Over 40% of teens with the highest social media use rate their overall mental health as poor or very poor, according to according to the American Psychological Association. (Photo by Daniel de la Hoz/Getty Images)
Virginia’s General Assembly would be doing our future a great service if it could rein in social media addiction for young people, the inspiration behind legislation it has approved and sent to Gov. Glenn Youngkin for his consideration.
Were it as easy as enacting a state law limiting social media exposure for Virginians under age 16 to a maximum of one hour, we would solve many problems that unlimited access to platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube cause for vulnerable preteens and teens.
Unfortunately, it’s not so easy. That’s because parenting is essential.
A study by the American Psychological Association notes that at about age 10, when fundamental shifts in kids’ brains make them crave social rewards such as peer approval, we hand them smartphones and access to the internet. There, they have limitless opportunities for outreach and validation on those social media platforms. But experts warn that it can cause anxiety, depression and unrealistic body image concerns among many mental health problems. Increasingly, children are bullied to the point of self-harm or even suicide via social media, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Surely we all remember parental involvement. It was a guiding theme of Republican Glenn Youngkin’s insurgency campaign for governor just four years ago. The amiable, untested former hedge fund executive deftly cornered the nomination of a Virginia GOP battered during Donald Trump’s first presidency and eager to move on. He channeled the zeitgeist of Virginia voters weary of a leftward Democratic overreach in Virginia and of first-year President Joe Biden.
In a feat of political jiu jitsu in his first-ever campaign, Youngkin made Democrats own pandemic-era frustration over shuttered schools and remote learning; over accommodations made to transgender and transitioning students; over mandates that pupils wear masks when classrooms reopened.
As anger toward school boards boiled over, book bans and confrontations over curriculum became a rallying cry on the right, and it was a message that resonated with moderate parents. Youngkin advocated for more parental say in their children’s public schooling, and it played well enough in suburban areas such as Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads to deny Democrats the large margins they needed to offset a historic rural GOP turnout.
It’s time for Virginia legislators to pay more than lip service to social media protections for kids
That year, seven school districts banned 11 titles, all of them dealing with gender, sexual orientation or race, according to data compiled by PEN America, a nationwide nonprofit that advocates for free expression for writers. Virginia Beach Public Schools led the way, axing six titles including Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” a novel set in the 1940s about a Black girl who grew up believing blue eyes would make her accepted and beautiful. In 2021, however, the book-ban movement was just getting started. The following year, 182 titles were challenged statewide, according to the American Library Association, and it more than doubled in 2023 to 387, the nation’s fifth-highest total.
We’d love to imagine that the 2021 ushered in a renaissance of close parental engagement with their children’s education and other pursuits, and not just a politically driven wave that swept conservatives into school board seats. Perhaps in some cases it did, but there’s no hard evidence of a subsequent groundswell of close parental involvement or oversight. At least not of the sort necessary to make Virginia’s social media bill highly effective. Ironically, if that sort of intimate attention by parents and guardians to their kids widely existed, there would be no need for laws such as this.
There’s a rich history of shielding kids from vices — and of kids indulging them anyway. Buying or possessing alcohol has long been illegal for anyone under age 21. (Full disclosure: the legal drinking age when this writer was young was 18, and I made the most of it.)
A 30-day CDC study of drug use among high schoolers found that during that span, more than one in five (22%) consumed alcohol, the most commonly used drug among youth. According to the CDC, 4,000 people under 21 die annually from excessive alcohol use. Also, underage drinking cost the United States $24 billion in 2010, the most recent year for which data are available. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $35.3 billion now.
The same study found that 17% of high schoolers used electronic vape products, the same ratio as those who used marijuana. Just 4% smoked cigarettes.
Addiction to social media, ever-present in the digital ether, bears less stigma than those more tangible vices. A more apt comparison would be to online pornography, something 19 states (including Virginia) ban for users under 18. Research consistently confirms the detrimental effects of sexually explicit internet material on young minds, including poor academic performance, increased emotional and behavioral problems, and harmful or even predatory notions about sexuality, primarily among boys.
Virginia’s age-verification law went into effect in July 2023. According to reporting by the Mercury later that year, many online smut purveyors ignored the law while some, including Pornhub, protested it by blacking out their content to all users across the commonwealth. Kids, however, have grown up surrounded by technology, and finding workarounds is child’s play to them. If they don’t borrow mom or dad’s driver’s license to fool verification systems, they can always use virtual private networks to conceal their true internet address and trick age-restricted sites into believing the user is someplace without age-verification laws.
Many pornography websites aren’t complying with new Va. age verification law
An article published in 2018 by Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking titled “Internet Filtering and Adolescent Exposure to Online Sexual Material” found that even wide use of filtering technology by parents or caregivers yielded inconsistent and insignificant results keeping online sexual content from underage users.
Things are further clouded by a case before the U.S. Supreme Court in which the porn industry challenges age-verification laws on grounds that they constitute a government infringement on First Amendment free speech rights and Fourth Amendment privacy rights by forcing users to provide identifying information. A ruling is expected before the court’s term ends in June. Unknown is whether the decision could apply to social media age-verification efforts.
Trying to outsmart kids in the online realm is an enterprise that requires a Herculean measure of vigilance by today’s parents. That’s horribly unfair to today’s parents (or grandparents, or uncles and aunts, or foster caregivers, or whomever provides a home). They work harder and smarter in tougher times, with fewer safety nets than yesteryear’s parents.
Imperfect as it is, Governor Youngkin should sign this bill — a rare bipartisan concurrence — into law. Should it survive inevitable legal challenges by the social media leviathans like Meta (parent of Facebook and Instagram), China-owned TikTok, and Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), it at least provides another tool that vigilant parents can add to their workbench if they commit to the hard, yearslong mission of protecting their children by deeply involving themselves in their lives.
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