In the rising fervor over social media and the youth mental health crisis, one piece of technology has received a lot of attention: the algorithm.
Algorithms—which prioritize the posts we see on our social media feeds usually based on how likely we are to engage with the content—has made social media addictive to young people, hurting their mental health. Or so says California’s Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act, which was signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, on Sept. 20.
In a nutshell, the law makes it illegal for minors’ social media accounts to have what lawmakers describe as “addictive feeds”—those that recommend or prioritize content based on information about the child—unless parents have given consent.
The law also requires parental consent for social media platforms to send notifications to minors between 12 a.m. and 6 a.m. year round and 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. during the weekdays from September through May—the critical time frames when kids should be asleep or engaged in learning at school. That’s where the new bill would likely have the biggest direct impact on schools, said Jeffrey Carpenter, a professor of education at Elon University who studies social media and its impact on education.
“That is something that the schools can’t touch: They can ban cellphones in school, but schools have a lot less influence over what happens outside of school,” he said. “I do think those [notification restrictions] would be concretely helpful to schools if there is some help in limiting the distractions of all of the notifications.”
The provisions of the law won’t go into full effect until January of 2027, when the state attorney general is tasked with hammering out the regulatory details.
The California law is part of a broader push by states and school districts—through legislation and lawsuits—to compel social media companies to take more aggressive action to retool their platforms so that they are less likely to hurt children’s mental health. New York passed a law earlier this year restricting the use of algorithmic feeds on minors’ social media accounts.
“Lawmakers certainly have the attention of these social media platforms now,” said Taylor Barkley, the director of public policy at the Abundance Institute, a Utah-based think tank that focuses on public policy and emerging technology. “I think there is a degree to which social media platforms should have been thinking much more intensely about these issues earlier.”
A 2023 Utah law requires parental consent for minors to open social media accounts. But Barkley said that how, exactly, social media companies will comply with these parental consent provisions remains largely unanswered from policymakers.
Movement to reign in social media companies has bipartisan support
Those concerns have not slowed the movement to regulate social media companies, though. That, Barkley said, is because the problematic use of social media and cellphones by kids are rare issues that have bipartisan support to address, said Barkley.
“It’s fascinating to see two very different states—California, big population, very progressive, left leaning, and Utah, you have 3 million people, very conservative, right leaning—meeting at the top of the circle with very similar public policies,” he said.
The California law’s focus on parental consent might help it sidestep some constitutional concerns around free speech that have arisen with other legislation and district-led lawsuits directed at social media companies, said Eugene Volokh, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and professor of law emeritus at UCLA.
“The fact that the law leaves it to the parents to decide is a plus for the law,” he said. “It doesn’t categorically say ‘we think kids shouldn’t be able to access these things no matter what their parents say.’ Another plus is that it doesn’t target any particular viewpoint. It doesn’t go after supposedly racist speech or anti-trans speech, and it doesn’t even really target particular subject matter. It doesn’t target speech about sexual development, or about violence, or about anorexia. Those are pluses for the law.”
But should the law face a legal challenge, it could still be found unconstitutional, said Volokh. Recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings in cases involving NetChoice, the industry trade association that represents several major social media and tech companies such as Meta, Snap, and X, found that social media companies’ moderating and curating of feeds is protected by the First Amendment.
NetChoice has warned that legislation like California’s could inadvertently block adult users from accessing certain content and could lead to social media platforms collecting more information on users, undermining online privacy.
In a letter to Gov. Newsom requesting he veto the California bill, NetChoice said: “We share the sponsor’s goal to better protect minors from harmful content online. NetChoice members have taken issues of teen safety seriously and in recent years have rolled out numerous new features, settings, parental tools, and protections to better empower parents and assist in monitoring their children’s use of social media.”
Does social media actually hurt youth mental health?
The U.S. surgeon general has both described the state of youth mental health as a crisis and pointed directly to social media as a potential source of the problem when recommending that social media platforms come with a health warning label.
Forty-two state attorneys general sent a letter to congress earlier this month endorsing the surgeon general’s proposal.
But other experts say that the research linking social media use to poor mental health among youth is limited and mixed.
While there is reason to be concerned about social media notifications disrupting children’s sleep and algorithms luring impressionable adolescents into increasingly harmful content—from extreme violence to eating disorders to conspiracy theories—there is also research suggesting that social media can be good for young people. It can provide students with important peer networks and support, strengthen connections to far flung family members, and connect them to hobbies, resources, and causes they wouldn’t otherwise have access to.
For this reason, some LGBTQ+ youth advocates, including The Trevor Project, sent a letter this summer to the California Assembly speaker voicing opposition to the bill the state’s governor signed into law on Sept. 20.
Nearly three-quarters of high school students surveyed by the EdWeek Research Center earlier this year said that social media either had no impact or a positive impact on their mental health.
“I don’t know that we are being 100 percent honest with ourselves if we think all of the mental health challenges that teens experience are linked to social media,” said Carpenter. “Social media is a contributor, and that’s why I think it’s good there is regulation, but I don’t think it’s a sole reason that schools are seeing the challenges that they are with students’ mental health.”
