Kalaʻe Kong often looks down the hallway at St. Louis School and notices his fellow students staring down at their phone screens.
“I just see a long line of people, everybody is just glued to their phones,” the 18-year-old senior told Civil Beat. “It looks like a bunch of electronic zombies or something.”
Even though he sees how overusing their phones has affected his peers, he catches himself getting sucked into social media sites like YouTube and Instagram as well.
“I definitely have my moments where I go on my phone quite a bit,” he said.
The addictiveness of social media, especially among teenagers, is a major concern for some Hawaiʻi lawmakers, who had been advancing Senate Bill 2761 that would limit the ability of kids 16 and under to use the online platforms. But Rep. David Tarnas, who is chair of the Judiciary and Hawaiian Affairs Committee, deferred the bill indefinitely Wednesday, putting it on hold because of concerns the proposal could conflict with the public’s right to free speech.
At least 17 states have enacted laws addressing minors’ use of social media, but most of them have been blocked or paused by lawsuits challenging their constitutionality on First Amendment grounds.
Advocates for restricting social media use among minors say two recent jury decisions in California and New Mexico are considered wins. Juries in those states found Meta and Google liable for causing depression and anxiety among young users and failing to warn consumers about the potential harmful effects of their platforms.
The jury decisions, though, will have little effect on the legal challenges to state laws, which federal judges have repeatedly ruled pose unconstitutional limits on free speech, said David Greene, senior counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a national organization focused on digital civil liberties issues.
“The purpose of all of these laws is to deny young people access to information they have a constitutional right to receive, and also audiences they have a constitutional right to speak to,” he said. “So it’s really hard, and should be really hard, to write a law that survives constitutional scrutiny.”
But Sen. Jarrett Keohokalole, who introduced Hawaiʻi’s bill, said lawmakers have to do something. His bill originally would have banned kids under 16 from using social media but was revised to allow young users to create accounts with parental consent. Keohokalole is running for Congress in Hawaiʻi’s first district.
If nothing is done, he worries society could see a repeat of the damage done by the tobacco industry, which marketed their products to vulnerable young people despite the detrimental health consequences of smoking.
“We know that the cigarette companies intentionally made cigarettes that were hyper addictive, and we know they knew it, and we know they targeted teenagers,” he said. “My fear is that the cycle is repeating itself.”
First Amendment Issues
Keohokalole said the idea for his bill came from a 2024 Australia law barring anyone under 16 from accessing social media.
But apparently, there were workarounds. Tech regulators in the country recently announced they are investigating social media companies, including Meta and Google, for allowing young users to bypass age verification checks.
Testifiers opposing Keohokalole’s bill have brought up other concerns with Australia’s ban and said it couldn’t be implemented in the United States because Australia doesn’t guarantee the same freedom of speech rights the U.S. does.
Teens’ inability to sign up for popular sites like Facebook and Instagram is forcing many of them onto less-regulated platforms, according to David Louie, a Honolulu lawyer who represented Meta in a Health Committee hearing last month.
“And so, you’re forcing teens into — who are seeking community, seeking information, trying to learn about the world – you’re forcing them into potentially unsafe platforms with no parental controls and no parental input,” he said.
The bill was changed from outright banning young users on social media to allowing them to create accounts with parental consent. The latest version of the bill also shifted the responsibility of verifying a user’s age and getting parental consent from social media companies to app providers like the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
But many who have testified in opposition, including NetChoice, a tech industry trade association, still take issue with the bill.
Age verification processes pose serious privacy risks by requiring users to upload personal information and even photos of government-issued IDs, Amy Bos, vice president of government affairs for NetChoice, said during a hearing on the bill Wednesday.
“Age verification data presents a honey pot of sensitive personal information on millions of users, including minors and adults,” she said. “One data breach could expose the identities and ages of Hawaii’s children to bad actors.”
She also noted a federal judge in Texas recently blocked that state’s law requiring age verification to download apps.
LGBTQ groups also oppose the bill because they say it will make it harder for LGBTQ youth who may feel vulnerable and isolated at home to access supportive spaces online. A representative of the Trevor Project, a national organization that focuses on suicide prevention in LGBTQ youth, testified in opposition.
“We cannot ignore the reality that many LGBTQ+ young people – especially those who do not live in supportive homes or communities – turn to the internet to better understand themselves, and to find support and belonging,” wrote Casey Pick, senior director of law and policy for the Trevor Project. “These online spaces can be life-saving; LGBTQ+ young people with access to affirming online spaces report significantly lower odds of attempting suicide.”
Some testifiers also noted having a social media account can be particularly important for Hawaiʻi youth, who may feel especially isolated living in an island state.
“For many young people in Hawaiʻi, social media is not simply entertainment,” Hawaiʻi resident Leinaala Keohuhu-Paaluhi wrote in testimony. “It is a primary way they maintain relationships with friends and family who live on neighbor islands or on the mainland.”
“Removing access may reduce screen time,” she wrote, “but it also severs meaningful connections that help young people feel supported and engaged in their communities.”
Recent Cases
Recent court rulings show people are willing to place on blame on social media companies for failing to protect young people.
Last week, a California jury found Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and Google, which owns YouTube, liable for causing depression and anxiety in a woman who compulsively used social media as a child. The jury awarded her $6 million in damages, 70% of which will be paid by Meta.
Jurors in New Mexico last week ordered Meta to pay $375 million for endangering children and violating consumer protection laws by failing to warn consumers about the dangers of using social media.
Greene, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the outcomes of these cases will likely embolden advocates and legislators to try to impose more regulations on social media, despite legal challenges to state laws. The outcomes may also inspire those who feel they’ve harmed by social media use to file their own lawsuits.
Stephanie Otway, a spokeswoman for Meta, said in a statement the company plans to appeal the verdicts.
“Reducing something as complex as teen mental health to a single cause risks leaving the many, broader issues teens face today unaddressed and overlooks the fact that many teens rely on digital communities to connect and find belonging,” the statement says.
The fact that using social media can be positive for some and harmful for others is part of what makes it so hard to regulate, Greene said.
“The question is, what do you do then, when you have something that may harm some people and may be a great benefit for others,” he said. “It’s hard to respond to that, and the First Amendment says you don’t respond to that by passing a law that says no one can do it.”
While states have been able to regulate tobacco, for example through prohibiting cigarette sales to minors under 18, regulating social media use is harder because it deals with people’s free speech rights.
A more effective way for states to address these issues could be to implement mandatory social media education for youth, Greene said. North Carolina just passed a law requiring social media literacy classes in public schools.
‘It Really Affected My Mental Health’
Many young people who use social media regularly say it can be a good way to connect with friends, chat and share funny photos. But they also say it negatively affects their mental health, especially when they started using it at a young age.
A group of teens who recently attended a high school journalism bootcamp in Civil Beat’s newsroom said they agree with placing restrictions on children’s social media use.
Liv Knutsen, a 16-year-old at Punahou School, said she created an Instagram account when she was 10 years old, but she wishes she would have waited until she was older. Constantly seeing photos of models and influencers on the platform made her feel insecure.
“I think it really affected my mental health for a few years,” she said, “especially in middle school where you’re always focused on comparing yourself to other people.”
“I have seen people pull out phones mid conversation or mid interaction and start scrolling.”
Olesya Noerper, 15, Punahou School
Some teens said they started to have body image issues when they began using social media.
“It’s because of all the intense, like curation of Instagram, you’re only exposed to the most perfect parts of people’s lives,” said Charlotte Madin, a 16-year-old at the University of Hawaiʻi Lab School, “and because that’s all you see from them, that’s what you think is going on with them.”
Studies have shown the harmful effects social media can have on users, particularly children whose brains are still developing.
In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General released a report warning that using social media for more than three hours a day can lead to depression and anxiety in youth. Adolescents are particularly sensitive to the interactions they have on social media and the content they may be exposed to.
The report also notes social media can open young users up to cyberbullying and put them at risk of being contacted by online predators or other malicious actors.
Now Madin said she tries to control her social media use. Sometimes she’ll set a timer when she goes on Instagram to try to limit herself to 30 minutes of scrolling. Occasionally, she’ll delete the app altogether for weeks or months at a time.
Olesya Noerper, a 15-year-old student at Punahou School, said she can see positive and negative sides of social media. She uses Instagram mainly to keep up with friends and get news from sources like the New York Times and CNN.
But she worries about her younger brothers, who are 11 and 13 and spend a lot of time on YouTube. She’s concerned about how much time young people spend staring at screens instead of interacting with each other and the content they could be exposed to.
“I have seen people pull out phones mid conversation or mid interaction and start scrolling,” she said. “It feels very awkward because you’re actively speaking to them, and they are on, most likely, a social media platform.”
She said she supports requiring parental consent for young kids to have social media accounts. But she and other teens also say they also want to see more education for young people about how to better use social media.
Madin suggested schools incorporate social media classes into their curricula and encouraged parents to talk to their kids about their online habits.
“A lot of the time, people are like, ‘Oh, social media is bad, you should not do it,’” she said. “But if you’re going to do it and you’re young, how are you going to know what to do? How to operate it safely?”
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