Bill mandating access to minors’ social media messages advances to Senate floor

Legislation aimed at safeguarding minors from online predators is heading to the Senate floor after clearing its last committee hurdle.

The Senate Rules Committee voted 21-0 for SB 868, which would require social media companies to provide Florida law enforcement authorities with tools to decrypt encrypted messages if the user is underage.

Police and prosecutors would have to present the companies with a subpoena or warrant to gain access to messages. The bill would also require companies to grant a minor’s parent or legal guardian access to all the child’s accounts, and the platforms would be forbidden from allowing minors to use or access messages designed to disappear, like those on Snapchat and Instagram.

The bill, sponsored by Spring Hill Republican Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, faced opposition Wednesday from more than a dozen youths and tech advocacy groups like NetChoice and TechNet. Many contended that decryption would compromise the online security of all users, citing examples of governments and private companies being breached in recent years, including several in Florida.

GrayRobinson lobbyist Chris Carmody, representing Facebook parent Meta, said that when it comes to end-to-end encryption, it’s an all-or-nothing equation.

“If you create a key to unlock it, you’ve now unlocked everything or potentially unlocked everything,” he said. “The way this bill is drafted right now, that would do just that. It would create a backdoor.”

Ingoglia rejected that assertion as an “industry talking point” that social media giants are using to skirt what in every other situation would be a clear black-and-white issue. He also balked at claims that conforming to the bill’s dictates is too tall or expensive a task to be possible for them.

“We are now in an environment today where we’re talking about AI micro-nano-computers moving through the bloodstream of humans, being able to potentially detect cancer cells in people. That’s how advanced we’re getting,” Ingoglia said.

“They cannot tell me with a straight face that they cannot code something that can decrypt something on a one-time basis for the purpose of retrieving the evidence needed in court to put sexual predators away and then close the door right behind them.”

SB 868 would build on a law Gov. Ron DeSantis signed last year that prohibits children under 14 from having social media accounts and requires parental permission for 14- and 15-year-olds. It is one of the most stringent social media bans in the country and faces an ongoing legal challenge.

Ingoglia decided to file SB 868 after participating in state sting operations to catch online predators and seeing the disturbing activity firsthand. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 1 in 5 children per year receive unwanted sexual solicitation online. One in 33 are targets of aggressive sexual solicitation, which involves pushes by the culprit to make offline contact. And at any given time, some 50,000 predators are on the internet actively seeking out children.

State Attorney Amira Fox of the 20th Judicial Circuit said it isn’t just some social media sites that are contributing to the problem; it’s all of them, it’s getting worse and the companies aren’t helping to fix it.

“This is attracting a lot of people who want end-to-end encryption for nefarious purposes, so when we issue a subpoena now … we get back, ‘We don’t have anything.’ They can’t report this anymore because they can’t see it. … This is incredibly dangerous.”

State Attorney Brian Haas of the 10th Judicial Circuit offered a similar perspective. But when asked by Senate Democratic Leader Jason Pizzo, a former Miami-Dade County prosecutor, to say which companies have been uncooperative, Haas declined to offer specifics.

“It’s more than I can name,” he said.

“Name one,” Pizzo retorted. Haas didn’t.

Pizzo also asked Ingoglia whether SB 868 would, in effect, mandate social media companies to acquire more physical space for servers on which the otherwise disappearing messages must be stored, and for how long. He noted that in cases of physical crimes like robbery and murder, CCTV footage prosecutors sometimes use is often on a loop that lasts for a finite timespan.

Ingoglia said it was a good question and would ask law enforcement officials and prosecutors whether there was a time limit that runs “concurrent with the statute of limitations on some of this stuff.”

The bill’s House companion (HB 743) by Republican Reps. Michelle Salzman of Escambia County and Tyler Sirois of Merritt Island has one more committee hurdle to surmount before reaching a full vote by the chamber.