Empower parents to protect children from social media
Washington Examiner
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This February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released an alarming report on teenage depression. This March, the Republican-controlled legislature of Utah acted in response. This year, congressional Republicans should do the same.
The evidence that social media is having a harmful effect on our nation’s children has been growing for some time. Research has shown that teenage depression doubled between 2011 and 2019. Emergency room admissions quadrupled between 2010 and 2021 among girls between the ages of 10 and 14.
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It is not a coincidence that mobile devices became ubiquitous over this same period of time or that children with those devices flocked to prurient platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok.
Studies have found that the most frequent users of these social media applications are also the ones most likely to be depressed. Meta’s own internal research on Instagram found that teenagers themselves blamed social media for their generation’s increasing depression. “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” one memo concluded. “Thirty-two per cent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” another memo admitted.
This February’s CDC Youth Risk Behavior survey only confirmed what many already knew: Teenage mental health is in crisis. According to the survey, almost 60% of teenage girls reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless in 2021, and nearly a third of them said they had considered suicide, up 60% from a decade ago.
Recognizing both the alarming rise in teenage depression and its link to social media, the Utah legislature sprang into action last month, passing two key provisions that empower parents to protect their children from the dangers of social media. Utah’s legislation compels all social media platforms available in the state to verify each user’s age, requires all users under the age of 18 to secure their parents’ permission to create an account, and enables parents to monitor the content their children are seeing and posting on the platform.
The law also creates a preset curfew for all users under the age of 18, between the hours of 10:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m. During those hours, when children should be sleeping, platform users under the age of 18 will need permission from their parents to access social media.
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The law isn’t perfect — no law is. Some tech-savvy children will of course figure out ways to outmaneuver their parents’ limitations and monitoring. But the same has been true for decades of alcohol, cigarettes, and sexually explicit materials in the real world. Just because a law won’t work perfectly doesn’t mean states shouldn’t try and give parents all the tools possible to protect their children from harmful and addictive items.
And it shouldn’t be just the states that are left to do the heavy lifting here. House Republicans, looking to solidify their brand as the “family party,” couldn’t ask for a better issue. This is a national problem that requires a national solution.