California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan have proposed a new bill, AB 56, that would require social media companies to put a warning label on their platforms to disclose their mental health risks.
Citing social media platforms’ “harnessing of addictive features and harmful content for the sake of profits,” Attorney General Bonta says that consumers should have access to information about platforms that could impact their mental health. The current bill lacks detail on how much information these warning labels should have or how they should appear, but mentions the Cyberbullying Protection Act and the Online Violence Prevention Act as possible precedent for such a requirement. Those bills required social media platforms to disclose their cyberbullying reporting features in the terms of service, and clearly state whether they have a way of reporting violent posts for users and nonusers on the platform, respectively.
Bonta and Bauer-Kahan’s new bill fol
