Texas Social Media Ban Dead For Now

The Texas social media ban for anyone under 18 thankfully is now dead (for now) as of May 29, 2025 as the Senate ultimately missed a key deadline for a vote on the bill.  But we must not rest in our laurels just yet, though.  Unfortunately, another bill passed, and was signed into law, that requires app stores to verify age and parental consent for people under 18 to download apps, which takes effect on January 1, 2026 if it doesn't get struck down by the courts in the meantime.  Even if that one is not quite as bad.

Texas' Potential Social Media Ban Strictest In The History Of The World

The latest bill in Texas to restrict social media for young people is the strictest one in the history of the world thus far.  This bill as currently written, which passed the House and is now heading to the Senate, would absolutely ban anyone under 18 from using social media platforms, period.  And anyone signing up for a new social media account would face mandatory age verification, with the exact details on how that would work still not quite cut and dried yet, but most likely would involve some flavor of uploading or otherwise entering government-issued IDs, perhaps via third party services.  What that means for existing accounts remains to be determined, but parents would have the right to force social media companies to summarily and permanently delete their under-18 kids' accounts upon request.  And there are NO exceptions to what counts as "social media" as long one can create and share content on a website or app, except for news and sports websites.  

That would mean that in Texas, a 16 or 17 year old would be legally old enough to get married, but yet still somehow too young to post their wedding on Facebook, or any other social media for that matter.  Let that sink in for a moment.

(Suddenly, Florida's less extreme law, with its lower and graduated 14/16 age limit, and more, if unclear, exceptions, looks almost....quaint and nostalgic by comparison.)

Our vehement opposition to this abomination of a bill is twofold:  1) this bill blatantly violates the First Amendment rights of people under 18, and 2) it also creates a potentially massive privacy and cybersecurity risk for ALL ages due to the mandatory age verification, assuming government-issued IDs or other sensitive personal information is required.  It is grossly overbroad, unconstitutional, illiberal, and unethical.  And NO amount of lipstick can save this pig.

The ONE good thing about this bill is that it will require all ID and personal data used for age verification purposes to be used only for that specific purpose and deleted immediately afterwards, unlike some other bills out there.  Thank God (or Nature) for small mercies, right?  But honestly, can we really trust Big Tech with something like that?  I think we all know the answer to that question.

And don't even for a minute think that it will stop there!  We have all seen some flavor of this movie before, and it doesn't end well.  It certainly will NOT stop at 18, mark my words.  If it passes this year, and other states and the feds subsequently join them, then it is almost certain that it will be raised to 21 nationwide by 2030, if not sooner.  Just look at alcohol and tobacco, for example, which the bill's proponents are already comparing social media to.  Whether they make a beeline for 21 as soon as next year, or perhaps take the scenic route via 19 first (to "get it out of the high schools"), still remains to be determined, but they WILL get there one way another unless they are stopped NOW.  (Other countries will at least probably stop at 18, but almost certainly NOT the USA if the zealots succeed.)  

And don't think it will stop at "merely" verifying age either.  This can VERY easily lead to an Orwellian nightmare where all privacy and any semblance of anonymity is a thing of the past, and political dissidents are targeted by the state for voicing their opinions on any controversial issues.  And it goes further downhill from there as well.  

Don't say you haven't been warned!  While this particular bill is a primarily Republican effort, it has bipartisan support, just like all other tyranny against young people.

If they really wanted to keep young people safe online (and adults too!), they would do the following:

• Pass comprehensive data privacy legislation for ALL ages which, at a minimum, would ban any and all "surveillance advertising" and "dark patterns".  This is best done at the federal level in terms of effectiveness, but states can serve as important trailblazers nonetheless.
• Regulate the algorithms better, audit them, and ban "addictive design features" for ALL ages.
• Perhaps even tax the data mining of users by social media companies.
• Have a voluntary smartphone buyback program like they do for guns.
• Since the latest trend towards "bell to bell" phone-free schools is basically a foregone conclusion at this point, they should apply it to everyone (teachers, staff, administrators, and visitors), not just students.
• If after doing all of that we absolutely MUST set an "age of digital majority", then it should be no higher than 16 (ideally no higher than 15, but certainly NO higher than 16, EVER!), and it should be a "soft" age limit with plenty of generous exceptions, and NO mandatory age verification involving any sensitive personal information whatsoever, period.
• And if after all of that, they still insist on mandatory age verification, then they need to have a billion-dollar guarantee that such information will never fall into the wrong hands, and delay implementation of that requirement until that can be guaranteed.  That is, if a person's sensitive information is retained, compromised, or misused in any way, shape or form, that person should be entitled to at least one billion dollars in damages.  But Big Tech would NEVER agree to that, of course.  And that is by design.

And perhaps even do a "safety recall" of various social media platforms, freezing or quarantining them for ALL ages until the platforms are made reasonably safer.

But this sort of ageist and Orwellian bill, or even the milder versions which are either passed or pending in other states, need to be rejected completely, and yesterday, full stop.

(Mic drop)

P.S.  If what the social mediaphobes say is true in that the Big Tech platforms "already know more about their users than the users know about themselves", then mandatory age verification is completely unnecessary for enforcing any sort of hypothetical age limit or age-specific restrictions.  Simply holding them to an "actual knowledge" (as in COPPA) or "knowledge fairly implied on the basis of objective circumstances" (as in COPPA 2.0) standard, and auditing their existing treasure trove of user data (including their own age estimates) to keep them honest, is all that would be needed.  The zealots really can't have it both ways!

P.P.S.  The fact that the author of the bill is a fellow Elder Millennial like me really does NOT reflect very well at all on what our generation has become!  Pulling up the drawbridge for younger generations just like our Boomer parents did, the apple really did NOT fall far from the tree!

UPDATE:  The Texas social media ban is now dead (for now) as of May 29, 2025 as the Senate ultimately missed a key deadline for a vote on the bill.  Unfortunately, another bill passed, and was signed into law, that requires app stores to verify age and parental consent for people under 18 to download apps, which takes effect on January 1, 2026 if it doesn't get struck down by the courts in the meantime.

We Oppose The Proposed Texas Teen Social Media Ban

In Texas, a lawmaker has recently introduced a bill that would completely ban anyone under 18 from using any social media whatsoever, and require age verification via photo ID for anyone over 18 to open a social media account.  And Twenty-One Debunked opposes this bill for the following reasons:

• First and foremost, it is extremely ageist and a slippery slope.  And what's to stop them from arbitrarily raising the age limit even higher?
• It is far too broad an overreach, and throws the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.  Social media does have a dark side that we all should be aware of, but a blanket ban on everyone under 18 is NOT the way to deal with it. 
• Young people ages 13-17 are not adults, but they are not entirely children either.  There needs to be far more nuance than this sort of blanket ban.
• It is yet another intrusive instance of Big Brother, that also affects people over 18 as well.
• There is no obvious grandfather clause for anyone already over 13 but under 18 who currently already has social media accounts. 
• It will disadvantage people under 18 relative to people over 18 when it comes to networking for jobs (keep in mind that LinkedIn would count as social media under this bill).
• It will simply drive people under 18 onto the Dark Web instead, where there are NO rules or limits of any kind, period.  If they are tech savvy enough to set up and regularly use their own Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok account, they are also savvy enough to download Tor and then go down a far, far worse rabbit hole of horrors.

Thus, this ageist bill is a massive government overreach that will do far more harm than good on balance.  If we must have any hard age limits for social media by enforceable law, and that is a VERY big "if", they should not be any higher than 16 at most.  Age verification is OK in principle, but it needs to be done very carefully to avoid unintended consequences in terms of privacy and such.

So what should we do instead?  Well, we could adopt the data privacy laws that the European Union currently has.  We could tax the "attention economy" by taxing the advertising that serves as the business model of Big Tech.  We could put regulations on the algorithms that Big Tech uses to manipulate its users of all ages and keep them hooked.  We could investigate Big Tech for antitrust violations. We could, you know, actually educate young people on social media literacy, ideally starting long before they go on such sites.  We could do a smartphone buyback (similar to gun buybacks) for all ages.  And we could also, you know, enforce existing age limits (typically 13) that are clearly NOT being followed in any meaningful sense, honored far more in the breach.

We could do all that and more.  But that would make too much sense, right?

To all lawmakers:  please vote a HARD NO on this bill and any similar bills.  And to all parents and other adults reading this:  be a mentor, not a tormentor.