A Public Health Epidemic to Restrict Digital Rights

Remember that time a few years back when the government completely reshaped day-to-day life and restricted our basic rights to protect us from a disease that wasn’t that dangerous? Remember how our leaders forced us to comply with a suite of safety protocols that seemed mostly symbolic at best and a test of compliance at worst? Well, it’s happening again but not in the way you’d expect.

No, this time the threat is not some plague of medieval proportions. It’s not a new strain of super-Covid. It’s not Ebola or Disease-X. It’s not monkeypox or hantavirus. It’s not even explosive diarrhea from dirty lettuce. No, this time the threat is social media and the open internet.

That’s right. In case you haven’t heard, social media is causing a mental health crisis amongst young people. Porn and the potential for children to interact with adult strangers online probably isn’t great either. And therefore in order to protect our nation’s youth we all need to accept that the government has no choice but to reshape day-to-day life in the digital world.

A Brief History of Another Scientific Consensus

To give some background, starting roughly around 2012 depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidality began to increase among minors. These trends coincided with the growing ubiquity of smartphones and social media. Subsequently, many parents, teachers, psychologists, and activists went on to suggest a link. Moreover, these claims were said to be supported by a growing number of scientific studies showing associations between social media use and measures of declining mental health.

When discussed in popular books such as Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, these societal trends and supporting studies often are portrayed as undeniable evidence of a mental health epidemic caused by social media. When discussed in the media and by politicians, there can be a sense that this is a consensus position among experts overwhelmingly supported by “The Science.” 

Consequently, legislators across the country are rushing to demonstrate how seriously they take this and related issues by restricting access to certain digital corridors to those able and willing to convince a computer algorithm that they are in fact an adult – or by at least requiring everyone to jump through a couple additional government-mandated hoops just to get online.

Protecting Children by Requiring ID

Although many pieces of legislation have been proposed, and in some cases enacted into law, the most comprehensive and probably most threatening at the moment is the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (KIDS Act).

The KIDS Act, which recently passed in the House (and which I wrote about in more detail for The Washington Examiner), has been sent to the Senate. What happens next is unclear. But if it were to become law, it would require certain types of websites and digital technologies to provide distinct user experiences based on whether a user is an adult or a minor (or in some cases an adult, teen, or child).  

On paper, this is intended to protect minors from age-inappropriate content (e.g., pornography and cigarette ads), questionable practices on the part of social media companies (e.g., location sharing with third parties, personalized ads, and design features that encourage compulsive use), and online interactions with adult strangers and deceptive AIs. It also is meant to give parents greater control of their children’s social media accounts and online lives. 

In practice, however, the KIDS Act would require covered sites and technologies verify or at least estimate the ages of visitors or users through an array of mechanisms that at best legitimize current data collection practices by Big Tech (e.g., age estimation based on one’s online activity) and at worst mandate even more invasive ones that can be used to verify a user’s real-world identity (e.g., presentation of a government ID or submission to a biometric face scan). 

A similar effort has been proposed by the Senate. At the state level, places such as California, Texas, and Utah have their own age-gating legislation. Additionally, California and Illinois are pushing requirements that at least some operating systems collect age-bracket information on users to relay to websites as a means to ensure age-appropriate user experiences. 

Also, the Senate is considering the SCREEN Act, which is intended to prevent minors from viewing sexually explicit material online, seemingly by imposing more invasive age-gating protocols on anyone attempting to access such content. However, according to some analyses, the SCREEN Act may not only cover porn sites but also major streaming services and social media platforms. Furthermore, the SCREEN Act would require covered sites to crack down on people using VPNs to protect their privacy by circumnavigating compliance with age-gating requirements.

Despite some differences in the precise rationale and specific mechanisms imposed by these different pieces of legislation, the end result is always the same: an internet that is a little less free.   

Second-Tier Status for Those Who Refuse to Comply 

As highlighted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), one of America’s leading defenders of free speech, age-gating measures have the potential to eliminate the ability of people to speak anonymously on social media sites, as well as “suppress the consumption of lawful speech (by minors)” and put “all manner of censorial burdens on the rights of both minors and adults.” 

To go a step further, given that many age-gating measures can double as identity verification measures (e.g., the upload of one’s government ID, a biometric scan, etc.), this raises questions about whether online activities requiring submission to at least more stringent mechanisms should be treated with the same caution as a text, email, tweet, or nude selfie. In other words, should you always operate under the assumption that your age-gated activities could be linked back to you and made public? If so, should you proceed to alter your behavior, speech, and content consumption on the other side of an age-gate accordingly? What kind of chilling effects will these kinds of requirements ultimately have? 

Granted, it may feel like we don’t have much privacy left in the digital world (or the physical one for that matter thanks to companies like Flock), but maintaining an anonymous social media account isn’t completely impossible and you can still try to hide your browsing history by using privacy-friendly search engines and a VPN. Age-gating efforts, however, make such attempts considerably harder, if not futile. 

Furthermore, although social media is filled with all sorts of frivolous crap and people can behave in all sorts of puerile ways on these sites, for better or worse, there is truth to the cliché that social media sites have become our public squares. Facebook and X now serve as major news outlets for many people, as well as places of community engagement and political activism. Hence, a person’s inability or unwillingness to comply with social media age-gating efforts effectively limits their participation in modern society and civic life. 

In some places, this second-class status is cemented even further by age-gating mandates that gate much more than just social media. Texas’s 2025 App Store Accountability Act, for example, not only requires app stores verify the age of individuals attempting to download social media apps but also those trying to download library, news, book, banking, fitness, and weather apps. 

Additionally, once such measures take wide enough effect, requirements to submit to a face scan or to upload a copy of one’s government ID will likely come to be perceived as a normal part of day-to-day digital life, allowing companies to impose such requirements even more broadly than legally required, further excluding from normal life those who cannot or will not comply.

Moreover, even if you believe concerns about online privacy and anonymity are overblown, it is worth noting that additional data collection ultimately increases opportunities for data to be exposed through the kind of leaks and hacks that seem unavoidable for any entity collecting vast amounts of data. In recent years AT&T, Comcast, the background check company National Public Data, and TeaOnHer, an app women use to vet potential partners, all have been reported to have experienced data breaches. So have companies used by Discord, TikTok, and X for identity verification. 

Making matters worse, even if you think these are acceptable trade-offs for the protection and safety of children, the reality is that these efforts will likely protect as many children as requirements for cloth masks in their classrooms.  

Little Actual Protection for Minors

Like many of the ineffective public health measures imposed during Covid to protect us from a disease that wasn’t that dangerous, most age-gating measures are going to prove equally useless at protecting children’s mental health and broader well-being. Plus, like the threat of Covid to the physical health of everyone, the threat of social media to the psychological health of minors is largely exaggerated.

As I wrote in my Washington Examiner article, most age-gating efforts will inevitably fail to keep children away from purportedly dangerous or inappropriate online sites and content. 

Even when children are banned from having their own social media accounts (or accessing social media at all), many children still use parental accounts with parental permission. Other parents allow their kids to maintain “illegal” accounts (or at least look the other way). Realistically, even if age-gating mandates were put in place, such assistance and indifference inevitably would continue. 

Also, many families share computers and tablets, meaning that device-level age-gating mechanisms like the OS-level bracketing schemes of California and Illinois would have little impact on the online activities of children outside of families in which the children strictly use their own designated devices or in which shared devices are kept in child-mode. Furthermore, many older children can gain access to a parental credit card (an acceptable enough adult credential in some circumstances) just by asking to borrow it, while other kids beyond a certain age are more than comfortable snatching a parental ID after hours. 

The truth is that despite what age-gating proponents might claim, in practice, any age-gating mechanism short of requiring a live-selfie coupled with an ID just to open a browser (or at least access specified sites) is really a half-measure that will be undermined by a combination of parental indifference and teenage ingenuity. Any age-gating requirement that falls short of that level of stringency, at best, is the act of a politician attempting to signal that they take concerns about social media seriously enough to do something for the sake of doing something. At worst, such half-measures are meant to ease us into the more stringent ones.       

In either case they won’t do much to protect young people from social media (or the broader internet). Once more, though, this isn’t simply because all but the most draconian age-gating regimes are destined to fail, but also because social media isn’t quite the scourge to children’s mental health that it’s made out to be.

Social Media Harms to Childhood Mental Health: Disputed, Poorly-Supported, Exaggerated 

Despite the presentation that “The Science” is settled and the experts agree that social media is responsible for some massive mental health epidemic among young people, there is actually a fair amount of disagreement among mental health professionals and researchers on the matter.

Some share Jonathan Haidt’s general stance, as put forth in The Anxious Generation, while highlighting how social media may be especially harmful to certain subpopulations of young people such as those with existing learning disabilities or mental health problems. Others argue a lot of the research in this area is comprised of observations of trends in ecological datasets around which people later develop unsupported narratives.

Moreover, academic reviews and meta-analyses of relevant research raise questions about the quality of the work in this area. Commonly, such assessments conclude that the bulk of the studies in this area are of low quality, often yield weak or inconsistent results, and collectively fail to find clear links between digital technology use and clinically relevant measures of mental health or broader metrics of well-being.

Specifically, such assessments show that concepts like mental health, well-being, and social media use are defined and measured inconsistently between studies. Sometimes mental health is defined using clinically relevant measures; sometimes it’s not. Sometimes well-being is used as a catch-all term referring not just to mental or physical health but any number of social, cognitive, developmental, emotional, or academic measures. Sometimes distinct terms such as digital technology use, social media use, and problematic social media use are used interchangeably, leading to confusion about what researchers are even examining. 

Many studies also fail to take into account questions regarding whether the type of content with which young people engage on social media, their motivations for using social media, or the manner in which they engage with social media have separate effects on measured outcomes. Another commonly cited problem is that studies frequently rely on unreliable self-report measures of social media use and generally fail to control for things like participants trying to respond to survey questions in a socially desirable manner or guessing study hypotheses and responding to questions in ways they think might “help” the researcher.

Similarly, academic reviews of research on social media addiction have found the same problems. Lack of standard conceptual and operational definitions. Inconsistencies in the measures used to quantify variables of interest. Over-reliance on self-report measures. 

The biggest issue in the social media addiction literature, though, is that there is no widely agreed upon definition for social media addiction or the related concept of problematic social media use.

At first glance defining social media addiction may seem straightforward. But then one remembers “addiction” is a meaningful clinical term. It has a clinical definition. In fact, it was actually this clinical definition on which researchers and clinicians initially tried to model concepts for different forms of technology addiction. The intent was to conceptualize these purported technological addictions as something analogous to addictions to chemical substances with motivations of mood regulation, symptoms of preoccupation, tolerance, and withdrawal, and ultimately dire consequences for one’s personal relationships and ability to lead a normal life. In practice, though, researchers quickly abandoned more rigid conceptualizations and now lack a standard definition. 

Likewise, attempts to define and measure problematic social media use have not gone much better. Conceptually, problematic social media use is supposed to imply some element of a preoccupation with one’s social media activities, an inability to stop them, and real conflicts in one’s life because of them. Yet, in practice, even when researchers claim (or at least imply) they are measuring problematic social media use in a way that captures these ill effects, they often actually end up simply measuring time spent on social media in ways that don’t.

Social Media’s Horrible, But Symbolic Safety and Digital Dystopia Are Worse

To be clear, nothing presented here necessarily is meant to defend the social media companies or encourage social media use among young people. Even if it’s not leading to a mental health epidemic, it still may not be great for basic human social dynamics or the development of good social skills. Even if it’s not addictive in a clinically relevant sense, that doesn’t mean the social media companies haven’t tried to make their products addictive or load them with design features that at least attempt to encourage compulsive use. It’s definitely not meant to defend questionable practices on the part of social media companies like location sharing with third parties and the analysis of personal data for the delivery of personalized ads. And it doesn’t mean everything online is age-appropriate for every person under 18.

However, if politicians are going to claim that social media is responsible for a public health crisis and use this as a pretext for requiring everyone, at minimum, to symbolically sacrifice a little bit of liberty, and perhaps ultimately accept the elimination of any possibility of online anonymity, it would be nice if there was stronger evidence to support the initial claim.

Furthermore, if such evidence is lacking, the scenario playing out does start to seem eerily familiar. In fact, it starts to become reminiscent of that time a few years back when we were required to symbolically wear a cloth mask to enter a restaurant and were left wondering whether the rollout of something else was just around the corner.