Florida Laws On Homelessness And Social Media: Better Than Nothing? Or Worse?

At What Point Does The Perfect Become The Enemy Of The Good?

Over the past week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has signed into law two pieces of legislation that came with a fair bit of controversy, and one of which is already sure to face legal challenge.

Last week, DeSantis signed into law HB1365 banning unauthorized public camping and public sleeping.

Today, Governor Ron DeSantis signed HB 1365 to keep Florida’s streets safe. This legislation requires counties to ensure that homeless individuals receive the mental health and drug addiction services they need while residing in a designated location off our public streets, prioritizing public safety.

“Florida will not allow homeless encampments to intrude on its citizens or undermine their quality of life like we see in states like New York and California,” said Governor Ron DeSantis. “The legislation I signed today upholds our commitment to law and order while also ensuring homeless individuals have the resources they need to get back on their feet.”

This past Monday (March 25), Governor DeSantis signed HB3, which prohibits children under the age of 14 from having accounts on most social media.

Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law banning children under age 14 from having their own social media accounts on Monday, according to a news release from the governor’s office.

Fourteen and 15-years-old will be allowed to have accounts with parental consent.

As might be expected, both bills have attracted their share of opposition.

Yet a question should be asked of both bills: Do they at least attempt to move towards a real solution that is enforceable, sustainable, and respectful of people’s inalienable rights?

Alternatively, should Ron DeSantis be celebrated or pilloried for not vetoing these particular pieces of legislation? Is there a demarcation line where the perfect becomes the enemy of the good, and are these two laws on the correct side of it?

On HB1365, critics have said Florida isn’t allocating enough funding to provide the resources mandated by the bill.

"We're going to need so much more funding if we're going to build up these resources," said Megan Sarmento, an outreach program manager for the Florida Harm Reduction Collective in Tampa. "Even now, how the system is, we are finding people on the streets and are unable to link them to care because of the lack of resources, including housing and detox."

Others assert that HB1365 unfairly targets both the homeless and communities struggling to address the challenges presented by homelessness.

Critics have said the legislation unfairly targets a vulnerable population and places limits on municipalities struggling to deal with their homeless population. The measure has no penalties for those living on the streets, but it allows local residents, businesses and the state attorney general to sue local governments that don’t follow the restrictions. 

Laws such as HB1365 have been enacted by multiple states, even though critics such as the National Homelessness Law Center challenge both the constitutionality and the propriety of such laws, arguing in a 2021 study that they “criminalize homelessness.”¹

Laws that criminalize homelessness do not solve the underlying causes of homelessness. Punishing an unhoused person for sleeping outdoors does not obviate their need to sleep nor does it create a safe place for them to sleep indoors. Instead, criminalization exacerbates a person’s homelessness, often by creating additional barriers to housing and employment. Additionally, whether at the state- or local- level, enforcing criminal statutes is expensive and diverts resources that could instead be spent to solve homelessness.

The study also argues that bans on public camping merely shuffle the homeless population around without fundamentally addressing their needs for housing.

Camping bans are frequently enforced as an excuse to conduct sweeps of homeless encampments. These sweeps can result in arrests and the destruction of a person’s personal property, including IDs and personal documents, medicine and medical devices, and other crucial items. Enforcement of a camping ban does not suddenly result in a person experiencing homelessness having a place to live. Instead, it unnecessarily displaces a person experiencing homelessness to another public place, where they might find themselves at risk of subsequent enforcement.

Others have called the law’s mandate for municipalities to designate spaces where public camping is permissible as calling for internment camps for the homeless.

Critics, meantime, have said the legislation will create forced internment camps, shoving homeless people into fenced villages where they will be neither seen nor heard.

"When they told me about this law, I went and told everybody," [Stephanie] Bennett said. "I was like, 'Yo, they're trying to pass a law where they're going to make it illegal for us to put our tents up. We're not going to be able to have tents, and they're going to force us into their camps.' "

DeSantis and other proponents of the legislation defend the law as protecting communities’ “quality of life”.

DeSantis said the law was Florida's way of preventing cities from looking like San Francisco, a city he has criticized for its "leftist policies" and for allowing parks and sidewalks "to be overwhelmed with tent cities and homeless encampments."

"These are difficult issues, but you should not be accosted by a homeless like we see," DeSantis said at Wednesday's news conference. "You should be able to walk down the street and live your life."

Florida state Representative Sam Garrison similarly spoke of homelessness overwhelming cities elsewhere, and argues the legislation is a way to prevent such outcomes.

Rep. Garrison described “great cities” elsewhere “brought to their knees” by the homeless problem, which assails “civic pride” in those municipalities that have “embraced comfortable inaction.”

We should note that in liberal states such as California, there is a growing sense that the government programs which aim to provide homeless individuals with resources such as mental health treatment and substance abuse rehabilitation are costing far too much and delivering far too little.

While voters have repeatedly named homelessness as a top issue in California, some are alarmed with the looming multibillion-dollar budget deficit and growing frustrated with Newsom's administration spending billions to get people off the streets with little dramatic change. Brian Sobel, a political analyst, said Californians are experiencing "bond fatigues" after years of approving expensive ballot measures. The fact that the bond within the proposition would eventually cost upward $14 billion because of interests could have deterred voters from supporting it.

"People are waking up to the fact that we're just incurring more and more debt and we don't see a discernible difference in the quality of life," Sobel said. "Because money's not solving the problem in the eyes of Californians, they're getting more and more reluctant to pass propositions."

When voters are increasingly reluctant to pass propositions such as California’s recent Proposition 1, which specifically addresses the mental health and drug addiction needs of the homeless, the question naturally arises as to what alternatives might exist to Florida’s HB1365.

When it comes to issues such as homelessness, I am compelled to admit that I have no answers, and ultimately can reach no conclusions about the wisdom or unwisdom of anti-camping laws such as HB1365.

Even in California, voters are in broad agreement that homeless encampments present significant issues of public health and public safety, particularly with the prevalence of fentanyl and other drugs within those encampments.

Mr. Newsom made homelessness a signature priority when he first became governor in 2019. Public concern intensified during the pandemic as downtown tent camps spread in Los Angeles, San Francisco and other cities that had been emptied by lockdowns.

California’s Democratic leadership has been under intense pressure to remove the camps, even as soaring housing costs and an influx of fentanyl have exacerbated homelessness in cities. Proposition 1 was crafted to target one of the thorniest aspects of the problem: severe mental illness and addiction.

At the same time, laws which target specific demographics, such as the homeless population, must be viewed skeptically with regards to their Constitutionality. Even the homeless are still guaranteed due process of law by the Fifth Amendment and the equal protection of the laws by the Fourteenth. Regardless of why the homeless are homeless, they still have all the same inalienable rights and civil liberties as the rest of the population. Do camping bans intrude on those rights?

As a matter of simple logic, the argument made by the National Homelessness Law Center that camping bans merely shuffles the homeless around in an endless game of human “whack-a-mole” is difficult to refute. The homeless by definition have no place of their own to sleep, and bans on public camping functionally compel them to choose either to seek a space in a homeless shelter or violate the ban on public camping. As HB1365’s own provisions highlight, in many if not all communities there are not enough beds in the available homeless shelters to house the entire homeless population, which means even in the best case scenario at least some homeless individuals have little choice but to violate a ban on public camping.

Even at that, HB1365 also acknowledges that some communities are going to be hard pressed to provide the designated public camping spaces allowed by the bill, along with the security, sanitation, and access to resources required by the bill for such spaces, and thus communities are allowed to exempt themselves from some of the standards laid out in the legislation.

A fiscally constrained county is exempt from the requirement to establish and maintain minimum standards and procedures under subparagraphs (b)1.-3. if the governing board of the county makes a finding that compliance with such requirements would result in a financial hardship.

Yet the problems and challenges of homelessness remain. The mental health issues among the homeless remain. The substance abuse issues among the homeless remain. The sanitation and public health issues of homeless encampments remain.

Whether one views these issues from the perspective of the broader community and its desire to maintain a certain “quality of life”, or from the perspective of the homeless who are in need of a helping hand, one thing seems clear: local and state governments especially do not have the option of simply doing nothing.

What then should government do? Must the solution be more social safety net funding in the manner of California’s Proposition 1? Are camping bans a necessary first step towards a resolution instead?

There is fault to be found with both approaches—so which approach it the “right” approach?

A similar conundrum arises when we look at Florida’s new legislation—HB3, titled “Online Protection for Minors” prohibiting minors under the age of 14 from having their own social media accounts.

(2)(a) A social media platform shall prohibit a minor who is younger than 14 years of age from entering into a contract with a social media platform to become an account holder.

The bill also requires social media platforms to terminate the accounts of minors under the age of 14.

The bill is not without some teeth. Social media platforms which do not comply could be sued and face fines of up to $50,000 per violation.

The bill, HB3, also directs social media companies to delete the existing accounts of those who are under 14. Companies that fail to do so could be sued on behalf of the child who creates an account on the platform. The minor could be awarded up to $10,000 in damages, according to the bill. Companies found to be in violation of the law would also be liable for up to $50,000 per violation, as well as attorney’s fees and court costs.

Intriguingly, DeSantis vetoed an earlier version of the same legislation, asserting that bill, HB1, violated the rights of adult social media users.

That DeSantis would veto a bill that ostensibly set out to do the same thing alone illustrates that there is a measure of controversy to such legislation.

For DeSantis’ Democratic opponents in the legislature, the bill represents a measure of legislative overreach, stepping into domains arguably reserved for parental rights and potentially creating free speech concerns.

“HB3’s sweeping prohibition of youth from social media runs contrary to a Supreme Court precedent and tells Florida families how to parent,” said Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, in a prepared statement in response to the bill signing.

“Though I agree more needs to be done in protecting our youth on social media, this bill goes too far in taking away parents' rights and banning social media usage -- and thus First Amendment Rights -- for young Floridians. Instead of banning social media access, it would be better to ensure improved parental oversight tools, improved access to data to stop bad actors, alongside major investments in Florida’s mental health systems and programs,” she said.

It is worth noting that even those Florida legislators opposed to HB3 conceded that social media use by minors is an issue that needs to be addressed.

That there are serious concerns surrounding use of social media by minors is indisputable.

We should not overlook a growing body of evidence that indicates social media use by minors is actually damaging their emotional health.

In January, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, appeared at a congressional hearing to answer questions about how social media potentially harms children. Zuckerberg opened by saying: “The existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health.”

But many social scientists would disagree with that statement. In recent years, studies have started to show a causal link between teen social media use and reduced well-being or mood disorders, chiefly depression and anxiety.

At the same time, social media use by children has been on the rise for a number of years. A 2022 survey showed that teenagers were spending as many as 8 hours every day on social media, a full hour more on average than in 2019.

The survey, published by the nonprofit research organization Common Sense Media, found that overall screen use among teens and tweens increased by 17 percent from 2019 to 2021 — growing more rapidly than in the four years prior. On average, daily screen use went up among tweens (ages 8 to 12) to five hours and 33 minutes from four hours and 44 minutes, and to eight hours and 39 minutes from seven hours and 22 minutes for teens (ages 13 to 18).

If social media is harmful to minors and minors are using social media more and more…it is safe to say there is a problem here!

Yet there is also the First Amendment, and its protections of Free Speech. Given that Free Speech is a moral imperative, and it because of the importance of Free Speech that I oppose the legislation being advanced through Congress to ban TikTok, that especially should not go unnoticed.

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If banning a social media platform circumscribes Free Speech, how does banning users en masse not also circumscribe Free Speech. Certainly banning individual users is censorious and circumscribes an individual’s right to Free Speech, as I myself experienced during my ban from LinkedIn.

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Is it right to deprive minors of a facility for Free Speech and Free Association, just because they are minors? Does the First Amendment render all such legislative attempts null and voice?

Do minors, being minors, even have a true capacity to exercise a right of Free Speech? As minors, they cannot give legal consent, and surely that means also they cannot consent to whatever consequences might arise from their exercise of Free Speech on social media. If they are immune to the responsibility arising from Free Speech, have they an inalienable right to Free Speech irrespective of their minority?

As with Florida’s anti-camping legislation, I am very deliberately not reaching a final conclusion about the wisdom or the propriety of HB3.

Rather, here I am more concerned with a not-so-abstract question regarding both bills: What is the alternative?

The one thing that is absent in the media coverage of both pieces of legislation signed by Ron DeSantis is the articulation of any discrete alternatives proposed by the opponents to the respective bills.

It is neither a disparagement of either the bills themselves or the various criticisms made of the bills to acknowledge that the bills seek to address real issues that affect communities across Florida. It is facile and even a tad disingenuous to say that something needs to be done about the homeless, and something needs to be done to address the risks and dangers social media poses for children.

Yet to say “something needs to be done” about such issues largely reduces from the abstract to a practical “what specifically needs to be done?”

That is a question for which the opponents to these particular pieces of legislation seem not to have crafted an answer. Certainly that answer is not forthcoming in social media.

Such answers are, I submit, a glaring absence from much of the public debate about a great many issues facing both the country and the world today.

It is easy to say “this is wrong”, or “this law is wrong,” and if we truly believe that a policy or a law is wrong we absolutely should step up and say so. However, when we do say so we should at least put in a little time contemplating and then advocating for the specific solutions we believe are the right approach.

It was in furtherance of having that “new and improved” solution to an issue that I wrote back in 2022 how the Federal Reserve should be combating Consumer Price Inflation.

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If we wish things to improve in this country, or globally, we have to look beyond the the problems everyone faces, and gives some space and articulation to crafting alternative solutions. We need to grapple with the specifics of policy, and with the sometimes unsightly “sausage making” that goes into the crafting of legislation at all levels of government.

I will not conclude here whether HB1365 or HB3 are good or bad pieces of legislation. I will acknowledge that they are addressing real issues that need real solutions. Even if the bills should prove to be heading in an exact wrong direction, they still have the somewhat saving grace of confronting genuine social issues head on.

For any who find issue with either HB1365 or HB3, or indeed any act of a legislature addressing any genuine social ill, a simple question which deserves an hopefully simple answer: What is your alternative?

1. National Homelessness Law Center. HOUSING NOT HANDCUFFS 2021: STATE LAW SUPPLEMENT. National Homelessness Law Center, 2021, https://homelesslaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/2021-HNH-State-Crim-Supplement.pdf.