Technology as a Public Health Issue: The New Wave of Regulation
An analysis of the growing global trend toward restricting children's and adolescents' access to social media and other digital technologies.
Originally published in La Silla Vacía, 9 de octubre de 2026..
For some time now, we have been seeing a growing trend around the world: more and more countries are portraying technology as something risky and harmful, access to which should be restricted. This is a movement that began years ago in Asia and has slowly spread to Western countries. This perspective advocates using long-standing legal measures designed to protect children and adolescents: just as we prevent them from smoking or drinking alcohol, so too—according to those who propose these measures—can we prevent them from using social media or cell phones.
An ongoing research project by CELE has identified more than 77 laws and bills around the world that follow the same pattern: banning social media and other services deemed harmful, restricting their use to adults, or decisively influencing the features of these services when they are offered to minors. The mechanisms used are familiar: certain services are banned, and the obligation to comply with these bans is shifted to the companies providing the services, requiring them—for example—to verify the age of their users. The supermarket cashier checks that we are the credit card holders and verifies our age; the person selling movie tickets does the same. Sometimes these bans can be circumvented with parental consent, but in most cases they are broad and a matter of public policy. The types of prohibited services vary widely: sometimes they are limited to pornographic content, but in other cases they extend to general communication services (such as social media or messaging services).
Many of these regulations also seek to require companies to make changes to their services: they limit the processing of minors’ data (such as the Digital ECA in Brazil), prohibit or limit algorithmic recommendations that reward screen time, or ban social popularity features such as likes or follower counts. Other regulations impose generic duties of care on companies, thereby creating potential grounds for civil liability if the companies fail to comply with them. Other regulations mandate the establishment of time limits, warnings about the adverse health effects of excessive phone or social media use, and so on.
Limited Evidence and Judicial Restraints
This trend is fueled by growing concern about the effects of technology on our children. A major driving force behind this movement is Jonathan Haidt, who, through his best-seller The Anxious Generation, has convinced many that we have been living through a social experiment in recent years that must be reversed. According to Haidt, the presence of technology in our children’s lives produces numerous adverse effects.
Any parent of young children can relate to this assessment, but the evidence on the matter is inconclusive. The fact is that technology is ambiguous: for some children, it can be a channel through which they are bullied or a form of solitary escape that discourages them from socializing with peers; but others may find true communities of purpose and meaning online, especially when their offline lives are filled with people different from themselves, or when they live in hostile or repressive environments. A UNICEF report from a few years ago documented numerous studies that report both positive and negative effects simultaneously.
These regulations are popular but severely restrict children’s rights. Therefore, they must be subject to the strict scrutiny we generally apply when evaluating regulations that restrict rights. Many of these regulations have come under such judicial scrutiny. For example, numerous laws in the United States have been struck down by judges who found that they unduly restrict the freedom of expression and communication of children and adolescents. In France, the Constitutional Council ruled that a law proposed by the National Assembly was too broad in its prohibition, and did not allow for distinguishing problematic services from others that are useful or beneficial to children’s development and education. In Paxton, the U.S. Supreme Court took a lenient stance toward a law restricting access to child pornography, but it is reasonable to assume that it would be more stringent with general laws prohibiting, for example, “social media.” These initial judicial restraints suggest that the trend will continue but will eventually find a point of equilibrium.
Informal and Permanent Regulation
What concerned lawmakers around the world sought to achieve through legislation was, to a large extent, accomplished by the attorneys general of numerous U.S. states through civil litigation that led to Meta’s agreement with Meta a few weeks ago. In fact, Meta agreed to a series of changes to its services that, in many cases, address the concern we are discussing: “screen time” limits, notifications disabled during school hours, more parental controls, among other measures.
These concessions are voluntary. But are they really? Scholar Jeff Kosseff argues that they are not: These are decisions made by the company under coercion, which makes them unconstitutional. But it is doubtful that there will be an effective remedy at the end of the day, because —even if Kosseff were right— the coercion he alleges would be difficult to prove, and all the incentives at play for Meta point toward it rationalizing its decision under the voluntary paradigm, since under litigation pressure, Meta emerges as a player capable of setting trends at the industry level. And that’s always good for business.
It remains to be seen how the settlement will impact Meta’s global service offerings and—more broadly—the industry as a whole. Meta included clauses whose effectiveness depends on YouTube and TikTok following suit. On the other hand, the agreement applies to the United States, but it could have extraterritorial effects—for example, if the technical solutions implemented as part of the agreement were met with favor by the European regulatory authorities responsible for implementing the Digital Services Act. The trend we’re discussing here is so persistent that it’s likely to have an impact, even if the laws were to come under constitutional scrutiny. That’s because Meta’s agreement is on track to become a new industry standard.
In that scenario, what countries do or fail to do becomes more or less secondary. Brazil’s Digital ECA restricts the processing of children’s data and imposes general duties of care, but if its implementation proves effective, it will likely be more so because the law builds on a global trend than because of the law itself. This, which is true for Brazil, is likely true for the rest of Latin America, where similar projects are already flourishing. This is a familiar and frustrating path in the region, which suffers—for both good and bad reasons—from legislative bandwagoning: many of the laws we enact to govern our communal life often come from beyond our borders.