Utah’s strict new social media laws have some scary implications for the whole country.
If everything goes according to the government of Utah’s plan, around this time next year, there will be some big changes on social media platforms for the state’s residents. Especially — but not exclusively — for the younger ones. They may also, possibly, have an effect on social media users beyond Utah’s borders.
In a ceremony on Thursday, Utah Gov. Spencer J. Cox signed two bills regulating minors’ use of social media, denoting how important and significant he believes these two pieces of legislation are. Combined, the new laws call for social media platforms to verify all users’ ages. Those under 18 will have special rules for their online activity, including curfews; more privacy from advertisers but less from their parents or guardians; and the ability to sue platforms over certain harms, including addiction.
The laws are the first in the country to place such restrictions on kids’ usage of social media. They likely won’t be the last, however, as other states and the federal government are increasingly considering legal restrictions in the name of protecting minors as the potential for harm those platforms pose gets more attention. But opponents of such laws say they will have unintended consequences for the free speech and privacy of people of all ages.
Both laws, which are collectively known as the Social Media Regulation Act, are set to take effect on March 1, 2024. The first, SB 152, requires social media companies to verify the age of any Utah resident with an account on their services. Those under 18 will have to get their parent or guardian’s permission to sign up for an account and to access it at all between the hours of 10:30 pm and 6:30 am, and social media companies can’t advertise to or collect data on minors. The second, HB 311, requires social media companies to ensure that they are not designed to cause minors to become addicted to them, and gives Utah’s minors the right to sue social media companies if they believe they’ve become addicted to or otherwise somehow harmed by a social media platform they have an account on.
At the signing, Cox cited studies that showed how poor mental health in young people can be caused or exacerbated by their use of social media platforms.
“I think we need to do something,” the governor said. “These are first-of-their-kind bills in the United States. That’s huge.”
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There are a lot of things that can happen in the year before most of the legislation’s provisions take effect, including courts striking them down in part or entirely, as the companies or platform users affected by the laws are sure to take legal action to prevent them. The new laws also don’t totally spell out how platforms are supposed to verify users’ ages, as those details will be hammered out in consultation with the companies affected. But it’s pretty clear that they’ll go much further than the easily bypassable age verification services social media platforms currently use to comply with COPPA, the federal children’s privacy law, which depends on underage users telling the truth about their age.
This is a problem for privacy advocates, who point out that identity verification rules take away consumers’ rights to use these services anonymously, while companies get to collect even more of their data than before. And that goes for users of all ages, as the only way to prove you aren’t a child subject to these rules is to verify that you’re an adult. The provisions allowing parents to see everything their child posts and messages are a clear privacy issue as well. The laws are also a problem for free speech advocates, who believe the lack of anonymity will suppress everyone’s speech. That may include children in abusive situations or LGBTQ children who could be harmed if their parents snooped on their online activities.
“These bills radically undermine the constitutional and human rights of young people in Utah, but they also just don’t really make any sense,” Evan Greer, the director of digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future, told Vox.
Defenders of Utah’s new laws, including some children’s advocacy groups, believe that social media platforms are harmful to children and their mental health and that the tools those platforms have implemented willingly aren’t enough. That’s a complaint we’ve been hearing a lot more of lately, especially after Meta whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed that the company knew its platforms harmed minors’ mental health but didn’t do enough to prevent it. In his two State of the Union addresses, President Biden has said that social media platforms are “experimenting” on children. Several bills aimed at children and online services, including social media, have been introduced in recent Congresses. None have passed, but they have bipartisan support, and it appears that both houses of the current Congress are determined to get something over the finish line. Several members of Congress in the recent hearing about TikTok stressed the dangers of all social media platforms on children.
“I suspect that you will see lots of bills like these, and of course we are working with our federal partners as well,” Cox said. “This is one of those rare areas today where we see broad agreement amongst both Republicans and Democrats.”
Indeed, several states are considering children’s social media laws, including Arkansas, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Texas. California passed a law last year that would increase privacy protections for children online. It takes effect July 1 of next year. And Louisiana has a law that requires websites that have a certain amount of pornographic content on them to verify that users are at least 18 before they can view it.
So even if you don’t live in Utah, you should prepare yourself for the possibility that the state you do live in — or even the federal government — will pass something similar. That seems especially likely if Utah’s law survives the inevitable court challenges. There is also a chance that some of these platforms apply Utah’s rules to the entire country, as the borderless nature of the internet makes it difficult to set rules for just one state (see: how several companies have applied provisions of California’s online privacy laws to all Americans).
TikTok and Snapchat did not respond to a request for comment about Utah’s new laws. Meta didn’t say if it intends to challenge the law or if it would simply stop offering its services in Utah to avoid having to comply with it. Instead, the company noted that it already has “more than 30 tools to support teens and families, including tools that let parents and teens work together to limit the amount of time teens spend on Instagram, and age verification technology that helps teens have age-appropriate experiences” and that it will “continue to work closely with experts, policymakers and parents on these important issues.”
Greer believes that “very real harms” are caused by social media companies with business models based on the collection of data, but that there are other, better ways to deal with those harms.
“Rather than pushing for legislation that actually weakens kids’ online safety and security, lawmakers should focus on passing comprehensive privacy legislation,” Greer said. “The FTC and state regulators should crack down on predatory design practices like autoplay and infinite scroll, the use of personal data for algorithmic recommendations, and intrusive notifications.”
OpenAI’s GPT-4 shows the competitive advantage of putting in safety work.
On March 14, OpenAI released the successor to ChatGPT: GPT-4. It impressed observers with its markedly improved performance across reasoning, retention, and coding. It also fanned fears around AI safety, around our ability to control these increasingly powerful models. But that debate obscures the fact that, in many ways, GPT-4’s most remarkable gains, compared to similar models in the past, have been around safety.
According to the company’s Technical Report, during GPT-4’s development, OpenAI “spent six months on safety research, risk assessment, and iteration.” OpenAI reported that this work yielded significant results: “GPT-4 is 82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40% more likely to produce factual responses than GPT-3.5 on our internal evaluations.” (ChatGPT is a slightly tweaked version of GPT-3.5: if you’ve been using ChatGPT over the last few months, you’ve been interacting with GPT-3.5.)
This demonstrates a broader point: For AI companies, there are significant competitive advantages and profit incentives for emphasizing safety. The key success of ChatGPT over other companies’ large language models (LLMs) — apart from a nice user interface and remarkable word-of-mouth buzz — is precisely its safety. Even as it rapidly grew to over 100 million users, it hasn’t had to be taken down or significantly tweaked to make it less harmful (and less useful).
Tech companies should be investing heavily in safety research and testing for all our sakes, but also for their own commercial self-interest. That way, the AI model works as intended, and these companies can keep their tech online. ChatGPT Plus is making money, and you can’t make money if you’ve had to take your language model down. OpenAI’s reputation has been increased by its tech being safer than its competitors, while other tech companies have had their reputations hit by their tech being unsafe, and even having to take it down. (Disclosure: I am listed in the acknowledgments of the GPT-4 System Card, but I have not shown the draft of this story to anyone at OpenAI, nor have I taken funding from the company.)
The competitive advantage of AI safety
Just ask Mark Zuckerberg. When Meta released its large language model BlenderBot 3 in August 2022, it immediately faced problems of making inappropriate and untrue statements. Meta’s Galactica was only up for three days in November 2022 before it was withdrawn after it was shown confidently ‘hallucinating’ (making up) academic papers that didn’t exist. Most recently, in February 2023, Meta irresponsibly released the full weights of its latest language model, LLaMA. As many experts predicted would happen, it proliferated to 4chan, where it will be used to mass-produce disinformation and hate.
I and my co-authors warned about this five years ago in a 2018 report called “The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence,” while the Partnership on AI (Meta was a founding member and remains an active partner) had a great report on responsible publication in 2021. These repeated and failed attempts to “move fast and break things” have probably exacerbated Meta’s trust problems. In surveys from 2021 of AI researchers and the US public on trust in actors to shape the development and use of AI in the public interest, “Facebook [Meta] is ranked the least trustworthy of American tech companies.”
But it’s not just Meta. The original misbehaving machine learning chatbot was Microsoft’s Tay, which was withdrawn 16 hours after it was released in 2016 after making racist and inflammatory statements. Even Bing/Sydney had some very erratic responses, including declaring its love for, and then threatening, a journalist. In response, Microsoft limited the number of messages one could exchange, and Bing/Sydney no longer answers questions about itself.
We now know Microsoft based it on OpenAI’s GPT-4; Microsoft invested $11 billion into OpenAI in return for OpenAI running all their computing on Microsoft’s Azure cloud and becoming their “preferred partner for commercializing new AI technologies.” But it is unclear why the model responded so strangely. It could have been an early, not fully safety-trained version, or it could be due to its connection to search and thus its ability to “read” and respond to an article about itself in real time. (By contrast, GPT-4’s training data only runs up to September 2021, and it does not have access to the web.) It’s notable that even as it was heralding its new AI models, Microsoft recently laid off its AI ethics and society team.
OpenAI took a different path with GPT-4, but it’s not the only AI company that has been putting in the work on safety. Other leading labs have also been making clear their commitments, with Anthropic and DeepMind publishing their safety and alignment strategies. These two labs have also been safe and cautious with the development and deployment of Claude and Sparrow, their respective LLMs.
A playbook for best practices
Tech companies developing LLMs and other forms of cutting-edge, impactful AI should learn from this comparison. They should adopt the best practice as shown by OpenAI: Invest in safety research and testing before releasing.
What does this look like specifically? GPT-4’s System Card describes four steps OpenAI took that could be a model for other companies.
First, prune your dataset for toxic or inappropriate content. Second, train your system with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and rule-based reward models (RBRMs). RLHF involves human labelers creating demonstration data for the model to copy and ranking data (“output A is preferred to output B”) for the model to better predict what outputs we want. RLHF produces a model that is sometimes overcautious, refusing to answer or hedging (as some users of ChatGPT will have noticed).
RBRM is an automated classifier that evaluates the model’s output on a set of rules in multiple-choice style, then rewards the model for refusing or answering for the right reasons and in the desired style. So the combination of RLHF and RBRM encourages the model to answer questions helpfully, refuse to answer some harmful questions, and distinguish between the two.
Third, provide structured access to the model through an API. This allows you to filter responses and monitor for poor behavior from the model (or from users). Fourth, invest in moderation, both by humans and by automated moderation and content classifiers. For example, OpenAI used GPT-4 to create rule-based classifiers that flag model outputs that could be harmful.
This all takes time and effort, but it’s worth it. Other approaches can also work, like Anthropic’s rule-following Constitutional AI, which leverages RL from AI feedback (RLAIF) to complement human labelers. As OpenAI acknowledges, their approach is not perfect: the model still hallucinates and can still sometimes be tricked into providing harmful content. Indeed, there’s room to go beyond and improve upon OpenAI’s approach, for example by providing more compensation and career progression opportunities for the human labelers of outputs.
Has OpenAI become less open? If this means less open source, then no. OpenAI adopted a “staged release” strategy for GPT-2 in 2019 and an API in 2020. Given Meta’s 4chan experience, this seems justified. As Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI chief scientist, noted to The Verge: “I fully expect that in a few years it’s going to be completely obvious to everyone that open-sourcing AI is just not wise.”
GPT-4 did have less information than previous releases on “architecture (including model size), hardware, training compute, dataset construction, training method.” This is because OpenAI is concerned about acceleration risk: “the risk of racing dynamics leading to a decline in safety standards, the diffusion of bad norms, and accelerated AI timelines, each of which heighten societal risks associated with AI.”
Providing those technical details would speed up the overall rate of progress in developing and deploying powerful AI systems. However, AI poses many unsolved governance and technical challenges: For example, the US and EU won’t have detailed safety technical standards for high-risk AI systems ready until early 2025.
That’s why I and others believe we shouldn’t be speeding up progress in AI capabilities, but we should be going full speed ahead on safety progress. Any reduced openness should never be an impediment to safety, which is why it’s so useful that the System Card shares details on safety challenges and mitigation techniques. Even though OpenAI seems to be coming around to this view, they’re still at the forefront of pushing forward capabilities, and should provide more information on how and when they envisage themselves and the field slowing down.
AI companies should be investing significantly in safety research and testing. It is the right thing to do and will soon be required by regulation and safety standards in the EU and USA. But also, it is in the self-interest of these AI companies. Put in the work, get the reward.
Haydn Belfield has been academic project manager at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) for the past six years. He is also an associate fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.
We asked four political strategists and pollsters about what could come next.
Before heading to Waco, Texas, for the first rally of his 2024 campaign Saturday, former President Donald Trump spent more than a week signaling he thinks being indicted on falsifying records charges related to hush money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels will be good for him politically. So much so that he reportedly wanted to be seen in handcuffs. But it’s not clear he’s right.
Trump’s indictment, which at this point appears to be delayed until at least next week, could strengthen support among the Republican base for his 2024 reelection campaign. But it could also turn off voters who have come to see Trump as a liability given his refusal to accept his 2020 election loss, the resulting fallout of the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol, and the bevy of additional criminal and civil investigations he’s facing. Those include probes into his business dealings, interference in the 2020 election in Georgia, withholding of classified documents after he left office, and his role in inciting the insurrection, which could lead to additional indictments.
Even if an indictment earns him votes over his Republican Party challengers in the primary, it’s unclear whether the same would be true in the general election. The news has already splintered his own party, with some of his political opponents, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, invoking it in their lines of attack; others have rushed to the former president’s defense in the face of what they frame as a politically motivated case.
We spoke with pollsters and political strategists from both parties about what they think an indictment could mean in the months ahead.
The case that an indictment may help Trump
Robert Cahaly, senior strategist and pollster at the Trafalgar Group and former Republican political consultant:
With all the stuff that’s out there brewing that could turn into some kind of legal action against Trump, this is probably the weakest case. I think it’s very beneficial for Trump that something so superficial and silly is the first example.
It’s one thing when OJ [Simpson] is in the headlines, and everybody thinks that what he did was horrible. It’s another thing when somebody’s in the headlines and everybody doesn’t think going after them is fair. Trump’s best role has always been a conservative martyr. And this falls right in that … Literally, I can see them selling millions of T-shirts with his mug shot as a badge of honor.
There are a lot of people who really like Trump, but they just don’t think he can win. They just think they need somebody different. This is taking some of those people off the sidelines and making them consider Trump even now in the primary … Whoever’s galvanizing your opposition the most is most likely someone that your fans are going to rally behind.
Whit Ayres, founder and president of the polling firm North Star Opinion Research and adviser to GOP congressional and gubernatorial candidates:
Anything I say is rank speculation completely uninformed by data or evidence. We’re talking about something that has never ever occurred before in American history. There is no data on the political implications of indictment of a former president and leading presidential candidate.
I am skeptical that a charge about a years-old event that everybody has already known about for years is likely to have much impact on anything, other than it will probably rally Republicans and supporters of Trump around him, at least in the short term. This would be a very easy case to frame as a partisan political indictment. Much easier to frame that way than, say, the Georgia voting case or the classified documents or January 6.
It will force every other Republican candidate to react to it, which of course, keeps Trump directly in the spotlight — as he usually is.
The case that an indictment hurts Trump (and his party)
Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist among the few who correctly predicted the results of the 2022 midterms:
I think it will help [Trump] in the Republican primary, but will continue to degrade him with the broader electorate. MAGA has underperformed in three consecutive elections, and we know it doesn’t work in the battlegrounds. And if the Republicans present themselves as the party all for MAGA in 2024, they’re gonna have a very, very hard time winning the presidency.
Trump coming in as the nominee, having been indicted potentially two or three times — there’s no scenario where that’s helpful to him in a national election. It perhaps will help him crowd out DeSantis and other challengers in the primary. But of course, that would be a disaster for the Republican Party. I’d much rather be us than them heading into this next election.”
Matt Dole, an Ohio-based Republican strategist:
Trump faced an uphill battle before this for the nomination. I think [his indictment] probably just adds to that. A lot of folks in the Republican coalition want an option that espouses [Trump’s] policies without bringing the antics. Ron DeSantis, obviously, is the model for that.
Over the long term, I think this probably helps Trump’s opponents in the Republican primary. There’s certainly a lot to be said for political attacks on President Trump. But I think throughout the entire Republican coalition, this probably hurts him more than it would help.
There is a subset of Republicans who are going to support Donald Trump to the very end. And they are loud. And they are well-covered by the media. There will certainly be blowback. But again, all of this is feeding into the fatigue about Donald Trump. So I could personally believe that this is a politically motivated indictment. And I could also believe that it’s just another thing to add to the long list of things that I’m tired of having to defend and deal with as a Republican.”