BOSTON — The Senate on Thursday passed a bill to regulate youth social media use in what some senators said is an attempt to return the platforms to the “OG social media” of the early aughts.

Senators passed the bill (S 3164) by a vote of 38-2, after adding amendments that address overnight push notifications, age verification techniques and whether certain open source sites fall under the definition of “social media.” They called the proposal a way to regulate Big Tech companies and address the youth mental health crisis while maintaining First Amendment rights, data privacy, and users’ ability to join online communities.

Republican Sens. Peter Durant of Spencer and Kelly Dooner of Taunton voted against the bill.

“American teenagers spend an average slightly less than five hours a day on social media. Five hours a day. That’s almost a third of their waking lives spent scrolling on their phones. That means less time for all the other parts of life that are important to youth development: homework, sports, socializing with friends and family, music, hobbies,” said Majority Leader Cindy Creem, whose bill (SB. 30) served as the baseline for the proposal. “How many times have we been to a restaurant and seen parents having a wonderful dinner, and a two-year-old on his tablet?”

The Senate bill would require all social media platforms to adopt “default” settings for minors that disable things including addictive feeds, “autoplay” and “infinite scroll” capabilities, and that turn off notifications during a period at night. Those default settings would also apply to users who decline to go through an age verification process.

“First kisses, state championship games, band performances, summer job concerts, sleepovers, maybe even unsanctioned teenage mischief — these are the experiences that help kids learn, grow and just have fun. At least I always thought so,” Creem continued. “Unregulated social media platforms are robbing young people of these experiences, and it is our responsibility to help them break free from the addictive grasp of big tech.”

The Senate took a different approach to regulating youth social media than the House did in April, when it passed a bill (H 5366) that would ban kids under 14 from using social media platforms and require that platforms obtain parental consent for users aged 14 and 15. The House proposal is embedded in a bill that would also ban student cellphone use in schools, which the Senate took up in a standalone bill.

“We don’t want to have excessive restrictions, we don’t want to violate the privacy or constitutional rights of anyone, and we don’t want to pass a law in the Senate with a blanket ban that will be toothless for anyone with the knowledge or savvy of how a VPN works,” Sen. Julian Cyr said.

Cyr, one of the younger members of the Senate and a self-described “geriatric millennial,” talked about his experience on the early years of Facebook when he was in college. He described a version of “OG social media” that the Senate bill aims to return to.

“Facebook for me in college, in the early aughts, was a way to keep in touch with high school friends who went to other schools, was a way to stay connected with new people I’d met, it was a way to learn about someone I maybe had a crush on. It wasn’t an endless loop of algorithmic doom scrolling of self doubt and a misinformation trap,” he said.

Senators adopted a Sen. John Keenan amendment that would bar companies from sending notifications to minors between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. — an expansion of the bill’s initial notification blackout period of between 12 a.m. and 6 a.m. An adopted Sen. Cindy Friedman amendment would require social media companies to offer at least one age verification method that does not require users to submit biometric data or a government ID.

“Everyone should have the option to verify their age in a way that doesn’t require them to hand their ID or their biometric data to private companies like Apple and Google and Meta and X, et cetera, and no one should have to surrender their anonymity to these companies to verify their age,” she said.

The responsibility to figure out exactly how companies can verify users’ ages, however, still will fall to the attorney general, who must create regulations “identifying commercially reasonable and technically feasible methods for covered operators to determine if a user is a covered minor.”

A Sen. Robyn Kennedy addition clarified that only users who have verified their ages could share their locations on social media. The bill as originally written allowed parental consent for minors to share their locations, but Kennedy’s amendment stripped this language, so no minor regardless of consent could do so.

“Location data is highly sensitive, and sharing it with strangers on the internet could put kids at a high risk. It’s appropriate to treat location sharing as a feature that only verified adults can access,” Creem said.

Senators tacked on a Sen. Lydia Edwards amendment that would ensure nonprofit entities and open source software developing and sharing platforms, like Wikipedia and GitHub, can be exempt if they fall under the definition of “social media platform” established in the bill.

Creem said the Senate “assessed approaches taken in other states and other countries” when crafting the bill, which she argued would make Massachusetts “the national model for protecting kids on social media platforms.”

Debates about how to structure youth social media regulations are playing out across the country and world, as lawmakers point to the negative consequences of the platforms on children’s health and wellbeing.

Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr of Gloucester said the Senate was “venturing into largely uncharted territory” when introducing an ultimately successful amendment that he said would require the attorney general “to provide us with information that we can use to determine the efficacy of the bill, to determine what changes might need to be made and determine the impact of the bill.” The AG would have to file an annual report to legislative clerks and committees with data including complaints lodged by the AG as a result of the bill’s provisions, Tarr said.

“This legislation absolutely will pass any type of constitutional scrutiny, for the very simple reason that when you talk about speech on the one hand, and you talk about design on the other hand, courts are starting to be pretty consistent. If you’re regulating design, it’s OK. Speech, obviously not so much,” Sen. John Velis, who chairs the Committee on Mental Health, Substance Use and Recovery and was pointed to as a significant contributor to the bill, said.

The Senate adopted a redrafted version of the Westfield Democrat’s amendment that expands the required reporting by social media platforms to the office of the attorney general and “allows us to actually see and better understand how these platforms are operating and dealing with these problems affecting our youth,” Velis said.

Social media platforms relied “for the longest time” on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, Velis said, which dictates that social media platforms cannot be held responsible for users’ content.

“In the past couple months we’ve just had two really, really big cases in New Mexico and the state of California,” Velis said. “This is a changing landscape, so weighing in on it now makes a heck of a lot of sense.”

In a landmark social media addiction trial in March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for harms to youth using their platforms, according to the Associated Press. A New Mexico jury also found that Meta violated state law by knowingly harming children’s mental health.

Republican Sen. Patrick O’Connor flagged Wednesday that legislating social media on a state-by-state basis “is going to be incredibly difficult.”

“I would really hope that this sends a message to Washington that they need to start working on regulating tech and regulating social media in a way that’s much more appropriate to what we’re experiencing on the ground in our districts day-to-day,” O’Connor said.

Durant, the Spencer Republican who voted against the bill, said he wanted to see more parental rights included in the proposal.

“Show me a bill that puts the device-level age signal in parents’ hands, set it once as set up by a mom or dad, instead of handing it to the attorney general,” Durant said. “Show me a bill whose defaults a parent can adjust in either direction because they know their 15-year-old better than anyone.”

“It’s not to say it’s a horrible bill, it’s not to say that there aren’t many good portions of this bill, but for me the bill in front of us has to answer a question: Who raises the children of Massachusetts? And I’m afraid, and I’m worried that overall the answer is, and is increasingly becoming more, that we do. The state. Parents, they can watch,” Durant added.

Sen. Mark Montigny also raised concerns, though not for the bill before the Senate on Thursday. The vote came the day after the House passed a $561 million economic development bill, including the latest of the millions the state has pumped into Massachusetts’s artificial intelligence sector. Senate President Karen Spilka said Thursday that the Senate is “looking at economic development” which the chamber will “do hopefully soon thereafter” next week’s bills addressing workplace violence and home care licensing.

“I hope we will not speak out of both sides of our mouth,” Montigny said Thursday. “We are doing this today because we believe they can’t do it, they cannot self-regulate, they’re incapable. Their algorithms are designed to make money and take advantage, and artificial intelligence just makes the social media world on steroids.”

Ella Adams and Sam Drysdale are reporters for State House News Service and State Affairs Massachusetts. Reach them at [email protected] and [email protected].