Yes, it's a very bad thing. There are a lot of different types of social media. How about projects with Discourse forums? That could be considered social media. Do you want to force them onto Facebook?
> The proposal would only apply to social media companies that had at least $100 million in gross revenue in the past year
And also:
> Also, companies that conduct regular audits of their practices to identify and remove features that could be addictive to children would be immune from lawsuits.
...if a company is earning $100 million per year from their social media product I think I'm kind of okay with demanding they spend a person-day every couple months verifying that they're not adding features classed as addictive to children.
I'm not really seeing where your outrage is coming from, here.
The real issue with this bill is that "addiction" isn't the same for everyone. The Twitter "trends" paradigm itself could be considered addictive if you really stretched it, maybe a 15 year old looks at it every waking hour of their day and goes through it all looking for tweets to reply to? Since the law doesn't only apply in a class-action sense, any parent could bring this to court with their anecdote and the court's main argument would be on whether that specific feature is 'addictive', not "addictive to all children".
For reference:
> An operator of a social media platform shall be found to have violated their duty if the social media platform is found to have addicted a child user by either of the following means:
> (1) The use or sale of a child user’s personal data.
> (2) The development, design, implementation, or maintenance of a design, feature, or affordance.
Quite literally anything could be grounds for the $25k + 2x attorney's fees in damages.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
That’s just the natural outcome of blurring chat rooms with social media.