Only 6 of 16 State Social Media Laws for Kids Are Actually Being Enforced

America is deep in a youth mental health crisis, and lawmakers across the country have been scrambling to do something about it. Social media keeps landing in their crosshairs. But a new analysis of the 16 state policies enacted to address youth mental health and social media reveals a sobering truth: most of these laws have either been blocked by courts, are not yet being enforced, or rest on surprisingly little scientific proof that they accomplish what they set out to do.

Suicide is now the third leading cause of death among people aged 15 to 29, and suicide deaths rose 62% from 2007 to 2021, according to data cited in the study. Rates of depression, anxiety, and other mental health struggles among young people began shifting for the worse around 2006. Social media has become a major target for lawmakers, who have been busy writing laws to rein it in. After combing through every enacted state-level policy in the country that explicitly targets youth mental health and social media use, researchers found just 16 laws that actually cleared the full legislative process. Of those 16, only six were actively being enforced at the time of the study.

That gap between political activity and real-world protection is at the heart of what this study, published in the Journal of Policy Practice and Research, uncovered. Hundreds of bills have been proposed. Forty-two congressional hearings on kids and social media took place between 2017 and 2024 alone. Yet the number of fully enacted, actively enforced laws sitting on the books is small enough to count on one hand, and many face serious legal challenges.

How Researchers Studied State Social Media Laws

Researchers from George Mason University, New York Presbyterian, and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville pulled policy documents from congress.gov in November 2024, searching specifically for laws related to social media and minors. After applying a careful set of rules for what counted and what did not, they narrowed an initial pool of 178 policies down to 68 that fit their criteria. From there, they focused on the 16 that had been fully enacted as law.

Two researchers read through all the policy texts independently, coding them line by line to identify the underlying goals each law was chasing. A third researcher helped resolve any disagreements. From that process, three broad categories of policy strategy emerged: laws focused on access, laws focused on exposure, and laws focused on media literacy.

Most of the 16 enacted policies came from the Senate, making up 62.5% of the total. States that appeared in the final list included Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Utah, and Virginia.

Access-related laws were the most common, appearing in 15 of the 16 enacted policies across nine states. These laws try to control whether and how young people can access social media platforms in the first place. Age verification was the most frequently used tool, appearing in 10 of the 16 laws. Six of the policies required parents to give direct permission before a minor could create an account. Two required school districts to block students from accessing social media through the school’s internet connection. One law, Montana’s, went as far as banning TikTok outright within the state’s borders.

Exposure-related laws showed up in eight of the 16 policies across six states. These target what young people actually encounter once they are on a platform. Seven of the 16 laws addressed design practices, meaning they tried to stop social media companies from building features that can make platforms addictive for minors, things like endless scrolling feeds or late-night notifications. Three laws dealt with advertising restrictions, and three gave parents tools to control how many hours a day their child could use a platform.

Media literacy was the rarest category by far. Only one law, in Florida, required schools to actually teach students about social media’s social, emotional, and physical effects, covering topics like addiction, misinformation, cyberbullying, and predatory behavior online.

The Uncomfortable Gap Between Social Media Laws and Evidence

For all the political energy being spent on these laws, the scientific backing for many of the most popular approaches is thin, contested, or missing entirely.

Age verification, the single most common tool in the enacted laws, has been shown to be easily bypassed by kids using false information. A study examining account creation on six major platforms found that none required mandatory age verification with a valid ID during sign-up. Research also points to a fairness problem: age verification systems that require government-issued identification could lock out young people from undocumented immigrant families or others without standard ID.

Platform bans face similar scrutiny. Montana’s TikTok ban was appealed and blocked on First Amendment grounds shortly after it passed. International studies cited in the research found no meaningful mental health benefits from school phone bans in South Australia or England, though the authors note more research is needed in the American context specifically.

Even parental consent, which enjoys broad public support, has little formal research behind it as a mental health protection. One study found that the consent processes on popular platforms involve lengthy legal documents that many parents struggle to understand, and children can still create accounts without sufficient parental oversight. Parental controls built into platform design drew mixed reviews in the research. Some studies found benefits when parents set clear rules, while other analysis raised concerns that mandatory parental controls could create conflict or be misused in difficult family situations.

Design practice restrictions, the most supported category among parents in survey research, stand on somewhat firmer ground. Limiting addictive platform features like auto-playing content and silencing notifications during nighttime hours carry a reasonable logic, tied to research on sleep disruption and attention problems linked to heavy social media use.

Why These Social Media Laws May Be Missing the Bigger Picture

One of the study’s sharpest observations is about what these laws are not doing. Social media is not purely harmful. Research consistently shows it also provides genuine benefits for young people, including building friendships, finding community with peers who share similar identities, and accessing health information. But the laws being passed treat social media almost exclusively as a threat. None of the enacted policies the researchers found were designed to protect or support those positive uses.

Media literacy education, which could teach young people to weigh both the risks and the benefits of social media, is where that blind spot shows most clearly. The lone Florida law focuses only on the negative effects, stopping short of teaching students how social media can support connection and civic engagement.

Courts have not been idle while these laws have rolled out. Laws in Utah, Arkansas, California, and Montana have all faced legal challenges on free speech grounds. When researchers assessed the 16 laws, only six were being enforced. Several others had been blocked, and some were only partially implemented.

Sixteen enacted laws across a country of more than 330 million people, with a fraction actually in force, is a modest return on a decade of legislative urgency. If the goal is to protect young people from genuine harm, the research points to looking beyond access restrictions alone and placing more weight on evidence-backed approaches, while testing whether the laws already on the books actually improve young people’s mental health.

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