Utah's bills restricting kids' social media use have galling civil-liberties concerns and hazy enforcement plans, and will likely face constitutional challenges
Most people seem to agree that something should be done to protect kids from what sure looks like an addictive product.
New YorkerJay Caspian Kang
Context & Ripple Effects
Utah moved fast on this one: lawmakers fast-tracked two bills through February that would force every user to age-verify and hand parents access to minors' accounts, and Gov. Spencer Cox signed both into law by late March. The New Yorker's piece is the skeptical read on that sprint — flagging civil-liberties problems and enforcement plans thin enough to invite a constitutional showdown.
Utah minors and their parents are the immediate subjects: the signed law requires parental permission for minors' accounts and gives parents access to them, while platforms operating in the state face mandatory age verification for all users.
Social media companies serving Utah must build verification and parental-access infrastructure under a statute whose enforcement mechanics the coverage describes as hazy — unclear who runs the checks or how compliance is audited.
Second-order effects
Other states drafting copycat child-safety bills now have a live test case for whether the Utah model survives litigation, shaping how aggressively legislatures write similar age-gating requirements.
Platforms face a patchwork problem: state-by-state verification mandates with different rules raise compliance costs and push companies toward either uniform stricter defaults nationwide or geo-restricted features.
Third-order effects
If courts keep striking down these laws on First Amendment grounds, the structural outcome is child-safety regulation forced toward design-based or consent-based mechanisms rather than blanket access restrictions.
Age verification at scale would normalize identity checks as a precondition of platform access — a shift in how the open web's anonymity default is governed, with the litigation track determining how far it spreads.
The trend: State legislatures across party lines are racing to age-gate minors off social media, with federal courts acting as the real gatekeeper on how much of that agenda survives.
nuanced discussion: “two visions of #socialmedia are not mutually exclusive in any way. Social media does seem uniquely harmful to young people, but it is also the way in which they express themselves & find friends & confidantes.” …
‘Most people seem to agree that something should be done to protect kids from what sure looks like an addictive product. But almost no one knows what that something is.’ https://www.newyorker.com/...
Social media does seem uniquely harmful to young people, but it is also the way in which they express themselves and find friends and confidantes. https://www.newyorker.com/...
Most people seem to agree that something should be done to protect kids from what sure looks like an addictive product. But almost no one knows what that something is. https://www.newyorker.com/...
The civil liberties issues are very obvious. By restricting kids from what has now become not only the ‘town square’ but also the way in which they are informed of and comment on the world, you're violating all sorts of norms and laws https://twitter.com/...
The situation we seem to be in is that most parents would probably support some social media restrictions for their kids, but the logistics and the constitutional questions make it basically impossible. They aren't cigarettes; they also aren't public spaces. https://twitter.com/.…
Adults in Utah responding to the state ID requirement to use social media “will be much less likely to comment on anything, really, because they understand that their real identities have been linked to their accounts,” an ACLU official reasoned. https://www.newyorker.com/...
https://www.newyorker.com/... With growing social platforms, it's important to acknowledge safety precautions with trends. Yet, with cases like banning TikTok, it's also important to allow kids to indulge into their creative/fun sides! It is conflicting, yet important. #BeachSMC
Bans can never work. Cigarettes 🚬 did not wane just because of bans. In the next few decades, instead, technology should evolve to make it natural for children to stay away from social media. All things wane, after a suitable amount of time. https://www.newyorker.com/...
This does a good job of spelling out how this will actually look (and in doing so, gets into what the ramifications of this will actually mean) https://www.newyorker.com/...