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On April 9, 2026, the Massachusetts House of Representatives passed a bill, approved on a 129-25 vote, that would significantly restrict social media access by minors in the state; should the state Senate approve the law in its current state, parents would need to provide their consent for 14- and 15-year-olds to use social media, while platforms and social media companies would be required to implement age verification systems in order to prevent users under the age of 14 from having accounts. This would mark a significant jump-up from the Senate's original proposal, passed in July 2025, to just ban cellphone usage during school time, carving out exemptions for students with special needs.
Massachusetts is hardly the first US state attempting to limit children's access to social media – in fact, it would be the 18th state, as noted by The Boston Globe (behind paywall) – but the bill would mark one of the most restrictive policies in the entire country. The news has also been reported by other local media, including GBH, WBUR, Boston Today, and Axios Boston.
Axios reporter Mike Deehan specifically focused on the risks that Wikipedia, among other platforms, would face should the bill come into effect as it is. The proposal currently defines a social media platform as any online service that "displays content primarily generated by users and allows users to create, share and view user-generated content with other users." According to State Rep. Aaron Michlewitz, House Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, passages like this one were written in order to give State Attorney General Andrea Campbell flexibility in coming up with more specific regulations; however, digital rights group Fight for the Future argues that this definition is so broad it could force lots of sites with user-generated content, including YouTube, Roblox and even Wikipedia itself, to verify user ages.
Professor Timothy Edgar, who hosts lectures on cybersecurity and online privacy at Harvard Law School, told Axios that "what distinguishes [application of the law to] the big tech social media companies from the rest of the Internet [including Wikipedia] is not actually very clear," and that Mass. lawmakers would need to "think very carefully about the ramifications of what that would mean for innovation on the Internet, and what that would mean for the openness and freedoms that we all enjoy."
Anyway, the bill still needs to be examined and voted on by the Senate, which had focused exclusively on banning cellphones from classrooms, but the fate of the proposal is currently unclear: some politicians and organizations also raised concerns over the risk of retain of government IDs or biometric data by tech companies, outing LGBTQ+ status of minors to unsupportive families and incompatibility with First Amendment – which has been the subject of legal challenges to similar laws in Florida, Louisiana and Ohio. Plus, slight divisions have emerged within the local Democratic Party over the bill, as state Reps. Erika Uyterhoeven and Mike Connolly voted against it, whereas Governor Maura Healey has publicly unveiled a slightly different plan to curb children's access to social media in the state. – B, O
Search Engine Land recently acknowledged that "ironclad editorial guardrails" at Wikipedia make it very hard for all sorts of spammers to rely on astroturfing their way to the top of a search engine results page.
As per an excerpt from the article:
Claiming you need a Reddit or Wikipedia strategy [in reference to the Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) spamming strategy, nsp] because they are the most-cited domains overall is like claiming spaghetti carbonara is the most-eaten dish in Italy. Yes, it's ubiquitous and popular, but just because it's everywhere, [it] doesn't mean you should put it on the menu at a high-end steakhouse.
– B
LonelyWiki is a website that Boing Boing says "shares Wikipedia's most overlooked articles" and "Good News Podcast" by Cards Against Humanity described for a little over three minutes. The article that LonelyWiki presents to the reader is a randomly chosen non-stub that has been viewed fewer than 2,000 times in the past year. The creators say it is "a museum of forgotten knowledge" for the hard work of editors deserving better attention.
This editor visited the site and discovered for the first time Lucile Saunders McDonald, who was credited by his own local newspaper as "the first woman news reporter in all of South America; first woman copy editor in the Pacific Northwest; first woman telegraph editor, courthouse reporter and general news reporter in Oregon; first woman overseas correspondent for a U.S. trade newspaper; first woman on a New York City rewrite desk; second woman journalist in Alaska; and second woman to be a correspondent abroad for The Associated Press". – B
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