What specific policy proposals, at state and federal levels, are being advanced to regulate social media's impact on youth mental health, and what is their current legislative status?

Legislatures in nearly every US state have introduced bills aimed at social media's effect on minors since 2023, and Congress has debated federal versions for longer without passing one. The surge follows Surgeon General Vivek Murthy's 2023 advisory on social media and adolescent mental health, plus internal Meta research disclosed by whistleblower Frances Haugen showing the company's own data linked Instagram to body-image harm in teen girls. These proposals are fundamentally responses to the 'Engagement' Business Model, in which social media revenue is tied to ad impressions and the time users—including youth—spend on platforms, creating structural incentives to deploy addictive design features. Lawmakers have converged on a few mechanisms: age verification, parental consent for minors' accounts, restrictions on algorithmic recommendation feeds, and default privacy settings for children. Almost none of these proposals have survived intact. Courts have repeatedly blocked state laws on First Amendment grounds, reflecting ongoing tensions in First Amendment Jurisprudence over how much the government can restrict private platforms from hosting or ranking speech. The result is a policy landscape defined by the tension between State vs. Federal Preemption—individual state laws creating a patchwork rather than uniform protection—and shaped less by settled law than by litigation, as tracked in real time by groups such as the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). Understanding where these proposals stand requires separating what has been signed from what has been enjoined, and what has passed one chamber from what has died in committee.

At the federal level, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) remains the most advanced proposal. It would impose a duty of care on platforms to mitigate harms like eating disorders, substance abuse content, and sexual exploitation for users under 17, and would require default safety settings and an opt-out from algorithmic feeds for minors. KOSA passed the Senate by a wide bipartisan margin but has not cleared the House, where some members raised concerns that a broad 'duty of care' standard could be used to restrict lawful speech, including LGBTQ content, depending on how state attorneys general chose to enforce it. This concern reflects the underlying tension in First Amendment Jurisprudence between protecting minors and preserving platform speech rights. A companion bill, COPPA 2.0, would raise the age threshold for the existing Children's Online Privacy Protection Act from 13 to 16 and ban targeted advertising to minors; it has moved through committee alongside KOSA but faces the same procedural bottleneck. Neither has been reintroduced with a clear path to a floor vote as of the current session.

State legislatures have moved faster, and with less success in court, illustrating the challenges of State vs. Federal Preemption. Utah's Social Media Regulation Act, one of the earliest laws, required age verification and parental consent for minors' accounts and imposed curfews on minor access to social apps between 10:30pm and 6:30am. It was rewritten after industry lawsuits and ultimately narrowed before taking effect. Arkansas's Social Media Safety Act, which required age verification for all users, was blocked by a federal court that found it likely violated the First Amendment by burdening adult speech to protect minors, a rationale echoed in challenges to similar laws in Ohio, Texas, and Mississippi. NetChoice, the trade association representing Meta, Google, and other major platforms, has been the plaintiff in most of these cases and has won preliminary injunctions in the majority of them.

California's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act took a different approach, requiring platforms to assess and mitigate risks to minors by default rather than verify age directly, modeled on the UK's Children's Code enforced by Ofcom. A federal court enjoined parts of it, again on First Amendment grounds, though other provisions remain in litigation. New York's SAFE for Kids Act, signed into law, restricts addictive algorithmic feeds for minors and night-time notifications unless a platform obtains verifiable parental consent; it survived an initial challenge but its age-verification enforcement mechanism has not yet been finalized through rulemaking by the state attorney general.

The NCSL's 2026 legislative tracker lists dozens of active bills reflecting this same template, including New York's S 4609, the Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act, which restricts algorithmic recommendation feeds to minors and remains pending. Comparable proposals have surfaced in nearly every state legislative session, addressing app store age verification, chatbot interactions with minors, and school cellphone restrictions, though most are still in committee. Additional policy mechanisms under consideration include a Tax on Targeted Advertising aimed at reducing the economic incentive for hyper-targeted engagement, though this approach has not yet been enacted and faces opposition from digital advertisers and small businesses.

The scoping review indexed in the PMC literature situates this US activity within a broader international pattern: Australia's eSafety Commissioner and the UK's Ofcom have adopted regulator-led enforcement models with statutory codes of practice, an approach US federal law lacks entirely, since neither the FCC nor FTC currently holds equivalent rulemaking authority over platform design for minors. That regulatory gap is part of why the state-by-state approach in the US has produced such inconsistent, litigation-heavy outcomes: without a federal agency empowered to write binding design standards, states have tried to legislate design mandates directly, and courts have treated many of those mandates as content-based speech restrictions rather than neutral consumer-protection rules. This fragmentation reflects the unresolved tension of State vs. Federal Preemption.

The near-term trajectory points toward continued fragmentation rather than resolution, driven by the underlying tension between State vs. Federal Preemption and the judicial application of First Amendment Jurisprudence to platform regulation. Federal bills like KOSA and COPPA 2.0 have bipartisan support but no clear floor schedule, and industry lobbying against a private right of action remains a sticking point. State laws will keep generating injunctions until either the Supreme Court rules definitively on age verification's constitutionality or Congress preempts the field with a single federal standard. Design-based approaches modeled on the UK and Australian regulator-led codes may prove more durable in US courts than direct age-verification mandates, since they regulate platform architecture rather than user access. Until then, platforms face a patchwork of overlapping and partially enjoined obligations that vary sharply by state, while the 'Engagement' Business Model that created the original impetus for regulation remains structurally intact.