Erasing the distinction between children and adults ...
A sixteen-year-old in Montana cannot vote.
She cannot get a credit card, buy a lottery ticket, or smoke cigarettes. She needs a parent to sign off before she can get a tattoo, apply for a driver’s license, or play school sports.
But she can consent to one thing: the predatory practices of online platforms.
That same teenager can authorize Instagram to collect her location data, analyze her viewing patterns, and deploy addictive features specifically designed to keep her scrolling.
Under Montana’s SB297 law, which just went into effect in October, she can consent to what the statute carefully describes as features that “significantly increase, sustain, or extend a minor’s use of the online service, product, or feature.”
Montana is not alone.
At least nine [other] states have enacted laws that allow teenagers between thirteen and seventeen to consent to various forms of data collection, targeted advertising, and, in some cases, design features that make social media psychologically addictive and potentially harmful.
Meanwhile, both the House and Senate have introduced a bill to amend the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act. The bill is intended to provide new protections for teenagers online. The problem is that it would also enshrine teen consent as federal policy.
This is a significant departure from how American law typically treats minors. Consent is fundamentally an adult concept in our legal system. Most states have carved out narrow exceptions, primarily for sexual and reproductive health care, but now, with far less fanfare, we are creating an entirely new category of teen consent online.
In yet another example of Big Tech exceptionalism, we are erasing the distinction between children and adults precisely in the domain that impacts the most children and employs some of the most sophisticated psychological manipulation techniques ever developed.
When thinking of teens and social media, most of us don’t think of legal concepts such as “consent.” Most of our thoughts are about content and the enormous amounts of time spent online—and the resulting anxiety, depression, and addiction-like behaviors.
Conservatives and religious folks are not the only ones concerned about the erosion of childhood. Self-described “neo-liberal” journalist Renaldo McKenzie described the erosion of childhood this way:
In a rapidly evolving digital landscape, the traditional framework for children’s psycho-social development is being eroded. The slow, deliberate exposure to stimuli that once characterized childhood has been replaced by a world where social media reigns supreme, parental guidance is often lacking, and tolerance for potentially harmful behaviors such as marijuana use is on the rise.
Gone are the days when children could navigate the complexities of social interaction at their own pace, guided by parental wisdom and faith-based values. Instead, they find themselves thrust into an environment where reality TV and pop culture glorify superficiality over substance, leaving them ill-equipped to engage meaningfully with others.
The consequences of this societal shift are dire. ...
Meg Leta Jones, writing in The New Atlantis (Spring 2026), would agree fully. In “‘Teen Consent’ Is Not a Solution to Social Media,” she shows how legal indecision about the limits of consent is contributing to the further erosion of childhood. She argues that consent is an adult concept.
Consent is a kind of “moral magic,” the legal scholar Heidi Hurd argues, because it is often the crucial difference between a wrongful act and a desirable exchange. Consent is the difference between rape and intimacy, theft and gift, kidnapping and mere transportation. It is at the foundation of modern contract law, medical jurisprudence, sexual ethics, and countless legal relationships. It requires informed agreement by one party with the capacity to bind itself to another. And legally, that capacity has long been linked to adulthood, though this history is messy.
The distinction between minors and adults marks a recognition that children occupy a fundamentally different position in society, not just as individuals with developing brains, but as members of families organized around dependency and authority. Childhood is not only a stage of cognitive development that we all eventually outgrow to become savvy consumers. It’s a social and legal status defined by embeddedness in relationships of care, protection, and authority.
For consequential decisions regarding minors, state law in the U.S. overwhelmingly assigns authority to parents, who know their children best and bear responsibility for their welfare, rather than to state actors or corporations. This protects child wellbeing by safeguarding family stability and ensuring decisions are made by those most invested in the child’s interests. When parental decisions pose serious risks to children or when broad social consensus exists about children’s needs, the state can intervene, usually with institutional safeguards and expertise.
When we allow children to consent independently, we’re not simply acknowledging their growing autonomy. We’re undermining the structures that protect childhood as a state of dependency rather than a period of market participation with diminished capacity. The general rule, then, is that minors cannot consent.
If consent is an adult concept, can we hold the line on teen consent as adult freedoms increase?
What makes teen consent particularly unsettling is that it is being proposed at the same time as American adults are experiencing dramatic expansions of their own freedoms (which does not seem to be going very well). Recreational cannabis is now legal in twenty-four states, sports betting in thirty-nine, pornography is ubiquitously accessible, and psychedelics have been legalized in Oregon and Colorado. The expansion of adult freedoms makes the boundary between adulthood and childhood more important, not less. We do not need a new policy framework for teen consent now, and certainly not for something like social media.
American law has long distinguished between things that are categorically prohibited for minors, regardless of parental permission, and things that require parental oversight because they’re developmentally appropriate but risky. Minors cannot buy alcohol, tobacco, or lottery tickets even with parental consent. These are adult-only activities because the risks are too high for developing brains and bodies. But teenagers can play sports, get part-time jobs, take advanced classes, and make other decisions with parental permission, activities that involve real risks but also developmental benefits.
To repeat the major question, “can we hold the line on teen consent as adult freedoms increase?”
Teen consent abandons children to navigate alone what adults with fully developed brains struggle to resist. It’s not a trend current parents and policymakers should indulge, and it simply transfers our responsibility to the individuals least equipped to exercise it: teenagers.
Obviously, Jones thinks the cultural eclipse of childhood is so complete that it may be impossible to reverse. In any case, consent is the only debate that’s happening on the legislative front. But in the judicial arena, there may be hope—unless the US Congress amends the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act in a way that “enshrines teen consent as federal policy,” a real possibility.
Writing at about the same time as Meg Leta Jones, Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch reported on two landmark legal cases that demonstrate that protections for children can be established in the courts.
[Recently,] on March 25, 2026, a jury in Los Angeles found Meta and Google liable in a landmark case. The jurors determined that the parent companies of Instagram and YouTube had acted with “malice, oppression, or fraud,” addicting and harming the young plaintiff, known as KGM.
Just one day prior, a jury in New Mexico found Meta liable for “misleading consumers about the safety of its platforms and endangering children.”
Many kinds of evidence were presented to the juries, from internal documents and research done by the companies themselves to testimony from experts and former employees. The evidence revealed that the companies had intentionally designed their products in ways they knew would harm children. ...
There are thousands of similar cases coming, and we can be confident that the companies will lean hard into this strategy: denying any scientific evidence of causation.
In “The Case Against Social Media: Seven Lines of Evidence,” Haidt and Rausch summarize the overwhelming evidence that social media harms children. But first, they give a brief summary of both cases as well as describing Meta and Google’s two-pronged defense strategy.
First, they blamed others: It was KGM’s fault for opening accounts before she was 13. It was her parents’ fault that she got addicted and depressed. Whatever harm happened, we’re just a neutral platform! The jury did not respond well to this strategy. …
Second, they claimed that there is no scientific evidence that their platforms cause harm to adolescent mental health. …
“The Case Against Social Media” is linked below. Anyone who cares about the mental and spiritual health of our children would do well to read it closely. It is a summary of the best evidence assembled by Jonathan Haidt and his team—evidence that is having a major impact worldwide in the defense of children’s health and safety.
I’ll introduce the first three of the seven “lines of evidence” and, again, I encourage reading the entire article. These three are the young people themselves, eye witnesses (parents, teachers, clinicians), and tech company insiders.
Line 1: What the Victims Say
Across surveys in multiple countries, many young people report that social media has harmed them directly and indirectly. They describe widespread experiences of cyberbullying, sexual exploitation, sleep disruption, lower confidence, and worse mental health. They also express strikingly high levels of regret toward the major platforms they have used for years. ...
Line 2: What the Eyewitnesses Say
We next turn to the adults who spend the most time with young people. Parents describe changes in their children’s mood, sleep, self-esteem, and friendships; teachers report worsening distraction, attention, and academic performance; and clinicians say social media is exacerbating anxiety, depression, and addiction-like behavior in their young clients. ...
Line 3. What Company Insiders Say
In our case against the social media companies, we have the equivalent of hundreds of such text messages in the form of internal company emails, messages, memos, documents, presentations, and more.
Here [is just one] of the quotations from internal documents revealing what company insiders — employees as well as external consultants hired to offer advice — believed.
“Oh my gosh yall IG is a drug […] We’re basically pushers […] We are causing Reward Deficit Disorder bc people are binging on IG so much they can’t feel reward anymore […] like their reward tolerance is so high […] I know Adam [Mosseri] doesn’t want to hear it — he freaked out when I talked about dopamine in my teen fundamentals leads review but its undeniable! Its biological and psychological […] the top down directives drive it all towards making sure people keep coming back for more. That would be fine if its productive but most of the time it isn’t […] the majority is just mindless scrolling and ads.”
– A chat between two UX Meta researchers (Social media addiction litigation, p. 33)
It’s research like that collected and reported by Jonathan Haidt and his team at After Babel that is producing results that will protect children from the harms of social media, not only in the US but around the world. Perhaps, it’s not too much to hope that their research will have an impact on legislatures as well as the courts.
Here’s how Meg Leta Jones summarizes her case against consent.
Teen consent enables commercial exploitation rather than preventing it.
Teen consent abandons children to navigate alone what adults with fully developed brains struggle to resist. It’s not a trend current parents and policymakers should indulge, and it simply transfers our responsibility to the individuals least equipped to exercise it: teenagers.
[bold added, formatting altered]
Linked resources:
“‘Teen Consent’ Is Not a Solution to Social Media,” Meg Leta Jones (The New Atlantis, Spring 2026) Linked but may now be behind a paywall.
“The Case Against Social Media: Seven Lines of Evidence,” Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch (After Babel) This article is a summary of a 52-page essay that was written to provide a summary that could be used in future court cases: “Social Media Is Harming Young People at a Scale Large Enough to Cause Changes at the Population Level.”
After Babel, Jonathan Haidt’s newsletter, contains a wealth of information about social media use and other important topics related to children.
And of course, consent to right-to-die decisions.