Officials across the country have introduced a wave of new restrictions on social media. These laws are unlikely to solve the harms associated with such platforms—indeed, they could exacerbate them.
In Texas, for example, Gov. Greg Abbott recently signed a law requiring app stores to handle age verification for social apps. Age verification has been tried before, with results that are mixed at best. When they were implemented for online pornography, searches skyrocketed for virtual private networks, which allow people to evade such restrictions; other users migrated to offshore platforms beyond U.S. regulation. Barring minors from social apps could easily lead to a series of similar loopholes or workarounds.
Explicit or clearly dangerous apps and services (containing nudity, hate speech, etc.) are filtered out by app stores and only operate within mobile browsers. But new social platforms capitalize on the fact that the line between mobile apps and mobile websites is becoming increasingly blurred. Advances in programming frameworks now enable apps and websites to have increasingly similar code, while the advent of Progressive Web Applications helps mobile websites look and feel exactly like apps. Improvements in operating systems such as iOS 17.4 even allow mobile websites to act as full-fledged apps on your device's home screen.
While Instagram or TikTok may soon be beyond the reach of Texan children, OnlyFans and RedNote (China's TikTok alternative) will still be freely accessible on their mobile browsers. Alternative sites such as the paranoia-riddled 4Chan or Parler could become easier to access than mainstream social media apps. Laws that would prevent children from going on YouTube, which is subject to strict content policies enforced by app stores and is regulated in the U.S., could inadvertently encourage kids to flock to other sites with little to no content moderation.
And extending age restrictions to individual mobile websites could resemble a game of whack-a-mole, where new platforms appear faster than you can identify and shut them down.
Meanwhile, this law could give parents a false sense of security, prompting them to relax their vigilance and assume their kids can safely roam the internet with less supervision. This might cause more harm than having no policy at all. An absence of government action at least encourages alert parents to use more effective device-wide parental filters instead.
Just as parents are best positioned to teach their children how to navigate real-world dangers, they are also best equipped to help their kids navigate the digital world. And that is how private companies are responding to online safety issues for teens. Both Apple and Google are introducing device-wide parental control features, including web content filters and on-device censorship for nudity. Meta, too, has introduced stricter default settings for teen accounts across Instagram and Facebook, limiting exposure to sensitive content and unwanted interactions while also providing parents with tools to stay informed.
There's no one-size-fits-all approach to teaching kids about the world, be it physical or digital. Asking the government to control what kids can access on the internet is a fool's errand; no amount of laws will ever be enough. Only parents are close enough to their children to monitor and protect them.
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