States get serious about limiting kids’ social media exposure

Key Facts

In 2021, more than 40 percent of high school students felt so sad or hopeless over a two-week period that they stopped keeping up with their regular pastimes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recent Youth Risk Behavior Survey.
In testimony to a Senate Judiciary subcommittee in November, former Facebook engineering director Arturo Béjar said that company data showed that a fifth of 13- to 15-year-olds experienced bullying on the platform and 13 percent experienced unwanted sexual advances.
The U.K. pioneered child-safe design requirements in 2021 and the International Association of Privacy Professionals, a privacy advocacy group, says the law has forced social media companies to reduce the data they collect on kids and cut features.
Adolescents are “vulnerable to many of the manipulative design and privacy practices commonly employed by social media and digital platforms,” they said.