The online age-verification provisions that the Alaska House approved earlier this legislative session to limit social media use by minors are no more.
The Senate Community and Regional Affairs Committee today removed and advanced House Bill 47, a bill largely dealing with explicit AI-generated images, without the sweeping changes that would affect how every Alaskan accesses broad swaths of the internet. Legislators said they were concerned about the legal implications of the measure and whether it would run afoul of free speech and privacy rights.
The inclusion of the age checks by the House followed several other states that have enacted strict restrictions on how minors can use social media platforms, but would require all users to identify themselves to use social media and other websites. How that is verified wasn’t clearly spelled out in the provisions, which were adopted as a floor amendment without the usual legislative process.
If they had been adopted into law, minors would have to obtain their parents’ express written permission to access any social media platform, give their parents full access to their accounts, and obey a 10:30 p.m. curfew on social media.
A legal memo from the Legislature’s nonpartisan attorneys laid out concerns that the limits could run afoul of the state’s privacy clause and the First Amendment. It notes that constitutional rights may be limited only when necessary to serve a compelling government interest, and that any such limitation must be a narrowly crafted solution.
“Presumably any mechanism sufficient to actually verify user age will require the disclosure of identifying personal information, which would burden both adult and minor users’ speech and could limit or eliminate adult and minor users’ ability to speak anonymously on social media, thus raising a potential First Amendment issue,” the memo explains. “This amendment probably advances important government interest in protecting the well-being of minors … But the amendment may burden substantially more speech than necessary and thus violate the First Amendment.”
Rep. Sarah Vance, the Homer Republican who sponsored the bill, told the committee on Wednesday that she supported removing the provision, largely because she worried that legal concerns about the social media rules could sink the rest of the bill.
That’s a point senators agreed with.
“Given the constitutional concerns raised, the sections regarding social media used by minors have been removed from the bill,” explained legislative aide Sorcha Hazelton while introducing the latest version of the bill. “They are also provisions that have they are also the provisions that have received the most opposition in public testimony … The Chair (Sen. Kelly Merrick) felt the foundation of the bill was too important that, for the sake of expediency, we should not have it.”
Legislators, including Vance, said they would be interested in looking at limits in the future, especially as legal challenges to other states’ social media limits are tested in court.
The underlying bill criminalizes computer-generated child sexual abuse material as if it involved a real child. A few of the other changes the bill picked up on the House floor included better legal recourse for people who are defamed or otherwise harmed by computer-generated deepfakes.
The bill next heads to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Bluesky.
