Fear of Missing Out Meets Fear of Letting Families Decide
“Everyone else’s parents let them” has helped generations of children negotiate later curfews, sleepovers, and trips to the mall. Today, it helps them get social media accounts. The novel twist is treating that familiar parental predicament as grounds for the government to make the decision for everyone.
Jonathan Haidt and coauthors argue that families face a “collective action trap.” Parents let children join because their friends already use the platforms, even if each family would prefer a world where nobody did. Their proposed escape puts the government in charge, banning social media accounts for everyone under 16, regardless of parental consent.
That argument comes as courts and legislators increasingly approach social media through the lens of product safety. Some courts have applied strict liability to alleged “addictive design features,” allowing claims that platforms should pay for resulting harms even without proof that they acted negligently.
Courts have traditionally distinguished physical products from the ideas and expression they convey, generally declining to impose strict product liability for harms attributed to that content. Social media complicates that distinction because platform design shapes how people share and encounter speech. Appellate courts will have to decide whether imposing liability on those design choices infringes the platforms’ or their users’ First Amendment rights.
Those rulings have also emboldened U.S. legislators to follow their overseas counterparts in proposing under-16 bans. With a new Democratic majority in Congress, the idea could gain traction as an area of bipartisan agreement.
But the research behind the collective action argument supports a much narrower conclusion than its advocates suggest. A study of college students’ willingness to take a month off social media tells us little about whether children should lose access altogether. The case for a ban also glosses over the gap between what people say and what they do, the benefits of belonging to a popular network, and the very different ways people use it. Those gaps matter when the proposed remedy takes the choice away from every family.