Efforts to regulate how social media companies interact with teenagers found mixed success in the first three months of 2025, limiting what has been a significant trend across states in recent years.
Lawmakers were able to push their bills across the finish line in some cases, while tech industry lobbying and the threat of legal challenges derailed legislation elsewhere.
Dozens of bills remain in play of the more than 100 social media and youth online safety measures introduced this year, according to tracking by the Computer & Communications Industry Association.
Bills were or are still being considered this year in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wyoming, according to a review by Pluribus News.
The proposals included requiring parental permission for teens to access social media, mandating higher privacy protections for youth accounts, and financially penalizing platforms for harms to youth. Lawmakers also continued to target algorithmically curated personalized feeds.
A bill requested by Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford (D) that would bar addictive features for teen social media accounts is pending. Washington State’s bill targeting so-called addictive feeds is one of the more notable collapses.
Washington Attorney General Nick Brown (D) requested the legislature pass the measure, which borrows elements from recent laws in California and New York. The Senate passed it on a broad bipartisan vote, but it never came up for a hearing in the House where a companion measure also stalled.
“I’m disappointed that this commonsense bill to improve youth mental health could not get a committee hearing in the House, especially after passing the Senate with bipartisan support,” Brown said in a statement to Pluribus News. “Compulsive social media use has demonstrably harmful impacts on young people. It’s disappointing not everyone is treating this crisis with the urgency it deserves.”
Rep. Amy Walen (D), chair of the House Consumer Protection and Business Committee, said she was concerned about the measure’s constitutionality, despite the attorney general’s office insisting it was “constitutionally sound.” Brown signaled he would try again to pass the legislation.
Virginia lawmakers approved a bill this year requiring social media platforms to identify users younger than 16 and limit their time on the platform to one hour a day unless their parents allow otherwise. An earlier version would have prohibited addictive feeds for minors, but that provision was stripped out. Gov. Glenn Younkin (R) has until May 2 to sign or veto the bill.
“While the bill that the Governor will sign doesn’t go as far as I wanted it to, I’m glad we could all come together, across parties and offices, to get the ball rolling on establishing some initial, and meaningful, guardrails on social media use for kids,” Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg (D), the bill’s sponsor, said in a statement.
Tech industry group Chamber of Progress is urging Younkin to veto the bill, calling it a “legal time bomb.”
The tech industry has vigorously challenged state social media laws, with the trade group NetChoice leading the legal fight with assistance in some cases from the Computer & Communications Industry Association.
NetChoice notched its latest and most sweeping win late last month when a federal judge in Arkansas permanently enjoined a 2023 law requiring teens to get their parents’ permission to have social media accounts. Several states have passed similar laws.
“For policymakers and the public, this ruling sets a critical precedent: states cannot sidestep constitutional scrutiny by wrapping speech restrictions in the language of online safety,” Krista Chavez, NetChoice’s senior communications manager, wrote in a blog post this week.
The ruling did not dissuade Arkansas lawmakers and Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R), who introduced fresh legislation aimed at amending the 2023 law to make it more legally resilient and allowing parents to sue companies for alleged harms to children. The legislature has moved swiftly to advance the pair of bills.
“Moms and dads whose kids have fallen victim to Big Tech deserve the right to take action against these abusive companies — and Arkansas law should protect kids so they aren’t subjected to toxic material in the first place,” Sanders said in a statement announcing the bills.
Other social media bills passed this year include a Colorado measure from Sen. Lisa Frizell (R) that would require platforms to report annually on how minors use their product, as well as require companies to make it easier for law enforcement to reach them and to respond more quickly to search warrants. It is not clear if Gov. Jared Polis (D) will sign it.
Utah enacted a first-in-the-nation law to require app stores to verify user ages and not allow minors to download apps or make in-app purchases without parental approval. Similar bills have been introduced in at least a third of states, including most recently Ohio.
The bills are backed by Meta, Snap and X, who jointly called on other states to pass similar laws.
“Parents want a one-stop-shop to oversee and approve the many apps their teens want to download, and Utah has led the way in centralizing it within a device’s app store,” the companies said in a statement.
Read more: Utah is first to pass app store age verification law
Myriad other social media bills are still alive in the states. They include proposals in California, Minnesota, New York and Texas that would require social media to come with warning labels, something former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for last July.