Northampton resident pushing for school cellphone ban welcomes new social media bill OK’d by House

BOSTON — A Northampton resident on the frontlines of a statewide movement advocating for legislation that would ban student cellphone use during the school day is both excited and relieved that the House of Representatives advanced such a bill on Wednesday.

Emily Boddy, who co-leads the local advocacy group Reconnect Western Massachusetts and serves on a coalition for the state’s Distraction-Free Schools Policy Project, has spent the last 18 months advocating for the cellphone ban.

“We’re really hopeful that this [legislation] will push the envelope. We’ve been working for nearly 18 months with Northampton Public Schools to try to get them to pass the policy,” Boddy said. “We’re really hoping for some movement based on the passage of this bill … we know that bell-to-bell is best practice, we know that when students have this six- to seven-hour break from their phones during the day, they’re really able to settle into that.”

The bill (S 2581, as amended), which also restricts social media use for children and includes language aimed at addressing addictive feeds and protecting vulnerable age groups, passed on a 129-25 vote. Democratic Reps. Erika Uyterhoeven and Mike Connolly voted against the bill, along with the majority of the Republican caucus. Republican Reps. Norman Orrall and Marcus Vaughn cast votes in favor of the legislation.

The Democrats representing Hampshire County all voted “yes” on the bill, while Republican Kelly Pease of Westfield voted “no.” 

While some schools and districts across the state have implemented their own bell-to-bell cellphone ban policies, others, such as Northampton Public Schools, are still weighing whether to implement similar policies.

Discussing model school districts — such as West Springfield and Brockton — that have already implemented phone bans and saw declines in disciplinary issues such as truancy, Boddy explained that although banning phones in schools is not a panacea, it has shown to improve students’ academics and sociability.

Boddy added that a bell-to-bell policy in which students lock their phones in pouches and turn them in to staff at the beginning of the day has shown to be the most enforceable phone restriction option in schools, yielding positive results in districts that have implemented similar policies.

These bans, she explained, have had a positive ripple effect in school districts that have implemented them — in some cases leading to decreased incidents of student-on-student violence.

“One of the things that principals often say as their first reaction [to a phone ban] is that the hallways are bustling again, kids are interacting with each other and not just having their heads down on their phones,” Boddy said. “It’s not just about academic time, which is really important … it’s also about creating a positive social environment for our students where they can thrive and connect face-to-face.”

Boddy helped launch ReConnect Western Mass in 2023 from her living room after she and other parents were alarmed when an older niece of hers began to suffer negative effects of social media.

Inspired by the 2024 book “The Anxious Generation,” by Jonathan Haidt, Boddy began seeking out ways to do more collective action around the issue of youth smartphone use, and sought out other parents and teachers who felt the same way and who had also been personally affected by their children’s smartphone use.

Social media use

The bill also prohibits social media use for children under the age of 14 and requires that social media platforms obtain parental consent for users aged 14 and 15 — a shift that Education Committee Chair Rep. Ken Gordon equated to past restrictions on youth access to tobacco, in a speech on the House floor.

“This is a matter of protecting our children with regard to public health. It’s a matter of standing up to big tech, just as we stood up to big tobacco in the past,” Gordon said of the social media provisions. “When we talk about restricting social media access for children, we’re responding to a growing body of evidence from trusted institutions that have carefully studied these effects.”

Boddy also said she was pleased with the bill’s inclusion of social media age restrictions, referencing a recent lawsuit in which the large social media companies Meta and Youtube were found negligent after harming a young user with design features that were addictive and led to her mental health distress.

Should the law pass, Massachusetts would be the 18th state to place a ban or restriction on children’s access to social media, Gordon said, adding that eight states have passed laws “requiring various forms of age verification, parental consent, or like ours, a combination of the two.”

The bill leans on the attorney general to write regulations for implementation and purposefully does not restrict any particular social media platforms, House Ways and Means Chair Aaron Michlewitz said after a closed-door Democratic caucus early in the afternoon.

Representatives Wednesday evening added language requiring platforms to prohibit a user 14 or 15 years of age from using “addictive social media feeds,” which the bill defines as content provided by a platform employing algorithms that “analyze user data or information on users to select content” for them, including features like infinite scrolling, push notifications or alerts, auto-play video, and displays of personal interactive metrics. 

Language was also added to require social media companies to “set default safety settings to prioritize the health and wellness” of users 14 and 15 years of age, including settings that restrict visibility, sharing and direct messaging to “connected accounts.” The bill defines those accounts as being “directly connected to the user’s account, including, but not limited to, a friend, follower or similar connection with access to view the user’s content.”

Under the bill, platforms can’t send notifications to 14- and 15-year-olds between the hours of 12 and 6 a.m. eastern standard time. 

“Research increasingly links early social media use to anxiety, depression, diminished self esteem and worse. A social media ban for children under 14 is not extreme. It is responsible. We set age limits for driving, for voting, for working, for alcohol consumption — the digital world should be no exception,” Rep. Alice Peisch said. A Peisch bill (H 666) included the concepts behind the social media portion of the bill, Gordon said earlier in the day.

“The bill also establishes a transitional period from ages 14 to 16, in which children can access social media with their parents permission, and gives parents some ability to monitor that access,” Peisch said. 

Concerns arose early Wednesday that provisions in the bill enabling parents to request access to their children’s user data could potentially harm LGBTQ youth, who often find safe spaces in online communities, Uyterhoeven said. Rep. Sam Montaño filed an amendment to the bill that would ensured no data submitted by users was made available to a parent or guardian prior to the bill’s effective date. 

“It’s an LGBTQ safety thing — we don’t want kids to get outed,” Montaño told the News Service ahead of the session. “I understand the impetus of the bill, I understand the concern. Like most things, there are unintended consequences for some people if you’re not the average neurotypical kid.”

Reps added language Wednesday night in a consolidated amendment that “recognizes that there should be some limits on that monitoring in order to protect certain vulnerable populations,” Peisch said. A section of the House bill now reads that, “No social media platform shall share any data related to a minor user and their LGBTQ+ protected status or any other protected status pursuant to chapter 151B.”

A consolidated amendment also added, to provisions enabling parents to request access to data submitted by their child, that, “No social media platform shall provide data other than what was submitted for the purposes of verifying the age of the user.”

Across the country, the industry has challenged social media age verification laws often on First Amendment rights concerns. Progressives Uyterhoeven and Connolly raised data privacy concerns when asked about their dissenting votes. 

“It’s not like, ‘Oh, maybe it will leak or maybe not’ — it’s an inevitability. Having to prove whether you’re a certain age using a government-issued ID or facial recognition, all of those methods, we know that there’s been several leaks that have happened,” Uyterhoeven said. “The fact that we put in no guardrails around that is a massive privacy and data security issue.”

According to bill language, social media platforms would be required to “implement an age assurance or verification system to determine whether a current or prospective user on the social media platform meets the age requirement.” That system would “consist of the best technology available to reasonably and accurately identify a current or prospective user’s age,” per bill text. 

While Connolly supports banning the use of social media for young kids, he said the legislation would require all people to verify their age, and that “big tech would be permitted to retain your government IDs or maybe even biometric data.”

“This is just another area where we’re really opening up the footprint of big tech,” Connolly added. 

Should the bill go to conference committee as anticipated, the Senate would have to determine whether to go along with the social media aspect of the proposal, which was not addressed in the version of the bill (S 2581) that cleared the chamber in July 38-2, and that would ban cellphones for students throughout the school day.