A freshman posts a Homecoming photo. A sophomore shares a meme with a friend across the country. For students at Lynbrook and across California, social media is woven into daily life. As concerns grow over its effect on teenage mental health, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is backing a statewide bill that would prohibit children under 16 from accessing mainstream platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube and X. Although the bill’s intention to protect children is admirable, an outright ban falls short of addressing the root cause. Shielding teens from social media only postpones the moment they will have to face it without proper habits or support. Instead of an outright ban, California should invest in better options they already have on the table.
Assembly Bill 1709, introduced by Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal, would set a minimum age requirement for social media accounts, with the cutoff likely at 16. Modeled after Australia’s 2024 nationwide ban, the bill has received support from both Democratic and Republican assemblymembers.
“We have a generation that’s never been more anxious, less free, more stressed,” Newsom said in a Sacramento Bee interview. “We have to address this issue.”
Research linking social media to teen anxiety and declining mental health has been circulating for years — the Surgeon General’s advisory found that teenagers who spend more than three hours daily on social media face double the risk of depression and anxiety symptoms. AB 1709 reflects a widespread fear among parents and lawmakers. Yet the leap from acknowledging harm to banning the source of it skips over a fundamental question: when teenagers eventually do get on social media, who will have taught them how to use it? Without structured guidance, they will encounter the same predators, the same algorithmic manipulation and the same addictive design, except they will have had no practice recognizing any of it.
Currently, California’s ability to keep teenagers off social media is far from guaranteed. Compared to the United States, Australia is a smaller country with a centralized online safety commission built specifically to enforce its ban. California operates in a different legal and political environment. User engagement-dependent tech giants like Google, TikTok and Meta are already suing to block a 2024 state law that requires parental consent to view personalized content feeds, arguing that curating an algorithmic feed is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment. A broader age ban would face even fiercer opposition. When Australia rolled out its ban, workarounds inevitably appeared, from VPNs to fake birthdates. In a poll of more than 17,000 Australian teenagers conducted ahead of the ban, 75% said that they had no intention of stopping their social media use. There is little reason to believe that California teens would respond any differently. A study of more than 10,000 U.S. adolescents found that 63.8% of children under 13 were already using social media despite the existing age requirement, proving that age restrictions do not keep determined teenagers offline.
“Passing a law and enforcing a law are very different,” social studies teacher Nhat Nguyen said. “If they don’t actually enforce it, nothing is going to happen.”
The bill also overlooks how embedded social media has become in students’ daily lives. At Lynbrook, incoming students connect with classmates before the school year begins, clubs announce meetings and ASB candidates campaign on Instagram. For many students, social media is more than a leisure activity separate from school life.
“Social media isn’t just brain rot,” sophomore Alicia Daeun Yoon said. “It’s a way for others to connect with people outside their circle.”
That connection extends beyond socializing. Students use these platforms to stay informed, build skills and expand their breadth of knowledge.
“I’ve gained a lot of information from social media — things I wouldn’t normally learn at school or anywhere else,” freshman Emily Kilpatrick said. “If anything, they should just put privacy and content restrictions for people under 18, rather than just banning it for people under 16.”
By age 14, most students are entering high school and taking on a multitude of responsibilities, including extracurriculars, homework and increasing independence. A government-mandated cutoff at 16 does not match the maturity and autonomy teenagers are already expected to demonstrate in every other area of their lives. The harms of online bullying and addictive scrolling are evidence that children need opportunities to develop awareness and boundaries earlier, rather than being handed unrestricted access the moment they turn 16. Without years of practice setting boundaries and building healthy habits, newly unrestricted teenagers are not protected by the ban. They are just older.
“I am in support of children gaining gradual, developmentally appropriate access to technology and social media, not prohibiting all social media based on an age threshold,” Stanford Center for Youth Mental Health director Vicki Harrison said.
The focus should instead be platform accountability, which is missing in the current bill. Rather than pushing for platforms to change harmful systems, AB 1709 simply removes users from them, leaving the same systems intact when teenagers return. Several existing California laws already attempt to demand platform accountability. AB 56, signed into law in October 2025, requires platforms to display a warning to users each day they first open social media, again after three hours of use and at least once every hour after that. Senate Bill 976 goes further, making chronological feeds the default for minors and prohibiting platforms from sending notifications during school hours and late at night. These are the kinds of interventions that make social media safer without pretending it does not exist.
“An age requirement doesn’t really do anything to curb the amount of time that a student is on the actual apps,” English teacher Vanessa Otto said. “It’s more the time spent and what they’re using it for that’s a greater concern than the age.”
Social media is not going anywhere, and neither are the predators, cyberbullying, addictive algorithms or online pressure. Every year spent off social media under a government mandate is a year not spent learning how to use it responsibly. Those are not lessons teenagers can pick up overnight at 16. Instead of an outright ban, California should shift the momentum from AB 1709 to building on the progress of AB 56 and SB 976, holding platforms accountable for the systems they deliberately design to maximize engagement and embedding digital literacy into school curricula. Teenagers do not need the government deciding when they are ready. They deserve adults who trust them enough to teach them.
“It’s better to learn to live with the existence of something than to pretend like it doesn’t exist,” Nguyen said.
