Whatever the cause of current teen angst, parents, not governments, are the answer.
In an effort to address a perceived youth mental health crisis, online kids’ safety regulation is on the march in Congress and around the globe. But these government interventions bring with them serious privacy and security trade-offs for internet users of all ages. They are based on unproven hypotheses and fundamentally misunderstand the locus for solving the problem. Whatever the cause of current teen angst, parents, not governments, are the answer.
The U.K. is moving rapidly toward banning everyone under 16 years of age from social media, the European Union is pushing a tiered age-restriction approach online, and Australia is doubling down on its mostly failed attempt to keep kids off many online platforms. Stateside, the U.S. House of Representative’s Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act passed and is headed to the Senate to be accepted or rejected in light of the upper chamber’s own Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). Laws being considered, already passed, or halted by courts over free speech constitutional questions at statehouses around the U.S. are too numerous to list.
But government regulation can only be justified when there exists market failure. That could be externalities (costs or benefits to third parties not involved in a business transaction, like pollution), insufficient information for both buyers and sellers to make informed decisions, public goods (like national defense), or monopolies that can raise prices or restrict output without consequence are all examples that traditionally justify government intervention. Proposals to regulate kids’ presence online meet none of these qualifications.
Yet, elected representatives are encouraged to act by things like a recent poll finding that majorities support government banning social media, requiring people to verify their age before using social media, and setting time limits for minors. In fact, the reported popularity of these measures is often the totality of the argument made by their supporters.
Never mind that buying their children the devices to go online is even more popular with parents than their self-reported enthusiasm for regulation. As of 2024, 95 percent of teens possess or have access to a smartphone, 88 percent to a desktop or laptop computer, 83 percent to a gaming console, and 70 percent to a tablet. Economists call that a “revealed preference.” In laymen’s terms, better to note what parents actually do, not what they say. In this case, parents pay hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars a year to provide devices and connectivity to facilitate their children being online.
An additional curiosity is that the vast majority of the restrictions regulatory measures propose can already be accomplished by parents. Beyond the aforementioned (and obvious) option of parents declining to buy these devices for their kids, comprehensive, granule parental controls to set content parameters, time limits, and alerts are built into every level of the tech stack. It takes about 15 minutes to set up parental controls on iPhones and Android devices.
All the tools to put parents in control already exist in their pockets. They can set restrictions to reflect their family’s values, to cater to the individual needs of their child, and can adjust them as those needs change as kids grow older. Most importantly, none of that technology brings with it the downsides that government regulation does.
Many of the proposals unavoidably create strong incentives for platforms to verify the age of their users. The higher the legal risk to platforms of showing content banned for minors, engaging in age-banned business practices such as targeted advertising, or offering prohibited features like infinite scroll, the more reliable the age verification will have to be. That will likely mean requirements to upload a government ID. And since we don’t give government IDs to children, that means adults will have to upload theirs to proactively prove they are of age. In practice, these proposals mean government ID age verification for every American of any age if they wish to speak or access others’ speech online.
Some adults will balk at uploading their identification to go online, missing out entirely on an increasingly important forum for information and entertainment. Constitutionally protected anonymous speech in the U.S. dates back to The Federalist Papers where Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay used the pseudonym Publius. The practice continues to protect speakers from retaliation, promote robust debate, and separate biases toward the speaker from his ideas.
Other adults who acquiesce to uploading their identification may think twice about what they say online, knowing it can be traced to their real name and other personally identifiable information. With serious legal threats hanging over them, platforms will err on the side of caution by overly restricting any content that could be deemed controversial to minors, even if it might be educational and helpful on topics like depression, sexual wellness, or nutrition. All of this is a chilling of constitutionally protected speech and will certainly face legal challenges.
Additionally, collecting government IDs creates a target-rich environment for bad actors. Identity theft and data breaches are already ubiquitous, and government mandates to collect more information will only make it worse. Attempts to protect kids shouldn’t mean sacrificing the privacy and security of all Americans online.
And what exactly are we trying to protect kids from online anyway? It depends on who you ask. Questions still remain about whether online activity is correlated or causational for its effect on teens’ mental health. Do kids feel better after social media, or worse? Or do kids already feeling bad turn to social media to feel better? Or does social media have any effect either way? Even the experts can’t agree on what the root cause is for society’s criticisms of today’s youth. Jonathan Haidt has become the poster boy for claims that social media is debilitating whole generations — and sold plenty of books doing it. But the battle of the social scientists will heat up this fall when Haidt’s former colleague, Peter Gray, releases his own book arguing that the same unstructured play, freedom, and agency kids are missing in the offline world shouldn’t also be taken from them online.
Perhaps it’s tech journalist Florence Ion who gets closer to the truth of what’s really flustering about screens for most parents. While penning a glowing review of Apple’s iOS 27 parental controls for PCMag, she writes of being asked by her child for time beyond the limits she’s set and the exchange ending with either, “a torrent of negotiation, after which I let her have an extra 10 minutes, or with the child in tears because she didn’t get to finish a level in a game she was playing. Either way, having a kill switch as the parental account isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.” And perhaps that’s what parents championing having their judgement outsourced to the government are really asking for: someone else to be the heavy.
U.S. legislators should think twice before passing regulations with harmful, unintended consequences in an environment when the market has already provided solutions to parents. It’s a bad trade-off to restrict speech, compromise privacy, and degrade security for all Americans just to spare parents from having to say, “No.”