Gov. Polis stared down legislators that sought social-media regulation. Polis won.

During an April 14 news conference urging Gov. Jared Polis to sign a bill seeking to impose new child-safety protections on social-media companies, Chelsea Congdon said it appeared only two groups were opposed to the bill — social-media platforms and Polis.

On not just that bill but on least two others this session that sought to make web-based platforms take policing or age-verification steps, the Democratic governor stood up against large numbers of bipartisan legislators, calling the proposals violations of Colorado law. He also characterized the bills as measures that would inhibit innovation, both of online companies and of the small businesses that rely on those platforms to succeed.

Polis vetoed the first bill in question, and on Monday the House sponsors of Senate Bill 86 conceded that they didn’t have the votes to override it, giving up their fight. Polis’ veto warnings also led sponsors of a porn-site age-verification bill to kill their Senate Bill 201 despite overwhelming initial support, and they’ve led House Bill 1287, which would require websites to offer supervisory tools to parents, to disappear from the calendar with eight days left in the session.

The seventh-year Democratic governor has stood up more to his party recently, clashing with more liberal legislators on business issues ranging from oil-and-gas regulation to labor protection to local governments getting a first right of refusal on apartment sales. But never has Polis gone out on such a limb as this against bipartisan coalitions to defend a technology sector that launched his business and public careers — and been able to win battles for that sector against seemingly long odds.

Defense of the social-media sector

“Social media platforms do more than provide a platform for free expression and engagement. These platforms are also inextricable from the successes of small businesses and individuals who make a living online,” the governor wrote in his veto letter for SB 86. “Removing users as this bill demands will have devastating consequences on the livelihoods of many Coloradans that use social-media platforms, with the largest economic impact being felt by content creators and small businesses that cannot afford web platforms or professional marketing campaigns.”

All three of the bills in question stemmed from the idea that children are being exposed to harmful elements — be it criminal activity, addiction-generating algorithms or pornography — online and need the state to step in and protect them more. Each would have required websites and social-media platforms to limit children’s exposure to these elements, sometimes by requiring their identification as minors — limitations that the companies called excessive or contrary to existing Colorado privacy law.

SB 86, sponsored by Democratic Sen. Lindsey Daugherty of Arvada and Republican Sen. Lisa Frizell of Castle Rock, sought to require social-media platforms to remove users who sold drugs, trafficked guns illegally or engaged in child pornography within 24 hours of being flagged by other users. It would have required tech companies to respond to law-enforcement warrants for information within 72 hours, and it would have mandated they provide annual reports to the Colorado Attorney General’s office on illegal activity.

What the other bills would have done

HB 1287, from GOP Rep. Jarvis Caldwell of Monument and Democratic Rep. Meghan Lukens of Steamboat Springs, would require social-media companies to determine if users are minors and offer them protections like daily-usage time limits and the ability to disable personal recommendations. They also would have to offer supervisory tools to parents such as management of account settings and restrictions on purchases, and the biill would ban use of algorithms to sustain a minor’s engagement with the platform.

SB 201, sponsored by Daugherty and Republican Senate Minority Leader Paul Lundeen of Monument, would have required pornography sites to perform age-verification measures and prevent children from accessing the material. The bill sought to ensure people would not have to disclose identities to access the material and required platforms to destroy any personal data acquired during verification, but it too was fingered as running counter to Colorado privacy law and hurting businesses.

On April 14 — the same day as the news conference supporting SB 86 — Lundeen and Daugherty killed SB 201 in the Senate, citing the looming threat of a veto, though both pledged to hone it and bring it back next year after a committee passed it 8-1. HB 1287 cleared its first committee 9-4 on April 2, but it’s lingered since in the House Appropriations Committee as industry leaders have called the age-verification system impossible to implement and warned it could disable algorithm-based sites like YouTube.

Showdown over Senate Bill 86

SB 86 passed the Senate 29-6 and the House 46-18 despite Polis’ veto threats, gathering support from Attorney General Phil Weiser, all 23 district attorneys in the state and both public-safety and parental organizations. At the April 14 event, supporters argued that the state needs to rein in criminal activity that the social-media platforms refuse to stop and said that the activity the bill targeted, were it being done on the street rather than online, would be the focus of swift intervention.

“There are no 1^st Amendment rights to sell guns and drugs to anyone, especially children,” said Congdon, whose son died after ingesting fentanyl that he purchased on Snapchat, believing it was Percocet that would help him cut the pain from an injured shoulder. “And I believe I stand for all parents when I say, ‘Governor Polis, we are not willing to trade our children’s lives for social-media innovation.”

But while supporters of the bill spoke loudly for it, tech companies approached Polis with concerns that they could be forced to violate privacy law to conform to the new provisions, could be put into position to get sued or could simply not do what the bill required.

Ruthie Barko, Colorado executive director for industry group TechNet, said the requirement to nix someone from a platform within 24 hours of a reported violation could encourage targeting of members of marginalized communities and set platforms up for lawsuits. The 72-hour compliance window with warrants also wouldn’t provide social-media companies ample time to ensure the warrant is legitimately court-ordered, leaving them without time to carry out due process, she said.

Matters of platform and innovation protection

Polis and members of his administration also have told committees that the proposals clash with the 2021 Colorado Privacy Act, which lets people demand immediate deletion of their personal data by websites rather than requiring sites to keep and report such data. In his veto letter for SB 86, he called the mandatory metadata collection required by the bill “costly” and warned that sensitive information like user age and content viewed could be made public at the discretion of the attorney general.

“In our judicial proceedings, people receive due process when they are suspected of breaking the law. This bill, however, conscripts social media platforms to be judge and jury when users may have broken the law or even a company’s own content rules,” Polis wrote. “This proposed law would incentivize platforms, in order to reduce liability risk, to simply deplatform a user in order to comply with this proposed law.”

Senators overrode the veto on April 25 by the same 29-6 margin by which they gave final approval to SB 86 three weeks earlier — though, curiously, with several people switching their votes to come up with the final number. Daugherty, considered one of the more pro-business moderates in her caucus, made it clear that she believed business interests should take a distant backseat to public-safety concerns on the bill.

“This is not about entrepreneurship. This is not about speech. It is about standing up for the safety and dignity of our most vulnerable,” she intoned. “If we fail to act, if we let this veto stand, we are choosing to protect the business interests of billion-dollar tech companies over the safety of Colorado kids. That’s a choice I refuse to make.”

Defense of tech goes beyond social-media sector

Three days later, however, House sponsors, despite having passed SB 86 originally by a veto-proof margin, failed to muster the 44 votes they needed to override the bill. A tearful Rep. Anthony Hartsook, a Parker Republican who sponsored the bill with Democratic Rep. Andy Boesenecker of Fort Collins, said they’d reached the point in the process where they could push no further.

Polis made his professional mark in the tech industry, first digitizing and selling his parents’ greeting-card company and then starting and selling an online flower-delivery company during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s — and using his earnings to launch into politics. While he’s accepted regulations for many industries, signing laws that limit questions employers can ask in the hiring process or that have made it easier for workers to sue for harassment, he’s been reluctant to regulate disruptive sectors, particularly tech.

A representative of the governor, for example, testified against a bill in March that would give special protections to whistleblowers in the artificial-intelligence sectors, saying the bill would incentive AI companies to move operations to other states with less regulation. That bill advanced to the House floor nearly two months ago but has sat idly on the calendar ever since as it faces a clear veto threat.

So, while opponents are decrying the governor’s veto of SB 86 — the group Blue Rising wrote that his talking points against the bill “read as if they were written by lobbyists for Meta, Google and Snapchat” — he’s stood unwavering on that issue this year. And it’s clear from other speeches in which Polis has discussed these advanced industries that he is hoping his stand will pay off with companies in these sectors flocking to Colorado and bringing with them high-paying jobs and economic stability.