Social Media Regulations and Mental Health

Question: If social media is doing harm to teenagers’ mental health, should it have stricter regulations and why?

Answer: Thank you for this question! The relationship between social media use and teen mental health is complex.  If you’d like to learn more about social media’s impact on teens, here are a few resources: 

• The Good and Bad of Social Media: What Research Tells Us 
• Tips to Manage Social Media Use for Teens 
• Impact of Social Media on Youth

Social Media Regulation: Calls for Changes to Support Youth Well-being

While positive and negative experiences with social media vary between adolescents, there are steps that social media companies can take to make social media safer for all users.  Several reports, including the U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on Social Media and Youth Mental Health and the American Psychological Association’s Health Advisory on Social Media Use in Adolescence, have called upon social media companies to improve safety and privacy features on their platforms. 
 
In February 2026, the American Academy of Pediatrics released an official recommendation on Digital Ecosystems, Children, and Adolescents. This policy statement recommends that social media companies not design their platforms around maximum engagement and instead design around the health, safety, privacy, and developmental needs of children. Additionally, in June 2026, our Center’s Youth Advisory Panel shared Building Better Platforms: A Youth-Led Guide to Age-Appropriate Digital Design, reflecting a vision of social media that better supports how adolescents think, feel, and connect.   
 
Center Co-Medical Directors, Drs. Moreno and Radesky discuss potential legislative changes to social media regulations that may support youth well-being in Benefits and Harms of Proposed Social Media Legislation and in Online child safety laws could help or hurt - 2 pediatricians explain what’s likely to work and what isn’t. For example, they suggest: 

• Legislation that includes default privacy protections (privacy settings that are automatically turned on, instead of something you have to find and turn on yourself) for youth that would allow users to limit their interactions to friends and communities they seek out 
• Policies that improve user control over platform settings, such as controlling the content that users see in their feeds and recommendations 
• Legislation that prohibits data collection from youth social media users 
• Platform-level policies that limit misinformation and hateful content 
• Developing an effective age-verification system that will allow protections that make sense for different ages

Want more detail? This review of social media legislation looked at laws being proposed across the country and found six main types: warning labels (like the ones on cigarettes, but for apps), age limits and ways to verify age, rules requiring parental consent or monitoring, school cell phone policies, rules about how platforms are designed, and laws targeting deepfakes and non-consensual intimate images.  
 
One important catch: these laws are moving faster than the research can keep up with. So even the experts who study this stuff say lawmakers should be careful, building rules based on solid science about teen development, real privacy protections, holding platforms accountable, and checking regularly to see if the laws are actually working.  

What’s Already Changing

Recent Developments in Social Media Legislation

This is a rapidly moving topic, but several state laws and recent lawsuit settlements may shift social media design in a safer direction: 

• States like California have passed laws that change the design features available to teens. One law mandates that social media companies provide feeds to teens that are not personalized in a way that leads to addictive-like, compulsive usage. Instead, teens’ feeds would default to only the accounts that they follow.  
• Similarly, New York and other states have adopted the SAFE Act, which also prohibits engagement-based feeds (feeds designed using data about you to keep you scrolling as long as possible). 
• Meta recently agreed to a legal settlement that will change some Instagram and Facebook features for younger users, including two-hour time limits, hidden “likes” counts, easier ways to report harmful content, built-in break reminders, and more parental controls.  

At the federal level, a bill called the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) has been proposed that would require platforms to build in safety protections by default for young users, including limits on features that encourage compulsive use, stronger privacy settings, and more control over what you see and who can contact you. It has not passed yet.  

Outside the U.S., some countries are going further. Australia now requires platforms to keep users under 16 years old off their apps, putting the responsibility on companies rather than teens or parents. Australia is also considering a law that would let users opt out of algorithm-driven feeds entirely.  

Tips for managing social media use 

Laws and platform changes take time, and they won’t look the same everywhere. In the meantime, there are things that you can control right now. Many social media platforms have some content, time, and privacy controls that teens can utilize to tailor their social media experience in a way that promotes well-being. There are also other steps that you can take to improve your experience online. 

• Use your settings to shape your feed around content that matters to you. For more ideas on how to do this, check out Managing Content on Social Media Feeds  
• Seek out media that you find valuable, such as content that helps you learn, provides new perspectives, or connects you to others  
• To reduce the amount of time you are spending on habit-forming feeds, try spending more time messaging and connecting with friends on social media, rather than consuming content 
• To focus your time during homework, school or at bedtime, consider setting “do-not-disturb” or “focus mode” so you are in control of when devices grab your attention  
• Develop a schedule that includes time for your offline hobbies and special interests  
• Plan a regular sleep routine that helps you relax and enjoy restful sleep  
• Consider talking to your family about establishing a Family Media Plan that can provide ideas for rules, guidelines and shared media experiences across your family 

Find more helpful tips and strategies to practice healthy digital media use in this previous portal response on Managing Doomscrolling and Screen Time.  
 

 
References 

• Gobin, K. C., McComb, S. E., & Mills, J. S. (2022). Testing a self-compassion micro-intervention before appearance-based social media use: Implications for body image. Body Image, 40, 200–206.
• Mikami, A. Y., Khalis, A., & Karasavva, V. (2025). Logging out or leaning in? Social media strategies for enhancing well-being. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 154(1), 171–189. 
• Moreno, M. A., & Radesky, J. S. (2024). Benefits and Harms of Proposed Social Media Legislation. JAMA Pediatrics, 178(9), 857–858. 
• Nagata, J. M., Nayak, S., Huang, O. H., Li, E. J., Wong, J. H., Memon, Z., Zhang, S., Brindis, C. D., & Moreno, M. A.. (2026). Evidence for Social Media Legislation Strategies. JAMA Network Open, 9(9), e2626965.   
• SMRI. Social Media Research Institute. (n.d.). 
• Valkenburg, P. M., Meier, A., & Beyens, I. (2022). Social media use and its impact on adolescent mental health: An umbrella review of the evidence. Current Opinion in Psychology, 44, 58–68. 
• Young, G. K. (2022). How much is too much: The difficulties of social media content moderation. Information & Communications Technology Law, 31(1), 1–16.  

Age: 13-17

Topics: social media, adolescent, mental health, regulations

Role: Teen