of one of the bills. "We know what will make it better. What we need is the courage to get to work and change the world our kids are growing up in."
Nearly 40 percent of Colorado high-schoolers reported feeling sad or hopeless almost every day for prolonged periods in the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment's most recent Healthy Kids Colorado Survey in 2021. From 2016 to 2021, the rate of young Coloradans who reported poor mental health more than doubled, and children's emergency room visits for mental health reasons increased by 140 percent, compared to just 23 percent for adults, according to the 2023 Kids Count in Colorado report.
The report partially attributes this decline in youth mental health to increased use of social media. Nationally, children and teenagers who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of mental health problems, according to the U.S. Surgeon General.
Controlling Content
Michaelson Jenet's measure, Senate Bill 158, would create a proposed age verification and parental tool requirements. Specifics on how social media platforms would verify a user's age would be determined by the Colorado Attorney General's Office. Starting in July 2025, if a user is found to be a minor, the bill would require platforms to provide the user and their parent or guardian with tools to restrict how long the child can spend on the platform while also limiting access to specific features.Parents could also request to receive notifications when their children interact with an adult user's account and when their kids' accounts post or interact with sexually exploitative material. The child would be notified when their parent has these kinds of settings in place, too.
In addition, the bill would prohibit users of all ages from promoting or selling illegal firearms, illicit substances or sexually exploitative material involving minors on social media platforms. According to the legislation, platforms would have to remove any user engaging in this activity and set specific timetables for complying with law enforcement inquiries.
"In every single jurisdiction in Colorado, we see drugs and guns being traded over social media to and between juveniles," Boulder District Attorney Michael Dougherty said while testifying in support of the bill during a March 28 Senate committee hearing. "And we also see children being exploited and sex-trafficked through social media. It's happening in every jurisdiction across the state."
Besides Dougherty, the bill is backed by district attorneys of Denver, Arapahoe County, El Paso County and Jefferson County, as well as nineteen organizations including Children's Hospital Colorado, the Association of Chiefs of Police, the Colorado Education Association and the Colorado Psychiatric Society.
But not everyone is on board. The bill initially received major pushback from marijuana groups who argued it would lead to social media users being banned for posting about marijuana, even though the drug is legal in Colorado. The bill was amended on March 28 to exempt marijuana products from the illicit substance ban. With that change, the bill's primary opponents, Clear Cannabis and Cliintel Capital, both revoked their opposition.
However, the amendment didn't address medical psilocybin, which is now legal in Colorado, or the natural psychedelic substances that Coloradans voted to decriminalize in 2022.
"This bill threatens my livelihood and First Amendment rights," Ashley Troxell, a psychedelic guide in Denver, said during the March committee hearing. "By making it illegal for social media platforms to allow any promotion of natural medicines, this bill threatens to silence valuable education and harm reduction efforts, as well as the sharing of personal experiences that help to destigmatize and promote responsible personal use."
The bill unanimously passed its first vote in the Senate Business, Labor & Technology Committee, advancing to the Appropriations Committee. The vote came after lawmakers heard two and a half hours of testimony from stakeholders, including three Colorado parents who reportedly lost their children to overdoses from drugs purchased on social media.
Chelsea Congdon Brundige said her nineteen-year-old son, Miles, was injured during his sophomore year at the University of Colorado Boulder. He bought Percocet on Snapchat to manage the pain, but didn't know it was laced with "enough fentanyl to kill three people," she said. Miles died instantly in November 2020.
"He's gone now, forever," Congdon Brundige told lawmakers. "I'm here today to remind you that real families and real children and your children are all struggling against the unbridled influence of social media, and it may cost them their lives."
Limiting Time
Another piece of legislation, House Bill 1136, takes a different approach to managing youth social media use. If made law, the bill would require social media sites to display pop-up notifications to users under eighteen who are on the platform for over an hour or who are on it between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., beginning in 2026. The pop-ups would have to include data on the mental health impacts of social media use for young people, which would be collected in a resource bank."It's not different than putting a warning label on a pack of cigarettes," bill sponsor Judy Amabile tells Westword.
Nineteen-year-old Kaitlyn Tollefson spent an average of twelve hours per day on TikTok in high school, the Colorado resident told lawmakers in March while testifying in support of the bill.
"I can confidently say that I am not the only one who has struggled with this," Tollefson said. "I, and so many others, became entirely addicted to these apps, to the point where more than often they were controlling our lives. ... I would scroll on social media losing hours of sleep, skipping meals or using it as an unhealthy coping mechanism, never feeling any better, even after being on it for half of my day."
According to the U.S. Surgeon General, up to 95 percent of teenagers across the country use social media, spending an average of 3.5 hours on the platforms a day, while one-third of teenagers report using social media "almost constantly" and nearly two-thirds report using social media every day.
Two dozen organizations have lined up to support the bill, including the Colorado Behavioral Healthcare Council, Healthier Colorado and the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Two tech-industry trade groups are in opposition: TechNet and the Computer and Communications Industry Association.
Ruthie Barko, TechNet's executive director for Colorado, says the bill has too many specific mandates regarding what the pop-ups have to say and how often they have to be shown, referring to it as "compelled speech."
"We were trying to limit that to ensure that there could be compliance between states," Barko says. "The amount of engineering investment to redesign platforms to specifically comply with one state law, that's not really workable. ... If every state implemented a different version of this, it'd be really difficult to comply with."
Others argue that children and teenagers need to know the specific mental health data the bill asks the pop-ups to communicate.
Seventeen-year-old Eleanor Wynne told lawmakers that excessive social media use shortened her attention span, hurt her grades in school and decreased her motivation to do anything besides scroll. Wynne eventually recognized the negative impact social media use had, but needed to figure it out for herself without any guidance from parents or school counselors.
"We are a generation of youth who have grown up with social media," she said during a legislative hearing in March. "It's all we've ever known. But even though it's been a part of our lives since birth, we've never really been provided the information and tools on how to navigate it safely."
House Bill 1136 passed the House of Representatives on March 11 in a 54-7 vote, then cleared a Senate committee 6-1 on March 25; the bill is currently awaiting a vote in the Appropriations Committee and on the Senate floor. While the legislation has bipartisan support and sponsorship, only Republican lawmakers have voted against it.
Representative Don Wilson voted in favor of the bill in committee but voted against the bill when it reached the House floor.
"I don't know that it's the right way to address the issue, and I know there's so many other ways that we can address the issue," Wilson says. "Whenever we put certain government agencies in charge of certain things, it doesn't always fare well."
Future Steps
The final bill regarding youth social media use, Senate Bill 41, would prohibit online platforms from using features designed to significantly increase or prolong a minor's use. It would also enhance protections under the Colorado Privacy Act for when a minor's data is processed, and bar platforms from using a minor's personal data without their consent for targeted advertising, selling or profiling.This measure, sponsored by state senators Robert Rodriguez and Paul Lundeen, was introduced in January. It has no registered opponents and is supported by nine organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, Colorado Catholic Conference and Colorado Society of School Psychologists, but has not yet been scheduled for its first committee hearing.
Colorado lawmakers aren't the only legislators looking to change how young people engage with social media.
Many bills have been introduced in Congress regarding protections for children and teenagers online, including the Kids Online Safety Act, which is expected to be voted on soon. If made law, the bill would require online platforms to take “reasonable measures” to prevent harm to minors — including online bullying, harassment and sexual exploitation — and let young users limit or opt out of features like personalized newsfeeds, notifications and autoplaying videos.
Florida just passed a law to ban social media for people under fourteen and require parental permission for minors aged fourteen and fifteen. A number of states, including Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas and Utah have recently passed laws requiring parental consent for children to use social media, though some of the state laws face legal challenges.
In Colorado, even with all of these bills on the horizon, more are expected to come.
"It isn't going to fix everything, but it is going to help our kids do better," says Amabile. "It's a first step, and we'll be back next year with some other steps."
