Calls for the United States to join Australia in banning children from using social media ignore a critical difference between these countries: the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Although there is understandable concern about the effects of social media on youth, the answer is not a government ban on speech.

On Wednesday, December 10, a law went into effect in Australia that prohibits children under 16 from having access to 10 social media platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Facebook, X, and Reddit.  The Australia law is a flat-out ban on access; it has no exception for parental consent. If a platform fails to take adequate steps to block children from having social media accounts, it will face multimillion dollar fines. 

Some states have adopted their own social media bans. On Tuesday, December 16, a federal district court in Louisiana declared unconstitutional a law requiring age verification for access to social media. Last summer, the Supreme Court allowed to go into effect a Mississippi law, HB 1126, that mandated age verification for all users on social media sites and requires platforms to prevent minors from accessing harmful material. A federal district court issued a preliminary injunction, but the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and the Supreme Court, in August 2025, allowed the law to go into effect. There was no opinion of the Court, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a brief concurring opinion saying that “the Mississippi law is likely unconstitutional,” though he agreed with not enjoining the law at that stage.

The Arkansas Social Media Safety Act requires all users to verify their age and imposes a parental-consent requirement for minors who create accounts. A federal district court issued a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the Act and subsequently declared the law unconstitutional. After the decision, the Arkansas legislature amended the bill, though it still retained the age-verification provisions.

These laws are motivated by the laudable goal of protecting children. Studies document that social media use is correlated with depression, low self-esteem, bullying, and predatory behavior directed at children. But banning those under 16 from accessing social media is at odds with the fundamental premise of the First Amendment: a blanket prohibition, like in Australia, assumes that less speech is better. Age verification laws not only restrict access by children, but also burden adults who are unable or unwilling to link their government identification to their online activity.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (2011) is particularly important.  The case concerned the constitutionality of a California law that made it a crime to sell or rent violent video games to minors under 18 without parental consent. Like bans on access to social media, the California law and similar ones in other states were motivated by studies showing a link between playing violent video games and harmful behavior. 

In a 7-2 decision, the Court declared the California law unconstitutional as violating the First Amendment. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the opinion for the Court and rejected the state’s argument that states have broad latitude in regulating the speech of children. He wrote: “[M]inors are entitled to a significant measure of First Amendment protection, and only in relatively narrow and well-defined circumstances may government bar public dissemination of protected materials to them.”

California argued that playing interactive video games has a deleterious effect on children and makes them more prone to commit acts of violence. The Court, though, rejected this argument. Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, concluded that California “cannot show a direct causal link between violent video games and harm to minors. . . . The State’s evidence is not compelling. . . . They show at best some correlation between exposure to violent entertainment and minuscule real-world effects, such as children feeling more aggressive or making louder noises in the few minutes after playing a violent game than after playing a nonviolent game.” 

Defenders of a social media ban for children point to a more recent Supreme Court decision in June 2025, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, which upheld a Texas law requiring age verification for websites where more than one-third of the content was sexually explicit. But the Supreme Court has long given the government latitude to regulate sexual speech and almost 70 years ago held that obscenity is unprotected by the First Amendment. In Paxton, the Court upheld the Texas law by concluding that it regulated speech that was “obscene for minors.”

By contrast, laws banning or limiting minors from having access to social media keep them from all types of speech:  news, medical information, suicide prevention, help with their homework. In Packingham v. North Carolina (2017), the Court unanimously declared unconstitutional a state law that made it a felony for a registered sex offender “to access a commercial social networking Web site where the sex offender knows that the site permits minor children to become members or to create or maintain personal Web pages.” 

The Court’s opinion began by strongly emphasizing the importance of the Internet and social media as places for speech. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the Court, spoke of the “vast democratic forums of the Internet” in general, and of the importance of social media in particular. He said that seven in ten American adults use at least one Internet social networking service and that more people are on Facebook than the entire population of North America.  He explained that social media platforms are “the principal sources for knowing current events, checking ads for employment, speaking and listening in the modern public square, and otherwise exploring the vast realms of human thought and knowledge.”  Thus, the Court concluded that it “must exercise extreme caution before suggesting that the First Amendment provides scant protection for access to vast networks in that medium.”

Thus, a law like Australia’s, or even the age verification statutes in Mississippi and Arkansas, should be deemed to violate the First Amendment in the United States. The government should be required to use means less restrictive of speech to achieve its laudable goal of protecting children.  

As new media have developed, there has been a recognition of how the speech on them can harm children and a call for government action to protect them. This was true with comic books and song lyrics and video games. In each instance, the proposed restrictions were well-intended, but also failed as minors still found ways to gain access. It will be interesting to see whether the Australia law actually works. Already there are reports of how it is being easily circumvented.

It may be that studies will show that social media is more harmful to minors than any other form of communication. But it also is more beneficial in the enormous breadth of useful and even vital information that it conveys. The solution to the problem of children and social media is not to be found in a law like Australia’s or in those adopted by states such as Mississippi and Arkansas. The First Amendment does not allow it.