The Flawed Logic Behind Social Media Bans: Why Courts Are Pushing Back

There seems to be bipartisan agreement that everything from teen suicide rates to poor mental health and more is due to social media. The obvious solution, they believe, is to impose government oversight on how such services can be provided. Congress is considering sweeping social media legislation and a number of states have already enacted such laws.

But as legendary journalist H.L. Mencken wrote more than a century ago, for every complex human problem there is always a solution that is “neat, plausible and wrong.” Courts thus far seem to agree, barring social media laws from going into effect in Arkansas, California, Mississippi, Ohio, Texas and Utah as violating First Amendment protections for freedom of speech.

And that is the problem: Governments are trying to impose simple, one-size-fits-all solutions to address a complicated situation. In the process, they are overlooking the fact that the Supreme Court has long recognized that the right to freedom of expression doesn’t magically spring into existence when a person turns 18 years old.

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Those who embrace the theory of social media’s dangers often overlook contrary evidence, such as the largest long-term study of brain development in the U.S., which found no evidence of drastic changes associated with digital technology use. Others agree the answers are not so simple. The American Psychological Association issued a 2023 advisory that warned of potential risks but also observed that “using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful.”

The difficulty is that science is nuanced in ways that politics is not. The idea that some types of social media use by some minors under certain conditions can adversely affect some segment of this cohort is no basis for imposing restrictions on all social media use by all minors.

Examples of overzealous reactions are not confined to the long distant past. With the advent of the Internet, governments at all levels adopted laws seeking to restrict access in ways that affected the First Amendment rights of both young people and adults. The first round began with passage of the federal Communications Decency Act in 1996, which sought to ban all “indecent” communications online. The Supreme Court rejected that approach, holding that even a legitimate interest in protecting kids could not justify
“torching a large segment of the Internet.”

Now, almost three decades later, the age of Internet regulation 2.0 has arrived. This time, governments are focused on the idea that kids spend too much time online generally.

And rather than focusing on education, to teach people how to responsibly use this medium, states have opted to restrict speech. But courts reviewing regulations have been unwilling to green-light broad-based censorship.