Support Digital Literacy, Not Social Media Bans for Kids

I write to ask Congress to prioritize digital literacy and cybersecurity education for children — and to reject blanket social media bans for minors. Age-verification mandates and outright prohibitions raise serious constitutional concerns, push young people onto riskier corners of the internet, and fail to prepare them for the platforms they'll inevitably encounter as adults. Federal policy should target the business practices that harm kids, not the kids themselves. There is one piece of the child safety conversation that Congress largely overlooks, and I ask you to change that with education. California recently paired its misguided restrictions with two bills — AB 2071 and AB 2298 — that teach students digital wellness and cybersecurity: how to spot unhealthy tech habits, evaluate AI-generated media for credibility and bias, and protect their personal data from online threats. Students themselves backed these bills. That is the affirmative, rights-respecting approach, and the federal government is well positioned to scale it through existing channels — E-Rate support, CIPA requirements, and Education Department grant programs could all fund or incentivize age-appropriate digital literacy and cybersecurity instruction in every public school. On the platform side, I encourage Congress to pursue guardrails that address the underlying incentives — such as banning manipulative design practices and exploitative data collection targeting minors — without requiring privacy-invasive identity verification for adults and walling kids off from the digital world entirely. The choice isn't between doing nothing and keeping young people offline. We can regulate the practices that exploit them and teach them to protect themselves. I urge you to do both — and to weigh in against ban-style proposals when they come up.