Governor DeSantis signs legislation to protect children and uphold parental rights

Press release from the Office of Governor Ron DeSantis
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Today, Governor Ron DeSantis signed HB 3, which prohibits children under the age of 14 from becoming social media account holders and allows 14- and 15-year-olds to become account holders with parental consent.
“Social media harms children in a variety of ways,” said Governor Ron DeSantis. “HB 3 gives parents a greater ability to protect their children. Thank you to Speaker Renner for delivering this landmark legislation.”
“The internet has become a dark alley for our children where predators target them and dangerous social media leads to higher rates of depression, self-harm, and even suicide,” said House Speaker Paul Renner. “I am proud of the work of all our bill sponsors, Representatives Tyler Sirois, Fiona McFarland, Michele Rayner, Chase Tramont, and Toby Overdorf, for delivering a legislative framework that prioritizes keeping our children safe. Thanks to Governor DeSantis’ signature, Florida leads the way in protecting children online as states across the country fight to address these dangers.”
Specifically, this bill:
- Prevents a minor who is younger than 14 years of age from becoming a social media account holder.
- Empowers parents to decide whether 14- and 15-year-olds can have a social media account.
- Protects the ability of Floridians to remain anonymous online.
In addition to protecting children from the dangers of social media, HB 3 requires pornographic or sexually explicit websites to use age verification to prevent minors from accessing sites that are inappropriate for children.
Overreach. I despise social media but this shouldn’t be up to the government.
They state “Protects the ability of Floridians to remain anonymous online.” Think about this…how can they verify your age without running ID authentication and ID verification as a bank would currently do. The end goal is to know exactly who everyone is online…good luck with any privacy or anonymity. They think we’re all just dumb… perhaps they’re right
He bragged about the freedom he brought to Florida…. Until you’re not qualified as a parent to decide when social media is appropriate for your kids. What will the Desantis Nanny State tell me next, what and when to feed my kids for breakfast? Give me a break!
While I don’t agree with the legislation and courts will ultimately decide the outcome, because of those “not qualified” to be a parent, the state thinks they should lend a hand.
I guess if taxpayers have to provide food and housing we may as well let our elected representatives determine what social media access they’re able to use.
If you want to be a parent – parent.
Yes Jed. Although I applaud him for the way he’s handled many (most) issues as governor, his track record on privacy issues and first amendment issues is horrible. Absolutely horrible.
How so? The Big Tech law passed in 2021, which just was reviewed before the SCOTUS, is a huge 1st Amendment protection. The anti-CBDC stance The Governor is taking is also the biggest privacy concern – ever.
This issue with kids on social media is a real problem, and there isn’t any clean way of handling it in our deep-state run Western World. Kids do need to be protected from the physical (social media is more physically and physiologically addictive than cocaine to many kids – particularly girls), and bad actors (child predators and hostile states like the CCP) want to attack our kids in nearly every way possible. CCP has launched a cultural war on American kids through TikTok, which has shot the percentage that identify as LGTBQ+ from 4% to 25% in 5 years – the global average is 3%. Suicide rates are following close behind – exactly what the Chicoms want.
Where did you get these numbers from?
“identify as LGTBQ+ from 4% to 25% in 5 years – the global average is 3%”
Thank you DeSantis for PROTECTING children and parents.
Here’s our Governor at work:
“The biggest donors in Republican politics largely shunned Ron DeSantis after his presidential campaign began to falter last summer. So his allies turned to donors the Florida governor still held sway over because of his day job.
A state coronavirus response contractor, CDR Enterprises, gave $1 million to his aligned super PAC Fight Right in the final weeks of the campaign. The DeSantis administration has issued purchase orders to the company worth $158 million to help distribute vaccines, treat patients and provide other services, sometimes through no-bid contracts, according to state records.
Herzog Railroad Services — a Missouri company the DeSantis’s team hired to build a $35 million Orlando commuter rail extension — gave $250,000 around the same time to Never Back Down, another aligned super PAC.
And a casino magnate, Jeffrey Soffer, gave $1 million in late July — on the same day that the campaign announced massive layoffs. DeSantis came out in support of Soffer’s controversial bid to transfer a casino license to his Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach weeks after leaving the presidential race.
People involved in the DeSantis fundraising effort described the dependence on donors with business before Florida as part of a strategic shift born of necessity. Lobbyist friends and fundraisers of DeSantis called Florida clients asking them to contribute to the super PACs paying for television ads and field operations — and many of those people gave, according to people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions. The pitch, according to one person who received a call, was that DeSantis was likely to remain a powerful governor in the state….”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/27/desantis-donors-florida-presidential-campaign/
Will be ruled unconstitutional.
It’s a good start. Social media is causing rampant stupidity in our youth, worse than TV ever did.
Gee, the kids will never figure away around this!
Yes, it’s a problem, no, it’s not up to governments to make this kind of parenting decision, even if they could … and they can’t.
Were you not for forced masking of kids?
Yes. Spreading highly contagious diseases is not an individual or parental right.
What is wrong with you?
Nobody takes Covid serious anymore. The game is over. There never was a highly contagious disease floating around. It shouldn’t take you over four years to figure this out
“A total of seven studies with 21,618,297 COVID-19 patients were included in the meta-analysis. The odds ratio (OR) for mortality among unvaccinated patients compared to vaccinated patients was 2.46 (95% CI: 1.71-3.53), indicating that unvaccinated patients were 2.46 times more likely to die from COVID-19…..
…… (since) December 2019, the world has witnessed close to 760 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 infection, and as a result close to seven million deaths as of May 2023. The WHO statistics tabulate 115 million confirmed cases and as a result 1.5 million deaths in the North American Region inclusive of the United States, Canada, and Mexico [1].”
The US did particularly poorly on Covid mortality because of ignorant citizens like you who bought the politicization of the pandemic sold by idiots like our governor and surgeon general who even falsified data in his murderous efforts. Poorer nations did better – see Africa – because their populations were younger, a characteristic not common in the MAGA crowd who bought the BS and are still buying it. While most who had Covid lived and reactions varied by individuals, some suffered greatly and others have “long Covid” which may be with them for the rest of their lives – we don’t know. Those vaccinated who caught do much better and the data I linked to supports that.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10492612/
For every one pro-mask propaganda study we can show you five quantitative studies. It’s a complete fallacy that even N95 masks have any positive impact, but the negative impacts caused real harm.
Why did the USA lag behind? Simple – denying effective treatments such as Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine, Zinc and Quercetin, Fresh Air and Sunshine, and instead the protocols promoted deadly treatments like isolation, fear, respirators and Remdesivir.
You’re confused Truth, but you probably prefer that state. N95 masks and some alternates indisputably effectively resist the flow of Covid carrying aerosol, the primary means for it’s spread. It’s a matter of physics.
“…Figure 1 exhibits a schematic of the problem considered herein. As will be demonstrated in “Results and discussion”, experimental analysis revealed that a commercially available N95 mask comprises five porous layers with hydrophobic characteristic. The hydrophobicity prevents the passage of respiratory fluid by inhibiting the capillary imbibition process. In addition, after the outermost layer of the mask encounters a impacting droplet, secondary droplets are generated, whose kinetic energy slows down upon passage through the first layer due to viscous dissipation. The secondary droplets with a lesser kinetic energy fails to penetrate through the inner layers. In addition, since all the layers are hydrophobic, the passage of the secondary droplets’ liquid via capillary imbibition is also prevented. At last, we compare the performance of the N95 mask to that of a two-layer cloth mask with intermediate HEPA filter layer, and provide conclusive evidence that a HEPA filter inserted into a two-layer cloth mask elevates the performance of a two-layer cloth mask to the level of an N95 mask. Moreover, breathability and comfortability of the designed mask is also compared with those of N95 and other masks, and we found the same order of air passage through all of them. This way, the present work provides a complete proof of the effectiveness of the cloth mask designed earlier by Narayan et al. (2022)….”
It is true that masks do not protect the wearer as much as they protect those in proximity to them as it is possible that droplets from others – like the self centered egotists who won’t wear them in crowded public locations – will settle on the surface of the mask and therefore 1/8″ or less from their face and of course ready to be carried by the wearer’s fingers when removing the mask.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9947910/#:~:text=Specifically%2C%20to%20this%20date%2C%20N,face%20masks%2C%20and%20barrier%20face
“..In summary, masks block some fraction of viral particles from dispersing from those who are infected and from infecting those who are susceptible and are understood to prevent disease transmission through this mechanism. However, this simple understanding has been questioned based upon what has appeared to be mixed empirical evidence. However, studies that did not find masks to be effective had limited statistical power and therefore do not imply that masks are ineffective….”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8499874/
“Does the Cochrane Review show that masks aren’t effective at preventing COVID-19?
The vast majority of the studies assessed by the Cochrane Review ask, “If we give people masks and information about masking, do they get healthier?” Most of these studies find that the answer is, “Not much healthier.”
But there is a problem: giving people masks is not generally enough to get them to wear masks! In piloting in Bangladesh, we found that mask distribution plus information plus involving village leaders increased mask use by less than 10% (we later added other elements that were more impactful). In other scale-ups, masks and information alone did even less. One study in Uganda found that giving people masks and information increased mask use by one percentage point—that is, by 1 in 100 people….
Summarizing all of these studies, the Cochrane Review finds that the average effect is a 5% reduction in illness (COVID or influenza), insignificantly different from zero. But if fewer than one tenth of people were induced to wear masks by the studies in question, this would mean that the effect among mask-wearers was a 50% reduction or more. Now, my point is not that the Cochrane Review shows that the effect is at least 50%. My point is, there is very little information about the impacts of actually wearing masks in the Cochrane Review.
Do the results of your study in Bangladesh contradict the Cochrane Review?
(The Bangladesh study was the largest of all studies on this and involved nearly 350,000 people in 600 villages across Bangladesh and implemented a four-part intervention in the experimental villages.)
“I wouldn’t say the results of our study contradict the studies in the Cochrane Review. I would say our study is designed to answer the question, “Does masking reduce COVID?” while the Cochrane Review is answering the question, “Do mask distribution and information reduce COVID?” At one point, the Cochrane Review states, “Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of influenza‐like illness.” This interpretation is flat wrong given the point above about compliance. The studies they summarize simply do not answer this question.
In Bangladesh, through several rounds of piloting, we arrived at an intervention that considerably increases mask use, achieving a 30-percentage-point increase. A key element of this was having “mask reinforcement”—people in crowded public areas asked people not wearing masks to please put on masks. We found a 10% reduction in COVID. Extrapolating, the total impact of masking relative to no masking (that is, a 100-percentage-point increase) might be three times as large….”
https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/no-that-new-study-doesnt-show-that-masks-are-useless
“Fresh air has around 0.04% CO2, while wearing masks more than 5 min bears a possible
chronic exposure to carbon dioxide of 1.41% to 3.2% of the inhaled air. Although the buildup is
usually within the short-term exposure limits, long-term exceedances and consequences must be considered due to experimental data. US Navy toxicity experts set the exposure limits for submarines carrying a female crew to 0.8% CO2 based on animal studies which indicated an
increased risk for stillbirths.” https://www.cell.com/heliyon/pdf/S2405-8440(23)01324-5.pdf?
“Physio-metabolic and clinical consequences of wearing face masks—Systematic review with meta-analysis and comprehensive evaluation.”
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1125150/
“Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of laboratory‐confirmed influenza/SARS‐CoV‐2 compared to not wearing masks (RR 1.01, 95% CI 0.72 to 1.42; 6 trials, 13,919 participants; moderate‐certainty evidence). Harms were rarely measured and poorly reported (very low‐certainty evidence). ”
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6/
See above on the bogus Cohrane study.
Most if not all schools included mask breaks during the day in outdoor uncrowded space.
Masks NEVER stopped the spread, believing so is denying the scientific analysis and data. Only powered respirator systems have a positive effect, every other form of masking has a much greater NEGATIVE effects than any possible positive. This is particularly true for anyone under 18.
Stop denying the scientific evidence.
See above