As statehouses ramp up for 2026, we’re seeing a familiar and concerning trend of lawmakers rushing to regulate the internet based on shockingly shaky science. From the California State Assembly to the Massachusetts and Minnesota legislatures, a wave of bills is crashing against the digital lives of young people, with proponents of these measures framing social media access as a “public health epidemic,” or a “mental health crisis,” even though we have yet to see any of the settled science that those labels usually invoke.
As a digital rights organization dedicated to the civil liberties of all users, EFF’s expertise lies in reminding lawmakers that young people enjoy largely the same free speech and privacy rights as adults. EFF is not a social science research shop, but we can read the emerging research. What that research shows is much more nuanced than what is claimed by those proposing to ban young people from social media, and it is clear that research and theories used to justify these sweeping bans is far from settled. The rush to ban access to digital platforms is being fueled by “pop psychology” narratives and a collection of statistically flawed studies that do not meet the rigorous standards required for such a massive infringement on youth autonomy and constitutional rights.
Off-topic comment. I read this article, but read it in a couple different sessions due to interruptions, and had apparently clicked on to other pages. I wanted to comment about how US culture is unreasonably hard on young people (in general), and for all the US talk of freedom, is often restrictive, especially so for minors. Unfortunately, finding this article page was rather difficult. A browser addon called “What we say” had 4 links from the article back to Lemmy discussion, but they were mostly to a federated instance called “Division by zero”. So I tried the button labeled “Find in my home instance”, but it refused to work, which could be due to my own browser’s configuration (it has worked on other articles and instances). So I came back to lemmy.world, and had to scroll manually through several pages, using browser search to find the article. It’d be nice if there was a more direct method of finding a Lemmy discussion from a non-Lemmy webpage.