The crusade to ban children from social media is popular. That is also its weakness

THE CRUSADE to keep children off social media has become the rare bipartisan project that stretches across the Atlantic. Lawmakers in America, Britain, Australia and elsewhere have signed on to age-restriction laws that promise to protect young people and deliver satisfying headlines. None of them have figured out how to make the promises stick.

The legislative activity is impressive. In the United States, at least 16 states have enacted laws regulating minors' access to social media, as a Harvard Law Review study documented in February 2026. Utah's Social Media Regulation Act, passed in 2023, requires age verification and parental consent for users under 18. Arkansas followed with a near-identical measure. California has been more inventive: its Digital Age Assurance Act, signed into law in October 2025, requires operating-system providers to estimate users' ages and sort them into four categories. It takes effect in January 2027, giving Apple, Google and Microsoft two years to figure out how to guess how old you are without your documents. California also enacted a law in September 2024 that bars platforms from serving addictive feeds and sending notifications to minors during school and sleep hours.

Across the Atlantic, The United Kingdom's Online Safety Act, which came into force in stages from 2023, requires platforms to age-assure users and remove harmful content. France, Ireland and other European nations have followed with their own versions.

The public appetite is real. The political incentives are therefore powerful. The danger is that popularity has been mistaken for policy design.

The judicial reality is stark. All but one federal district court to address these state-level age-verification laws has found them likely unconstitutional under the First Amendment. Justice Kavanaugh, writing in an emergency docket concurrence, called Mississippi's age-verification law "likely unconstitutional". The technology industry's trade group, NetChoice, has successfully sued to block enforcement in multiple states, supported by civil-liberties groups. Courts have repeatedly agreed that these measures are vague, unworkable, and burden more speech than they protect.

To be sure, the concerns that motivate these laws are genuine. The Supreme Court itself has acknowledged that social media pose dangers to adolescents' mental health. Concrete evidence of a causal link remains contestable, as the Harvard Law Review study notes, but the correlation between heavy social-media use and worsening adolescent well-being is hard to ignore. And the problem may get worse: the increasing presence of artificial intelligence in social feeds will intensify the attention-grabbing mechanics that lawmakers rightly find alarming.

Yet the policies being enacted do not address the problem they claim to solve. The trouble is structural. Age verification requires platforms or operating systems to collect, store and verify personally identifiable information from hundreds of millions of users, including minors. That creates a honeypot for data breaches. It forces children who cannot legally vote, drive or sign contracts to hand over the documents of a parent or guardian. And it does nothing for the 12-year-old who borrows a friend's phone, uses a virtual private network or simply lies about their birthday-a practice so commonplace that Michigan and Wisconsin have proposed banning VPNs to prevent circumvention.

There is a deeper problem. These laws look like regulation of technology companies but function as regulation of speech. FIRE puts the point bluntly: what happens on social media is expressive activity-text, images, video-and the government cannot restrict it without surviving constitutional scrutiny. Content-based restrictions face "strict scrutiny", the most rigorous form of judicial review, which is "strict in theory and fatal in fact". Laws that single out "social" platforms for differential treatment while exempting news sites, forums and video games look like censorship dressed as child protection. They rarely survive.

The result is a familiar one. States keep passing laws that courts keep striking down. Companies keep building products they know will be targeted. Parents keep worrying. No one is better off. The political incentive is to appear decisive; the institutional consequence is to erode trust in the rule of law. When a law is enacted that everyone knows will be enjoined within months, the spectacle is less legislation than theatre.

A better approach exists, though it is less photogenic. The first task is to regulate the product, not the person. California's 2024 law banning addictive feeds during school and sleep hours is closer to the mark: it targets design features that exploit psychological vulnerabilities without demanding invasive identity checks. Platforms can limit notifications, remove autoplay and default-opt children to less stimulating interfaces without knowing their exact birthdate. Several already offer "teen accounts" with restricted features, though these are voluntary and inconsistent.

The second task is to strengthen the oldest federal rule on the books. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, enacted in 1998, restricts data collection from children under 13 but has never been meaningfully updated for an era in which TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube Kids operate as default social environments. Updating COPPA to require age-appropriate defaults, limit data brokerage, and ban manipulative design features for minors would be a far more coherent federal approach than watching 16 states produce 16 different unconstitutional schemes.

The third task is the least politically fashionable but perhaps the most urgent: teaching children to use these tools without treating them as if the internet is a drug. Social media provides real benefits for young people, including connection with marginalised communities, access to civic organising and educational resources. The National Youth Rights Association, an advocacy group for young people, argues that blanket bans limit communication, free expression and civic participation. Its tone is polemical, but the underlying point is worth taking seriously: for many teenagers, especially LGBTQ+ youth in hostile environments, social media is not a luxury but a lifeline.

Governments should resist the urge to legislate their way out of discomfort. The instinct to ban children from social media is understandable. It is also the wrong answer. The incentives that drive lawmakers-visible action, public approval, blame displacement onto Silicon Valley-are the same incentives that produced laws no court will uphold and no platform can enforce. The aim should be to make social media less harmful for children without stripping adults of free speech or handing a generation of minors' identity documents to a stack of databases that hackers are already circling.

Protecting children online requires precision, not popularity. These laws have plenty of the latter. They are short on the former.