Aspen resident Chelsea Congdon calls upon Colorado Gov. Jared Polis to support Senate Bill 86 at a press conference outside the state Capitol in Denver on Monday. The bill, which passed this month, would require social media companies to crack down on illegal activity such as drug sales on their platforms, but the governor has indicated he’s likely to veto it due to concerns it could harm freedom, innovation and privacy.
A bill that would require social media companies to crack down on illegal activity such as drug and gun sales, as well as sex trafficking and the sexual exploitation of minors on their platforms, passed the Colorado legislature this month, but Gov. Jared Polis has indicated he’s likely to veto it due to concerns it could harm freedom of speech, innovation and privacy.
One of the first of its kind in the country, Senate Bill 86, called “Protections for Users of Social Media,” passed the state House and Senate with strong bipartisan support — and several local parents who lost their kids to accidental fentanyl overdoses have joined advocates across the state urging the governor to reconsider.
On Monday, Aspen resident Chelsea Congdon addressed a crowd outside the Capitol building in Denver.
“Good morning, Colorado. This is a very beautiful place to live and grow up. My son Miles only got to grow up here until he was 19 years old,” she said. “Miles died in November 2020.”
Growing up in the Roaring Fork Valley, Miles was a talented big-mountain skier and a musician who loved playing the piano and guitar.
“Miles was a tall, very handsome, charismatic young man,” Congdon said in an interview April 9. “He was very funny, and, of course, he couldn’t wait to get away from home and from his parents.”
After graduating from Aspen High School, Miles attended the University of Colorado Boulder. During his sophomore year, he fell and dislocated his shoulder.
“His friends got him to the hospital, where his shoulder was put back in place, and he was discharged with four pain pills,” Congdon said. “When those four pills were gone, Miles took it upon himself to find more pain medication.”
He bought, without a prescription, what he thought was Percocet, but it was laced with fentanyl and he died from an overdose.
“The autopsy showed that Miles had enough fentanyl in his body to kill three people instantly,” Congdon said.
Congdon, who was able to access Miles’ computer, found evidence that he likely got the pills from a dealer on Snapchat, but Boulder law enforcement personnel weren’t able to solve the case.
Speaking in support of SB 86 at Monday’s press conference, Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty said cases like Congdon’s are not uncommon.
“We see these cases throughout the state of Colorado and currently in Boulder County, we have drug distribution cases, including cases where people have died, where kids were getting drugs through Snapchat,” Dougherty said. “We just finished a human trafficking prosecution where the defendant received a sentence of 97 years in state prison. Every single victim in that case, they lured and coerced and victimized through social media, every single one.”
After losing her son, Congdon joined Colorado-based youth advocacy nonprofit Blue Rising, which helped craft SB86 and other state legislation to protect young people from fentanyl overdoses.
In 2022, they helped pass a bill — signed by Polis — that increased penalties for dealing fentanyl and that funded addiction treatment and harm-reduction services. It also required the state to study how the internet and social media are used to illegally distribute fentanyl and other counterfeit prescription drugs.
Although information surrounding illegal activity on social media is limited because platforms don’t always provide transparent access to the relevant data, the 182-page report from the Colorado Department of Law found that social media is used as a primary means for drug transactions.
It also found that although most platforms already have policies banning illegal drug sales and have made some efforts to work with law enforcement to address the issue, companies’ responses to such activity on their platforms have had limited effectiveness.
Daniel Shaw stands outside his home in Woody Creek on April 10. Shaw joined youth advocacy group Blue Rising in its efforts to pass Senate Bill 86 after he and his wife, Isa Catto, lost their daughter Bailey to an accidental overdose last summer.
In response to Aspen Journalism and Aspen Public Radio’s request for comment, Snap Inc., which operates Snapchat, outlined its efforts to crackdown on criminal activity, remove drug dealers on its platform, and help spread awareness about fentanyl and counterfeit pills.
“Snap condemns the horrific criminal behavior by drug dealers that led to these tragedies, and we have deep empathy for the families who have endured heartbreaking losses. We have zero tolerance for criminal abuse on Snapchat,” a spokesperson with the company said. “In 2024, we removed more than 2.4 million pieces of drug-related content, disabled the 516,000 related accounts, and blocked the devices associated with those accounts from using Snapchat.”
The company also outlined its commitment to responding to law enforcement requests, and highlighting its annual U.S. Law Enforcement Summit and its biannual transparency report.
“We value our partnerships with local, state and federal law enforcement to help bring criminals who abuse our platform to justice,” a spokesperson with Snap said. “We currently respond to approximately 98% of legal requests within the timeframe specified in the request.”
Meta and TikTok did not respond to Aspen Journalism and Aspen Public Radio’s requests for comment on this story, nor did several of their lobbyists in Colorado.
‘Better than where we are now’
SB86 — the latest legislation now in Polis’ hands — seeks to increase transparency efforts and overcome current data limitations by requiring social media companies to provide an annual report to the state on illegal activity conducted on its platforms.
The bill would also require these companies to publish clear policies concerning criminal activity on their platforms and remove users engaged in illegal activity such as drug and gun sales, and the sexual exploitation and trafficking of minors. Under the legislation, social media companies would have 72 hours after being notified of a user’s alleged violation of their policies — or of the law — to investigate the report, and another 24 hours to remove the user if they determine a violation occurred.
A framed photo at Daniel Shaw and Isa Catto’s home in Woody Creek shows Bailey, right, smiling with her sister Fiona. Bailey died from an accidental overdose shortly after graduating from Aspen High School and accepting a job on Broadway in New York City last summer.
In addition, the bill mandates a stricter timeline for platforms to respond to state law enforcement search warrants and requires larger companies to create a staffed hotline for such investigations.
“Search warrants from law enforcement are supposed to be complied with, and this bill will make sure social media companies have to respond within three days,” Dougherty said. “These are really time-sensitive investigations and while waiting for those search warrants and records to be returned so investigations can move forward, additional people are hurt and killed.”
Woody Creek resident and parent Daniel Shaw has supported the bill through Blue Rising’s advocacy network, and he is hopeful that these measures can save lives.
“After our daughter Bailey died of fentanyl poisoning last June, we knew right away that we wanted to get involved somehow in this battle against fentanyl, and the easy access that young people have to it,” Shaw said. “It’s impossible to tell how many lives this legislation would save or how long it would take for these measures to really become cemented in place, but it’s certainly better than where we are now.”
Shaw and his wife, Isa Catto, lost their daughter shortly after she graduated from Aspen High School and took a job on Broadway in New York City last year.
“Bailey was a remarkable, electric soul — she loved music and professional magic and was a theater tech wizard and stage manager,” Shaw said. “She went to celebrate her arrival in New York by getting some drugs, and those drugs included fentanyl, and she died 10 hours after arriving in the city.”
Although investigators have not yet been able to confirm where Bailey purchased the drugs that killed her, Shaw later learned that she had previously acquired other drugs through social media when she was living at home. Shaw said he wants to see more being done to regulate drug sales on these platforms, but he worries that Polis will veto the latest legislation.
“I would really like to hear his rationale from him and find out how he looks at that equation of First Amendment rights for these companies and people posting versus criminal activity and people dying,” Shaw said.
Free speech, privacy concerns
In response to Aspen Journalism and Aspen Public Radio’s request for an interview, the governor’s office, which testified against the bill before it passed both chambers, provided a written statement outlining Polis’ concerns:
“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,” said the statement from Eric Maruyama, a spokesperson with the governor’s office. “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.”
Colorado residents Charlotte DeGraff, right, and Madi Gmur stand in front of the state Capitol with a sign in support of Senate Bill 86 in Denver on Monday. DeGraff supports the bill, which cracks down on drug sales and other illegal activity on social media, citing her firsthand experience, “I not only went through a bit of addiction myself, and always got the substances I used from social media, but I’ve also seen this problem show up in my friend group and with other people, in one way or another, whether it’s sex trafficking or the selling of drugs or firearms.”
Other groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado have also testified against the bill and share some of Polis’ concerns, particularly about the provision mandating that social media companies remove users in violation of their own criminal activity policies or the law, even if they haven’t been convicted of a crime.
“Our biggest concern is really around the requirement in the bill for social media platforms to remove users — and a lot of the legislation that has moved through Colorado, and nationally, attempts to do this,” said Anaya Robinson, a senior policy strategist at ACLU of Colorado. “Rather than setting strict regulations on the platform side, those regulations are bleeding into the user side.”
According to Robinson, the ACLU of Colorado supports the bill’s platform-focused regulations, including requiring social media companies to adhere to a strict timeline for responding to state law enforcement and to provide an annual report on illegal activity.
Although illegal activity is not protected under the U.S. Constitution, Robinson said their concern is that forcing social media companies to remove certain users could violate the First Amendment.
“Even if an individual is engaging in illegal activity that is not protected speech on a social media platform, that instance of unprotected speech doesn’t negate their First Amendment rights across the board,” Robinson said. “You still can’t remove the future of protected speech from that individual’s access and their ability to engage in those platforms.”But attorney Antonia Merzon, who has been working as a policy adviser for Blue Rising, disagrees, saying it’s misleading to suggest that removing a user from one social media site would deny them use of all platforms.
“What would happen is they would not get to use this particular social media platform,” Merzon said. “That doesn’t mean they couldn’t use any of the other social media platforms out there.”
Merzon and other advocates and legislators behind the bill said they worked hard to incorporate feedback from Polis and groups such as the ACLU, after facing similar opposition to a more comprehensive bill they ultimately pulled last year — and they believe the latest legislation would hold up in court.
“We have, collectively with the state attorney general’s office, analyzed their arguments, analyzed the case law, and have concluded that there is nothing about a platform removing a user for violating its policies about clearly egregious illegal activity that constitutes a First Amendment violation,” Merzon said.
For their part, Congdon and Shaw hope Polis will listen to families who have experienced firsthand the impact of things such as illicit fentanyl.
“No one ever caught the person who sold fentanyl to Miles, and there is nothing to stop that person from selling fentanyl to someone else’s kid and killing them,” Congdon said. “And that’s wrong.”
Polis received the legislation last Monday. He has until Wednesday to sign or veto it.
If he vetoes the legislation, the Democratic and Republican lawmakers sponsoring the bill would need a two-thirds supermajority vote in both chambers to override his decision. The bill passed with enough votes to clear that threshold in the House and Senate.
“I’ve been a journalist my whole life, and Isa is a very creative artist and writer, and we are big fans of the First Amendment, but we’re also big fans of young people staying alive,” Shaw said. “The opposition has been very effective around the country, and it might take someone like Gov. Polis signing this bill, or the legislature overriding a veto, to move the needle.”
