How And Why To Fight Back Against Social Media Bans

Policy

from the moral-panic-creeping-further-and-further dept

Several U.S. states are pushing to ban young people from social media entirely. This marks the latest wave of censorship bills masquerading as “children’s online safety” measures, with states like Massachusetts, Idaho, Minnesota, North Carolina, South Carolina, Illinois, and EFF’s home state of California leading the charge.

Just a few years ago, lawmakers supporting age-gating laws insisted their efforts were narrowly targeted at limiting young people’s access to adult content. At the time, we warned that they would not stop there: once the government established the authority and built the infrastructure to collect and “verify” massive troves of user data, it would inevitably sweep broader and broader categories of lawful speech into this mass surveillance and censorship system. 

Unfortunately, our predictions came true. As legislators across the country advance proposals that would block all young people from accessing the “modern public square,” the Overton window has shifted dramatically towards mass censorship—and the speed of this shift should concern all of us. 

This primer breaks down this dangerous wave of social media bans: how they work (and why they don’t), who they harm, and how we can fight back. 

How to Spot a Social Media Ban

The details of these bills vary from state to state. Some (like California’s AB 1709) are a flat-out social media ban for all young people under a certain age, while other states (like South Carolina and Minnesota) allow access to young users who hand over even more data to show verifiable parental consent. Many bills regulate certain social media features, too, including by setting default privacy settings, time limits, or notification preferences for all accounts that fail the age-gate.

As for the age-gating mechanism itself, most proposals fall into two broad categories: age verification bills and behavioral age estimation bills. 

Age Verification Bills require online services to collect highly sensitive data, including government ID and biometric information, from all users before either restricting or allowing them access. 

For example, take California’s social media ban (AB 1709). Starting in January 2027, operating systems will be required to collect enough information from users to sort them into age groups, or “brackets.” Under AB 1709, social media apps would then use that age bracket information to completely block anyone under 16, while supposedly letting everyone else through. By contrast, Florida’s law (HB 3) takes a more aggressive route by forcing platforms to verify users’ identities directly, usually by contracting with private third-party companies to perform verification services.

Behavioral Age Estimation Bills, on the other hand, are a more recent innovation of states like Minnesota (HF 1438) and South Carolina (H 4591). These bills require platforms to estimate the ages of users based largely on data that they already collect, including self-attested age, behavioral information, and account history and activity. In practice, these bills enable tech companies to use algorithms and/or AI to analyze our online behavior and estimate age based on that. 

Proponents of behavioral age estimation bills claim that their proposals avoid the massive security risks that come with mandatory age verification bills. However, much of the data that social media platforms collect from us “in the ordinary course of operation” is collected in order to serve us targeted behavioral ads. If we force platforms to use this imperfect data to make more important judgments about who can access their services, we risk entrenching those insidious data collection practices. Surely we don’t want to give social media companies more reasons to justify and sustain their reliance on this exploitative business model.

If you want to dig into the nuance here, our terminology guide sheds more light on the technical differences between age verification and age estimation bills. 

Overall, it’s a lose-lose scenario: either platforms collect new forms of our most sensitive and immutable data, or they unleash their AI and algorithms on our existing behavioral data to make creepy guesses about who we are and what we deserve to see. No matter which age-gating method your state chooses to execute its social media ban, there will be lots of error at the margins—and lots of users who will be blocked or chilled from access to lawful online speech.

Why Social Media Bans Are So Dangerous

Social media bans are unconstitutional, discriminatory, and deeply misguided. They reinforce existing structures of oppression, and they are broadly unsupported by young people, whose voices are conspicuously absent from this conversation. They undermine parental decision-making and replace tailored family-level solutions with a one-size-fits-all band-aid. And, in the places we have seen social media bans go into effect, early reports show that they don’t even work. 

For example, in Australia, where a social media ban has been in effect since late 2025, a majority of young people can still access social media, those who can’t have lost their access to the news, and crisis helplines are reporting skyrocketing numbers of calls from youth left stranded without online community or resources.

We could go on and on about all of the inherent harms here, but we’ll try to keep this short as we walk through some of the major issues.

1. Security Risks and Privacy Harms

In order to ban some users, social media platforms first must confirm the ages of all users, regardless of age. Bans thus incentivize companies to force users of all ages to hand over government IDs, face scans, and other sensitive information. When parental consent is required, companies must collect even more verification data and often create explicit links between child and parent accounts—further destroying users’ anonymity. 

Both of these databases create massive data “honeypots” that invite identity theft and permanent surveillance. We’ve already seen repeated data breaches involving age- and identity-verification services. Yet these laws would force both adults and the youth they claim to protect to feed their most sensitive data into this growing surveillance ecosystem. 

If we don’t trust tech companies with our private information now, we shouldn’t pass laws that force us to give them even more of it. 

2. Disproportionate Harm to Vulnerable Communities

Age-verification technology is deeply flawed and prone to discrimination. These systems frequently misidentify or lock out people of color, people with disabilities, and trans or gender-nonconforming individuals whose IDs may not match their appearance. 

Where these bills require parental consent, they impose disproportionate access barriers on low-income, non-traditional, and immigrant families. These sorts of families are more likely to share a single family device or have strong reasons to not want the government to track family associations and ID documents. 

Beyond the technical failures, these bans cut off a vital lifeline. For LGBTQ+ youth, foster kids, and those stuck in unsupportive home environments, social media is often the only place to find community, explore their identity, or access life-saving resources. Forcibly removing young people isolates those who need connection the most, while creating massive new barriers for adults. 

You can read a breakdown of the diverse groups vulnerable to these laws here. 

3. Based on Shoddy Science

The current legislative push to ban young people from social media relies heavily on the idea that the “great rewiring” of the adolescent brain is a proven fact. This simply isn’t true.

Social science indicates that moderate internet use is a net positive for teens’ development, and negative outcomes are usually due to either lack of access or excessive use. For LGBTQ+ and marginalized youth in particular, social media offers an essential space to access support they might lack offline. By forcing youth into digital isolation, these bans cut off vital access to political news, community, and health resources. They also completely ignore the calls of young people themselves who favor digital literacy and education over restrictive government control.

Instead of cutting off these lifelines, we should support measures that arm all youth (and the adults in their lives) with the knowledge they need to navigate online spaces safely.

4. Reckless Free Speech Violations for Users of All Ages

No matter your age, the First Amendment protects your right to speak and access information. 

Blanket social media bans immensely and unconstitutionally chill all users’ exercise of this right. They cut off young people’s access to lawful speech, or ruin their privacy in the home by mandating parental consent and sometimes even parental access to their account activities and settings. They force all users (adults and young people alike) to hand private information over to tech companies before speaking or accessing information on social media platforms, imposing annoying obstacles on lawful online expression and wrongfully blocking some adults outright. 

Critically, these bans destroy our right to online anonymity—a cornerstone of our right to free expression that protects whistleblowers, journalists, activists, immigrants, and everyone who has ever used a private browser or account to ask the internet an embarrassing question.

How to Fight Back

Social media bans weaponize parents’ concerns about children’s safety to justify unprecedented levels of surveillance and censorship. In the process, these laws deny young people their rights, threaten online anonymity for everyone, expose our sensitive personal data to breach and abuse, and replace parental decision-making with state authority. This is a battle over the future of the open, private, and free internet, and we must act now to protect it.

Here’s how you can help us fight back: Talk to your community (including young people!) about what’s at stake. If you’re a parent, lean on open conversations and platforms’ existing tools to tailor your child’s experiences instead of handing that power over to the government. And no matter where you live, contact your government representatives and tell them clearly that social media bans are not the answer to kids’ online safety.

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

Filed Under: age estimation, age verification, california, free speech, idaho, illinois, massachusetts, minnesota, moral panic, north carolina, social media, social media ban, south carolina