The Kentucky State House passed a bill restricting social media use for kids 15 and younger on March 9. The bill is now stalled in the State Senate. Perhaps a landmark legal ruling last week against Meta, which found them guilty of persistently violating New Mexico’s consumer protection laws, will jar it loose.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a press release on March 25, “Meta executives knew their products harmed children, disregarded warnings from their own employees, and lied to the public about what they knew.” Torrez led a two-year investigation that uncovered internal documents of a Meta “Deactivation Study”, where employees found that users who stopped using Facebook and Instagram for a week showed lower rates of depression, anxiety, and loneliness. Meta buried the findings.
An unnamed Meta employee said that “If the results are bad and we don’t publish and they leak, is it going to look like tobacco companies doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves?” What a fitting reference to Big Tobacco’s denial of tobacco’s addictive qualities and harmful health effects in the 1990s, and marketing schemes to recruit a new generation of smokers.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found that the Joe Camel cartoon character campaign illegally targeted minors, encouraging them to smoke. In the case of social media, Meta knew about serious risks to minors including exposure to harmful content, failure to keep kids under age 13 off the platform, and weak safeguards against child predators.
In 2017, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggested that “teen time spent be our top goal”, according to a company executive quoted in a legal brief. Meta’s growth team determined that a private-by-default setting (which would keep predators and unsolicited and dangerous content away) would result in a loss of 1.5 million monthly teen users on Instagram. An unnamed Meta employee said “taking away unwanted interactions… is likely to lead to a potentially untenable problem with engagement and growth.” Research is making clear that Big Social Media’s “growth” comes with a high cost to minors.
Social media addiction in minors is emerging in low test scores, decreased attention spans, and overall poor mental health. Social media platforms are also a playground for bullies. They’ve become a pool where child predators lurk. Platforms like Instagram with their 17-strikes policy of sexual solicitation to teens before blocking pedophiles demonstrates a low threshold for criminal behavior and poor job of self-policing. An audit of Instagram in 2022 found that their recommendation features suggested over 1.4 million “potentially inappropriate adults” to teens in a single day.
Aspects of social media play like a slot machine: infinite scrolling reels, push notifications, and autoplay features are built in to foster compulsive use. All add up to a dopamine rush making it difficult for kids to pull away. Addiction is part of the business plan. In 2024, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy was convinced of the harm it was causing kids and called for a warning label on social media platforms because they are linked to significant mental health issues.
Currently, HB 227 would require the largest social media companies to block minors 15 and younger from access, unless parents choose to opt their children in. As it is, they can determine in short order the age of their patrons, making it an easy task.
According to a 2022 study by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat raked in $11 billion in marketing and advertising revenue aimed at minors. But kids shouldn’t be seen merely as revenue streams in any context. They are vulnerable, susceptible to manipulation, and need adults to protect them until they’re able to make reasoned judgments for themselves. For their sake, we must minimize harm in order for the best chance of future health and happiness.
Opponents of regulation argue that parents are responsible for policing their own kids’ social media use. Of course, parents play an outsized role. Yet, social pressures from their peers often prove too strong. “But mom, all my friends are on Instagram!” One thing the New Mexico ruling made clear is that parents need help to stand against an exploitative industry that has failed to police itself and protect kids from harmful content and predators.
Big money is clearly at stake. That’s why Meta’s lobbyists are clouding the issue and trying to kill HB 227 this session. Perhaps this is a replay of Big Tobacco’s smokescreen in the 1990s when they denied the health hazards of cigarettes. Something just as addictive and dangerous appears to be at stake. Hopefully our state legislature will notice and act.