Senators Approve Nebraska Age-Appropriate Online Design Code by Voice Vote on Second Reading
LINCOLN – The Nebraska Kids Code Coalition today applauded the Nebraska legislature’s passage of Senator Carolyn Bosn’s LB504, the Age-Appropriate Online Design Code Act, by a voice vote on the bill’s second reading and issued the following statement:
“As parents, families and community members across the state who have urged state leaders to protect our kids online, we thank Governor Pillen and Senator Bosn for their leadership and commend the Nebraska legislature for standing up today and taking real action. With harm to kids and teens accelerating as Big Tech companies continue to harm young people in order to increase their own profits, we will keep advocating for this much-needed legislation that can and will make a real difference for Nebraska’s youngest generation and our future.”
About the Nebraska Age-Appropriate Online Design Code
Social media companies are profiting off the time, attention, and data of young people—creating a vicious cycle of exploitation and harm. Online platforms purposely design their products to keep kids on screens, track kids’ activity, and then monetize the data they collect to increase profits – no matter the cost to Nebraska kids and families.
In Nebraska, more than a third of high school students say they’ve felt sad or hopeless during the past year. During the 2022-’23 school year, only about one in two high-school-aged Nebraska teens participated in any community service or volunteer work at school or church at all, way down from the levels of community participation we saw just five years ago. Meanwhile, social media companies collectively made over $11 billion in US advertising revenue from minors in 2022, according to a Harvard study.
The Nebraska Age-Appropriate Online Design Code would improve young people’s digital experiences by requiring tech companies to implement privacy-by-default and safety-by-design protections for kids online. This means setting high privacy standards by default and avoiding manipulative design. This bill has been designed by Sen. Carolyn Bosn and community stakeholders to incorporate Nebraska values and legal principles. Governor Pillen and Attorney General Hilgers support the bill and stand ready to use its provisions to hold Big Tech accountable and improve online safety for Nebraska’s kids.
Legal Background on the Nebraska Age-Appropriate Online Design Code
The Kids Code Coalition has consistently called out NetChoice, a lobbying front group for Big Tech companies including Meta, Google, Amazon, and Snap, for its self-serving litigation, deceptive lobbying, and misleading public statements to block state laws designed to protect children online. NetChoice is part of a network of Big Tech-funded organizations across the country, and runs a $30-million legal “war room” against kids’ online safety legislation.
The Nebraska Age-Appropriate Online Design Code (AAODC) differs from the 2022 California AADC that has been enjoined by a NetChoice lawsuit in significant ways that make it resilient to potential legal attacks from Big Tech:
- The Nebraska AAODC includes neither the Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) provisions that are a focus of the California AADC litigation nor any other reporting requirement.
- The Nebraska AAODC omits the legal duty of care and best interest of the child analysis that had been included in the California AADC and other previous state bills, including earlier versions of this bill, in order to avoid any potential interpretation that the bill could ever address specific pieces of content or in any other way infringe upon the First Amendment.
- The Nebraska AAODC applies only to known minors on online platforms, rather than to the previous, broader coverage definition of online platforms and services likely to be accessed by minors.
- To identify known minors, the Nebraska AAODC includes a novel definition of actual knowledge that prioritizes a company’s internal data about a user’s age for purposes of marketing or advertising over the user’s self-reported age when there is a discrepancy.
About the Kids Code Coalition
The Kids Code Coalition is a wide-ranging group of national and state organizations dedicated to improving youth online security and privacy by supporting policies that ensure companies prioritize kids’ and teens’ safety and developmental needs when designing digital platforms and products.
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