Who is covered

Unlike many other laws in the data rights domain, the definition of “social media service” in the Digital Rights Act in Utah is very broad. It covers all websites and appsFor the Utah act, only those websites and apps are covered that have users in Utah. In other states, similar draft legislation is not limited to residents of their state but effectively global as long as the social media service has some kind of relationship to the state. whose main content is user-contributed and that people can interact with, regardless of how many users they have.

This includes:

• All sites and apps from the big social media platforms like Facebook or X, all the way down to tiny social sites that somebody might run on a Raspberry Pi in their basement for a handful of friends (such as a Mastodon instance), and everything in between;

• Not just closed-source platforms, but also sites running open-source software; the requirement is on the site or app operators, not the developers of the open-source software;

• Sites that may not think of themselves as “social media”, but meet the criteria: their content is primarily user-generated, by users for other users; users have profiles; users can sign up, “connect” and interact. This definition appears to also include sites such as Medium or Stack Overflow.

• Sites and apps with any kind of user-contributed content, not just text, photos or videos; this would include sites such as 3D-model sharing site Thingiverse.

Sites and apps are exempted if their primary function is e-mail, cloud storage or document viewing, sharing or collaboration software: products like Microsoft Teams are likely not covered.

Unlike other legislation in other jurisdictions, the Digital Choice Act does not distinguish between “social media” and “group messaging” sites and apps, so it appears products such as Discord or Telegram may be covered as well.

For the remainder of this paper, we will use the term “SMS” as shorthand for “social media service or app” according to this definition.