As America celebrates 250 years of freedom, most U.S. adults want to curtail children’s freedom online.
According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 56 percent of Americans support banning anyone under 16 from using social media sites. The poll, which surveyed 9,750 U.S. adults from May 26 to June 1, reflects growing bipartisan support for restricting children’s access to social media as governments in Australia and the U.K. move toward age-based limits.
Supporters of social media bans, like social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, have argued that social media has severely damaged teens’ mental health and that it has “devastated” their social lives. But, as Reason has noted, several studies contradict claims that social media is unequivocally harmful. For example, according to a 2022 Pew study, 80 percent of teens said social media makes them feel “more connected to what’s going on in their friends’ lives,” and 59 percent said it had neither a positive nor a negative effect on their lives. Thirty-two percent said it affected them positively, while just 9 percent said it affected them mostly negatively. Among those who said it had a positive effect, 46 percent cited connections and socializing as the primary benefits of social media.
Despite these findings, the majority of Americans across all age groups and political affiliations want to rein in social media companies. According to the recent Pew survey, 59 percent of Republicans (and Republican-leaning independents) and 54 percent of Democrats (and Democratic-leaning independents) want to ban social media for kids 15 years old and younger.
And U.S. lawmakers appear eager to seize on the anti-social media moment. Last week, a group of Democrats released a social media crackdown plan as their first major Project 2029 proposal, as first reported by Semafor. Among other restrictions, the “Kids Over Clicks” plan proposes banning teens under the age of 16 from opening social media accounts. Red states have also attempted to heavily regulate social media companies, including Texas, where lawmakers’ efforts to pass a social media ban for teen users last year ultimately failed.
Explicit government bans aside, the Pew poll also asked respondents whether they would support social media companies enacting various policies to curb minors’ social media use, including requiring parental consent to create accounts, age verification for social media sites, and limits on the time minors can spend on social media. Young people were the least supportive of these measures, but these policies found majority support across all age groups. Most disturbingly, 78 percent of poll respondents supported requiring people to verify their age before using social media sites. That figure is up seven percentage points from 2023.
Just because company-imposed age verification measures might sound less restrictive than outright bans, that doesn’t make them a good idea. As Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown has reported, they would effectively eliminate online anonymity because they often require users to reveal personal information via ID checks or biometric scans to access sites. According to the free speech organization the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, age verification poses “risks for data breaches, overly broad data collection and retention, censorial legal demands for collected data, corporate and governmental malfeasance, pressure to self-censor, and perhaps blatant First Amendment violations.”
Unfortunately, it appears Americans are ready and eager to accept these risks. And as lawmakers attempt to impose more control over the internet, they will likely cite this poll as evidence that they have a popular mandate to “protect” children from online harms. But “protecting” children comes at the expense of other users and, in some cases, the children themselves. If parents believe their children must be shielded from social media sites, they may restrict their children’s access to social media at the device level (or deny them access to a smartphone in the first place). Outsourcing parenting to the government or to social media companies, however, will only restrict internet freedom for all.
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