1. United States
2. Ga.
3. Letter

Keep blocking these social media ban bills. The science used to justify them is not settled — it is contested, flawed, and in some cases outright misleading. Researchers at UC Irvine and Brown University have found no consistent, measurable link between social media use and declining teen well-being across large-scale, multi-country meta-analyses. One study of 100,000 adolescents actually found moderate social media use correlates with the best well-being outcomes. Legislators are selling correlation as causation, and courts should not let that slide. The real-world harms of these bans are concrete. Enforcement requires invasive collection of government IDs or biometric data from every user — a guaranteed data breach waiting to happen. LGBTQ+ youth, rural teens, and kids in foster care often rely on social media as their only supportive community; blanket bans cut them off entirely. And pushing young people off mainstream platforms doesn't make them safer — it drives them toward unmoderated corners of the internet with zero content protections. These bills don't protect kids. They surveil adults, expose everyone's personal data, and strip marginalized youth of critical lifelines — all based on emotionally charged rhetoric that independent statisticians have repeatedly discredited. The courts are one of the last checks on this kind of legislating-by-panic, and that role matters enormously right now.