Yesterday, TechFreedom was joined by thirteen scholars of youth mental health and technology in an amici brief urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to affirm a district court order blocking Texas’s App Store Accountability Act (SB 2420). Our brief explains why the law cannot be justified by speculative claims of harm to minors.

“The district court correctly held that SB 2420 is unconstitutional,” said Andy Jung, Associate Counsel at TechFreedom. “The law violates the First Amendment by imposing sweeping, content- and speaker-based restrictions that fail strict scrutiny. In reaching that conclusion, however, the court appeared to accept, without meaningful scrutiny, the premise that social media is harmful or addictive to minors. The evidence strongly suggests the opposite, undermining the state’s purported compelling government interest.  Moral panic is not a sufficient basis for upholding such a sweeping speech restriction.”

“The research does not establish that social media causes mental-health problems or addiction in minors,” Jung continued. “The most rigorous research in this area—including the largest meta-analyses and cohort studies—finds either no clinically meaningful association between social-media use and adolescent mental health or correlations so small as to lack practical significance. Claims that social media is ‘addictive’ fare no better. There is no recognized clinical diagnosis of social-media addiction, and recent experimental research suggests that the addiction framing itself may do more harm than the underlying behavior.”

“Minors report a generally positive relationship with social media,” Jung concluded. “The panic narrative requires us to believe that social media is ruining a generation. The generation in question tends to disagree. The best available survey data show that the overwhelming majority of teenagers describe their experience with social media as positive or neutral. None of this is to deny that some adolescents struggle. The evidence, however, strongly suggests that social media is not the cause.”

The cases are Students Engaged in Advancing Texas v. Paxton, No. 25-51073 (5th Cir.) and Computer & Communications Industry Association v. Paxton, No. 26-50001 (5th Cir.).

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TechFreedom is a nonprofit, nonpartisan technology policy think tank. We work to chart a path forward for policymakers towards a bright future where technology enhances freedom, and freedom enhances technology.

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