America is banning more and more kids from social media. That's bad news for kids.

Last fall, teens younger than 18 who logged into Instagram last fall were met with a PG-13-like shroud on their feeds. No longer could they follow accounts that regularly share what Meta deemed "age-inappropriate content" or search for terms like gore and alcohol. To opt out of these automatically applied guardrails, they'd need their parents to grant permission through a connected account. The move was an expansion of Instagram's efforts to give parents more control over teens' accounts. As the chorus against social media and screentime at large rises, Meta has tried to do something to appease parents and keep kids scrolling.

Across the US and around the world, meanwhile, governments are looking to curtail internet access for teens, which could push social media companies to verify users' ages or censor posts they deem not safe for kids. Australia has banned kids younger than 16 from joining major social media apps. Denmark has agreed to pass restrictions for those younger than 15, and French lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in January to advance their own ban. Florida, Virginia, and Nebraska have created a patchwork of laws that guide how children can — or in some total bans, can't — access social media. Federal lawmakers introduced a bill in December to repeal Section 230, which acts as the First Amendment of the internet and absolves websites from liability for user-posted content. For the past four years, lawmakers have considered the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill that digital rights experts say could lead to age-verification protocols across the internet. Courts are poised to consider a spate of lawsuits this year against Big Tech companies like Meta, Google, and Snap alleging they make addictive products that harm young people (the companies have denied the allegations).

The spirit behind the laws has been trumpeted by pundits and parents over the past decade: social media is ruining childhood. Absurd screen time logs, AI brainrot filling social feeds, and clear dangers of child exploitation, extremism, and online bullying all make this a compelling argument to parents. The wave of legislation could drastically slash the number of kids online and the content they scroll through. But the movement to kick kids off social platforms largely ignores that the connection of social media on mental health might be nuanced, that kids have a right to speak and access information, and that all of us can benefit from them joining conservations.

That silence might not be good for teens — or for those too old to keep up with the new memes.

"All of this policy around keeping kids off the internet is couched in language of protecting them, keeping them safe, helping them," says Evan Greer, director of digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future. "But there is a piece of it that is inherently rooted in the idea that they have nothing valuable to add to society or that there's no point in listening to them."

Kids came online in droves during the freewheeling, largely anonymous playground era of 2000s internet. By 2005, 87% of adolescents aged 12 to 17 used the internet, according to a Pew Research Center survey, and three-quarters of them were using it to read news. The web democratized information for young people who often had little access to it outside of TV news broadcasts playing in their living rooms, and particularly connected queer young people to burgeoning online communities. By contrast, only two-thirds of adults were online by 2005.

Investors caught on to the value young people brought to the social web. That meant more ads powered by user data, algorithmic feeds, push notifications, and content driven to capture and entertain in short spurts. People spend more time online now and complain about it more than they did 20 years ago, but the evidence of how modern social media affects kids is split. Meta's own leaked, internal documents have famously revealed Instagram could be harmful to teens (a characterization Meta has disputed). Studies for years have suggested there's correlations between high screen time and increasing anxiety or depression among young people.

But a study published last month from the University of Manchester challenges the long-held idea that gaming and social media are bad for kids. Researchers followed 25,000 kids ages 11 to 14 in what the university characterized as "one of the largest and most detailed studies of its kind." They tracked teens' self-reported habits on social media and gaming along with emotional difficulties over three school years. They found "no evidence" that more frequent social media use or gaming caused an increase in symptoms of anxiety or depression over the following year. A 2021 study from University of Toronto researchers found that LGBTQ youth use social media for emotional support and development, education, entertainment, and search information specific to the queer community, which can benefit them. A report published in 2023 from the US Surgeon General's Office noted both the harms and benefits of social media, but also that "we do not yet have enough evidence to determine if social media is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents."

Young people continue to dictate much of online culture, activism, and the ways platforms evolve, just as they did in the 2000s. They have for a decade-plus proved social media isn't frivolous. Greta Thunberg was just 15 when she started her solo climate strike outside of the Swedish parliament, eventually using social media to grow her action into a global youth movement. Jamie Margolin has been advocating for climate justice since she was 14. Black Lives Matter activist Thandiwe Abdullah started a youth chapter of the movement when she was 12. When tens of thousands of kids walked out of school last week to protest ICE, they did so after reading organizing posts on social media. Many young people don't use social platforms just for posting and viewing content, but also as their main way to communicate privately with friends, on Snapchat or in Instagram DMs.

KOSA was first proposed in response to the leaked Instagram findings. If passed, it would require tech companies employ the strictest privacy and safety settings for those under 17, and remove features like infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and rewards for time spent on the apps. The lawmakers behind the bill say it does not require age verification, but opponents argue it would lead to mass censorship of the internet, as tech companies and regulators would have latitude to determine what content could be harmful to minors and likely employ age verification tools or block certain content to comply. Certain conservative and progressive advocates both dislike the bill, and their opposing concerns get to the heart of the free speech issue: who gets to dictate what content is harmful? Patriot Voices, former presidential candidate Rick Santorum's conservative advocacy group, argues that its passage would "transfer parenting authority to government bureaucrats" and block access to information about "the harms of sex-change operations for children." Progressives worry teens will be robbed of information about LGBTQ issues and abortion. Big Tech companies have also lobbied against the bill.

Most of these laws and bills unfairly target the expression of young people, free speech advocates say. "Rights under the Constitution and the First Amendment do not simply turn on the day you are 18," says Cody Venzke, senior policy counsel at the ACLU. "Young people have the same Constitutional rights as adults do, and for some reason what gets lost in policy debates about young people, is the fact that they have a right to speak, they have a right to listen, they have a right to access information." The argument hasn't been a total winner so far; a federal court ruled in November that a Florida law barring children younger than 15 from social media could move forward, and didn't violate free speech protections, but a federal court Utah in 2024 did block an age-limit law there on First Amendment grounds.

In the past two years, several states have enacted a handful of laws regulating "sharenting" and kidfluencers, in part as a result of now-grown child influencers advocating states to bar parents from using young children in much of their monetized content. Teen girls have led activism on the harms of deepfake porn. But these new state and federal efforts focused on how children access the internet and social media have largely not taken kids' perspectives into consideration, and aren't driven by a youth movement. Teens are instead fighting against the laws; The ACLU last year brought hundreds of teens to Capitol Hill to lobby against KOSA. And while nearly half of teens say social media has a mostly negative effect on their peers, only 14% say the same for themselves, according to a Pew Research Center survey. In weighing the effects, they're more likely to say it hurts than helps their productivity or sleep, but more think it helps rather than hurts their friendships. More than 60% of teens say social media is an important way to get mental health information.

The bills gaining traction recently are akin to "abstinence-only sex education," Greer says. Lawmakers could focus on better funding mental health counseling in schools or regulating how social media companies serve up content based on personal data or in addictive, endless formats for everyone, she says. But kicking kids off the internet "avoids getting at the root of the problem, which is the surveillance capitalist business model that these large social media platforms employ."

Blanket social bans based on age ignore the nuances of adolescence; some 15-year-olds might have more media literacy than an 18-year-old. "It's not as if young people are going to reach whatever the threshold age is and decide not to be online at that point," says Clare Ryan, a children and family law expert at University of Alabama School of Law. Instead, bans might rob kids and teens of the chances to develop media literacy and comfortability with the platforms. "Young people aren't necessarily going to have opportunities to learn and develop their facility and understanding with these technologies."

Young people, frequently boys and men, are being radicalized by far right forums and podcasters, AI is being used to create nonconsensual deepfake nudes, often of teenage girls, and AI chatbots are giving encouraging words when people express intent to harm themselves. Many of the problems with the internet mirror those of our society. Bullying, scamming, sexual exploitation, addiction to quick dopamine hits — they all exist on and off the screen. A social web where everyone has privacy and can use platforms that forego addictive features and harmful, harassing content has long been the dream. But booting young people isn't going to resurrect the playful, fun days of the internet so many long for.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.