Discussion and debate over the regulation of social media companies has been front and center in recent months, between the possible forced sale of TikTok and pending Supreme Court cases pertaining to social media companies and the First Amendment. But another recent development is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ decision to require social media companies to prohibit the creation of accounts by users younger than 14.
The Florida law, which will take effect in 2025, was signed by DeSantis just weeks after Texas enacted a law aimed at protecting minors on the internet, requiring age verification for adults entering pornographic websites, to prevent access by underage children.
Laws such as those of Texas and Florida, as well as Congress’ apparent willingness to restrict TikTok, show a legitimate concern of lawmakers for the increasingly-apparent harmful effects of social media on developing children.
The Wall Street Journal’s investigative Facebook Files report uncovered internal company documents that showed Facebook was aware that Instagram was having negative impacts on the mental health of teenage girls, particularly in its messaging about body image. According to the Wall Street Journal report, “Facebook’s researchers identified the over-sexualization of girls as something that weighs on the mental health of the app’s users” and “the documents also show that Facebook has made minimal efforts to address these issues and plays them down in public.”
The harmful effects of the current weaknesses in internet regulations is also evidenced by a 2022 survey conducted by the nonprofit research organization Common Sense Media, which found that the average age of exposure to internet pornography was 12 years old, and more than half of teens encountered online pornography accidentally.
The increasing amount of time children spend on social media also takes away from valuable time that could be spent reading, playing, socializing and being with family.
The extent of influence that a foreign adversarial corporation like TikTok has over America’s youth is particularly troubling. Last month, when Congress seriously considered forcing TikTok to divest from Chinese ownership, the app sent notifications to users based on their zip codes, directing them to call their local members of Congress. Many of those calls came from children, and that shows the amount of power social media companies have over children, which should instead belong to parents.
The corporations that are negatively financially impacted by these laws will doubtless raise constitutional challenges under the First Amendment, but the states have firm constitutional ground on which to stand.
Laws that only regulate the medium of expression rather than its content are subject to a lower constitutional standard. Laws restricting the content of expression are subject to “strict scrutiny” under the First Amendment, meaning that in order to be valid, they must serve a compelling government interest and be narrowly-tailored to securing that interest, whereas laws regulating only the manner of expression are subject to “intermediate scrutiny,” which requires only that the law serve a substantial government interest and that it be substantially-related to promoting that government interest. Prohibiting social media for children is a content-neutral restriction, as it does not prohibit any particular message from being expressed, but only regulates the medium of expression, and courts would probably consider protecting the health, safety and welfare of children to be a compelling state interest.
Some have found it surprising that those leading the calls for regulating social media are political conservatives, who typically oppose government intervention in the economy and the exercise of state power over private corporations. The particular circumstances of the social media issue and its effects on minors requires a balancing of liberty and the protection of the family — two things which conservatism highly values.
John Stuart Mill, one of history’s most libertarian-minded political philosophers, famously held that individual liberty may only be restricted in order to prevent harm to others. But even he conceded that, “This doctrine is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. We are not speaking of children, or of young persons below the age which the law may fix as that of manhood or womanhood. Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others, must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury.”
Although there is some theoretical tension in conservatism’s use of government power, that tension is easily resolvable without a contradiction of fundamental philosophical principles. Conservatism does not view liberty in the abstract as an end in itself; rather it measures the content of that liberty according to the degree in which it promotes other fundamental values that are conducive to the common good, such as the protection and nurturing of children and protection of the family as an institution. Hence why a conservative can favor cautiously using the state to restrain that which is harmful to the things one wishes to conserve.
When it comes to regulating social media, conservatives using the law to protect the vulnerable does not compromise any of their foundational political principles.