Photo: Chelsea Congdon speaks about Senate Bill 25-86 at the Colorado Capitol on April 14, 2025. (Sara Wilson/Colorado Newsline)
This story by Sara Wilson appeared on Colorado Newsline on April 14, 2025.
Supporters of a Colorado bill that would set standards for how social media companies respond to users who violate a platform’s illegal sales policy are urging Governor Jared Polis to sign the legislation.
Senate Bill 25-86 passed both the House and Senate with bipartisan support, but sponsors fear Polis, a Democrat, will veto it based on First Amendment concerns.
“This bill simply says that for users egregiously harming our kids, they cannot be given endless chances to continue victimizing others. If this kind of conduct that we see on these social media platforms was happening on the street, there would be no question about intervention. None,” Sen. Lisa Frizell, a Castle Rock Republican and bill sponsor, said at a press conference Monday at the Capitol in Denver.
The bill targets social media users who illegally sell drugs and firearms or attempt to sex traffic on the platform. It would require companies to determine if a user violated those policies within 10 days of a notification, during which time their account would be suspended. If a company determines someone broke the policy, it would have 24 hours to kick the user off the site. Those companies would need to comply with a search warrant for materials from Colorado law enforcement within three days.
The legislation is an attempt to protect the young users of social media and help law enforcement identify perpetrators and prosecute cases successfully.
“No one sells fentanyl to a kid online just once and then decides the next day ‘You know what? I’m never going to do that again.’ This is repeated conduct,” said Boulder District Attorney Michael Dougherty. “In the meantime, while we’re waiting for those search warrants to be returned and those records be provided so investigations can move forward, additional people are hurt and killed.”
He pointed to multiple drug cases in his district where most of the sales were occurring over social media platforms.
The bill has bipartisan sponsorship and support. Sen. Lindsey Daugherty, an Arvada Democrat, Rep. Anthony Hartsook, a Parker Republican, and Rep. Andrew Boesenecker, a Fort Collins Democrat, ran the bill alongside Frizell. It passed the Senate on a 28-5 vote in February and the House on a 46-18 vote in March. Those margins, if they stick, could override a Polis veto.
Michael McReynolds, the legislative liaison for the Governor’s Office of Information Technology, said the office is worried about assigning private social media companies as the arbiters of whether a user broke the law and should be removed from the platform.
“Our main concern is the discomfort with this bill’s reliance on private companies to interpret and enforce the First Amendment. Delegating the nuanced and complex task of balancing free speech rights with the protection of vulnerable populations to private entities raises significant concerns about consistency, transparency and potential for overreach,” he told lawmakers during a House committee hearing on the bill in March.
“If someone is using an expression and talking about that activity, where is that line and how is that being interpreted?” he said.
But that argument is “absurd” and “insulting,” according to Chelsea Congdon, who lost her 19-year-old son to a fentanyl overdose in 2020 when he bought counterfeit drugs over Snapchat to ease his pain after a shoulder dislocation.
“There are no First Amendment rights to sell illegal drugs or guns to anyone, especially children,” she said. “If Senate Bill 86 had been law in 2020, Miles might be alive today. The person who sold him fake Percocet might have been off that platform, and if not before Miles died, then at least before the next kid did.”
On Monday afternoon, Polis spokesperson Shelby Wieman, sent Newsline a statement about the bill: “The Governor wants to protect internet freedom while making Coloradans safer, but has serious concerns about the impact of this bill on freedom, innovation, and privacy. He is not comfortable with the government forcing private social media companies to act as law enforcement, and will review the final version of the legislation.”
Under the bill, social media companies would also need to provide an annual report to the state attorney general’s office with specific data about illegal firearm sales, drug sales, sex trafficking of minors, and creation of sexually exploitative materials involving minors.
McReynolds also raised concerns about how that data collection provision could interplay with the state’s data privacy laws.
The bill has the support of Colorado Ceasefire, the Colorado Children’s Campaign, the Colorado Association of Chiefs of Police and the Colorado District Attorneys’ Council.
It still needs to be signed by House Speaker Julie McCluskie before it gets sent to Polis. That begins a 10-day timeline for him to sign or veto it, or it goes into law automatically. If he vetoes it, the Legislature could move to override it with a two-thirds vote. Polis has never had a veto overridden during his time as governor.