Massachusetts should not settle for half-measures on children’s online safety | #childpredator | #kidsaftey | #childsaftey

November 5, 2026 November 5, 2026

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by Matthew Allaire, CommonWealth Beacon November 5, 2026

THIS FALL, a six-member conference committee will decide whether Massachusetts joins the international movement to restrict children’s access to social media.
The committee is reconciling a House bill on student mental health that would prohibit children under 14 from holding social media accounts. Separately, the Senate has passed a bill restricting the addictive design features that keep children compulsively engaged. Taken together, the two proposals point toward a stronger policy: Massachusetts should prohibit children under 16 from holding accounts on platforms that employ predatory design features.
In Massachusetts, more than one in three high schoolers report sustained sadness or hopelessness. Pediatric behavioral health boarding in Massachusetts emergency departments remains six times higher than before the pandemic. A mounting body of evidence suggests social media is not incidental to this public health crisis, but rather a significant contributor.
Even Meta no longer pretends its product is safe for children. In August, facing testimony that its internal culture made child safety “practically impossible,” the company agreed to pay up to $17 billion to 52 attorneys general and to limit teenagers to two hours a day on its platforms.
But a daily allowance of an addictive product is still a choice to subject children to harm. Massachusetts should not settle for simply regulating the dose.
The damages of the modern internet extend well beyond mental health. The share of Massachusetts fourth-graders scoring below the basic level in reading has nearly doubled since 2011, from 17 percent to 32 percent, while longitudinal research finds that earlier social media use harms later language and math performance.
In-person socialization among young Americans has fallen to a 21-year low, while nearly four in 10 young children spend an hour or less playing outside on weekdays. American children now experience an indoor, phone-based childhood, sedentary and solitary.
What passes for social media today is increasingly neither social nor interactive. Across major social media platforms, entertainment consistently ranks among teens’ leading reasons for use. Algorithmically served short-form videos are interspersed with ads for online gambling and promotions for weight-loss supplements, alongside AI-generated explicit sexual material.
Children deserve to get through their most sensitive years before encountering a product built to profit from vice and vulnerability.
Prohibiting account creation for children under 16 protects them through much of adolescence, a second major window of heightened brain plasticity after early childhood in which experience can shape development well into adulthood. Age restrictions on addictive products have a proven track record of reducing consumption at the population level, even with imperfect enforcement. Social media is an addictive product unfit for developing minds, and it should be regulated accordingly.
Restrictions on addictive design features of social media platforms remain an important safeguard, but they reach only the minors a platform has already identified and place regulators in the position of repeatedly deciding which practices warrant intervention and how each should be regulated. By defining covered platforms according to the design features they deploy rather than the content they host, lawmakers can make access to children conditional on the product a company builds.
Platforms that redesign their products around safer forms of interaction can become eligible to serve children under 16. The law thereby creates an incentive not merely to comply with individual restrictions, but to build a safer product.
Relying solely on parental controls fails the children most in need of protection. Parents without graduate degrees are far less likely to impose screen-time limits, while about four in 10 parents say it is hard to manage how much time their teen spends on their phone. A patchwork of household rules inevitably protects children unevenly; a statewide default ensures protection does not depend on parents’ time, technical fluency, or resources.
The constitutional case for restricting minors’ access to social media is getting stronger by the day. In June, a federal appeals court rejected a facial challenge to an Ohio law requiring parental consent before children under 16 can join social media platforms defined by features such as profiles, friend networks, and feeds of user-generated content. In April, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled unanimously that Section 230, a crucial provision of a 1996 federal communications statute, does not shield platforms from claims targeting those same kinds of engineered design features. That gives lawmakers a path to regulate social media by product design rather than content.
Civil liberties advocates have warned that age checks will require invasive ID collection, threatening online anonymity. But Apple and Google are already deploying device-level age assurance that can signal whether a user falls above or below an age threshold without disclosing a birthdate or ID. When a child’s age is affirmed by a parent rather than estimated from their face or behavior, the system avoids the estimation failures inherent to age-estimation systems.
This will be remembered as the year the world drew a firm line on social media. Over the past year, Australia, Britain, France, and Denmark have all moved to restrict social media for young teenagers, and 20 countries have now acted or begun drafting similar laws. The recent settlement could produce billions in additional obligations if state legislatures bind Meta’s rivals to equivalent rules. An overwhelming majority of Americans support requiring age verification and parental consent for social media.
Massachusetts currently leads the nation on many traditional measures of child well-being. Beacon Hill now has the opportunity to set the standard on the challenge that will define childhood in the 21st century by enacting the strongest children’s online safety law in the nation. Parents, educators, and children across the Commonwealth deserve nothing less.
Matthew Allaire, a senior majoring in political science at Macalester College, is executive director of Commonwealth IRL, an advocacy organization working to curtail the influence of addictive and persuasive technology on young people.
This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Massachusetts should not settle for half-measures on children’s online safety

by Matthew Allaire, CommonWealth Beacon
November 5, 2026

THIS FALL, a six-member conference committee will decide whether Massachusetts joins the international movement to restrict children’s access to social media.

The committee is reconciling a House bill on student mental health that would prohibit children under 14 from holding social media accounts. Separately, the Senate has passed a bill restricting the addictive design features that keep children compulsively engaged. Taken together, the two proposals point toward a stronger policy: Massachusetts should prohibit children under 16 from holding accounts on platforms that employ predatory design features.

In Massachusetts, more than one in three high schoolers report sustained sadness or hopelessness. Pediatric behavioral health boarding in Massachusetts emergency departments remains six times higher than before the pandemic. A mounting body of evidence suggests social media is not incidental to this public health crisis, but rather a significant contributor.

Even Meta no longer pretends its product is safe for children. In August, facing testimony that its internal culture made child safety “practically impossible,” the company agreed to pay up to $17 billion to 52 attorneys general and to limit teenagers to two hours a day on its platforms.

But a daily allowance of an addictive product is still a choice to subject children to harm. Massachusetts should not settle for simply regulating the dose.

The damages of the modern internet extend well beyond mental health. The share of Massachusetts fourth-graders scoring below the basic level in reading has nearly doubled since 2011, from 17 percent to 32 percent, while longitudinal research finds that earlier social media use harms later language and math performance.

In-person socialization among young Americans has fallen to a 21-year low, while nearly four in 10 young children spend an hour or less playing outside on weekdays. American children now experience an indoor, phone-based childhood, sedentary and solitary.

What passes for social media today is increasingly neither social nor interactive. Across major social media platforms, entertainment consistently ranks among teens’ leading reasons for use. Algorithmically served short-form videos are interspersed with ads for online gambling and promotions for weight-loss supplements, alongside AI-generated explicit sexual material.

Children deserve to get through their most sensitive years before encountering a product built to profit from vice and vulnerability.

Prohibiting account creation for children under 16 protects them through much of adolescence, a second major window of heightened brain plasticity after early childhood in which experience can shape development well into adulthood. Age restrictions on addictive products have a proven track record of reducing consumption at the population level, even with imperfect enforcement. Social media is an addictive product unfit for developing minds, and it should be regulated accordingly.

Restrictions on addictive design features of social media platforms remain an important safeguard, but they reach only the minors a platform has already identified and place regulators in the position of repeatedly deciding which practices warrant intervention and how each should be regulated. By defining covered platforms according to the design features they deploy rather than the content they host, lawmakers can make access to children conditional on the product a company builds.

Platforms that redesign their products around safer forms of interaction can become eligible to serve children under 16. The law thereby creates an incentive not merely to comply with individual restrictions, but to build a safer product.

Relying solely on parental controls fails the children most in need of protection. Parents without graduate degrees are far less likely to impose screen-time limits, while about four in 10 parents say it is hard to manage how much time their teen spends on their phone. A patchwork of household rules inevitably protects children unevenly; a statewide default ensures protection does not depend on parents’ time, technical fluency, or resources.

The constitutional case for restricting minors’ access to social media is getting stronger by the day. In June, a federal appeals court rejected a facial challenge to an Ohio law requiring parental consent before children under 16 can join social media platforms defined by features such as profiles, friend networks, and feeds of user-generated content. In April, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled unanimously that Section 230, a crucial provision of a 1996 federal communications statute, does not shield platforms from claims targeting those same kinds of engineered design features. That gives lawmakers a path to regulate social media by product design rather than content.

Civil liberties advocates have warned that age checks will require invasive ID collection, threatening online anonymity. But Apple and Google are already deploying device-level age assurance that can signal whether a user falls above or below an age threshold without disclosing a birthdate or ID. When a child’s age is affirmed by a parent rather than estimated from their face or behavior, the system avoids the estimation failures inherent to age-estimation systems.

This will be remembered as the year the world drew a firm line on social media. Over the past year, Australia, Britain, France, and Denmark have all moved to restrict social media for young teenagers, and 20 countries have now acted or begun drafting similar laws. The recent settlement could produce billions in additional obligations if state legislatures bind Meta’s rivals to equivalent rules. An overwhelming majority of Americans support requiring age verification and parental consent for social media.

Massachusetts currently leads the nation on many traditional measures of child well-being. Beacon Hill now has the opportunity to set the standard on the challenge that will define childhood in the 21st century by enacting the strongest children’s online safety law in the nation. Parents, educators, and children across the Commonwealth deserve nothing less.

Matthew Allaire, a senior majoring in political science at Macalester College, is executive director of Commonwealth IRL, an advocacy organization working to curtail the influence of addictive and persuasive technology on young people.

This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Massachusetts should not settle for half-measures on children’s online safety | #childpredator | #kidsaftey | #childsaftey

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