There has been a swift buildup of lawsuits and legislation targeting social media companies and how they design their platforms for young users—and that momentum doesn’t show signs of slowing in 2025.
Hundreds of school districts have sued the major social media companies—ByteDance, Google, Meta, and Snap—claiming that their products are eroding students’ mental health and forcing schools to devote significant resources to managing the behavioral and academic fallout.
Some states, including California and Florida, have passed laws restricting kids’ access to social media or certain features on the platforms. (Most of those laws are being challenged in court.)
And the U.S. surgeon general made an official recommendation that social media should come with a health warning, alerting users to potential mental health harms for adolescents.
Such developments have been cheered by many educators who say social media distracts students from their learning and harms their mental well-being. But as tumultuous as the past two years have been for social media companies, 2025 is shaping up to be even more consequential—and unpredictable, said Jeff Carpenter, an education professor at Elon University who studies teachers’ and students’ use of social media.
“We are going to have this complicated federal context where the president owns a social media company, and one of his main associates owns another,” Carpenter said, referencing businessman Elon Musk who bought Twitter before changing the name to X. President-elect Donald Trump owns Truth Social.
One of the world’s largest social media companies is already making changes that could create a more chaotic and freewheeling online environment for young users. Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, announced this week that it was dropping its system of fact checkers because it wants to curb censorship and encourage more free speech, according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Critics of the move are worried it will lead to more misinformation and disinformation on those sites.
This new state of affairs in the social media world is already shaking up the potential U.S. ban on TikTok. Trump initially supported banning TikTok, owned by China-based ByteDance, over national security concerns in his first term. But he reversed his position during the 2024 presidential election cycle and is now calling for the U.S. Supreme Court to pause the ban as he prepares to enter office again.
Trump also developed a significant following on TikTok during the election, amassing more than 14 million followers after he joined in the summer.
This dynamic might complicate federal-level efforts to regulate social media, said Carpenter.
“At one level, it doesn’t make sense that this is being done at the state level, it would make a lot more sense to do things federally,” he said. “But I don’t know with the new administration. It seems like there are all sorts of conflicts of interest. So maybe states can be laboratories for trying out different approaches that then other states adopt.”
What’s ahead for 2025: Rising concerns about social media’s effect on kids’ mental health
Social media creates many complications for educators, even as schools rely on these platforms to communicate with their communities and teachers use social media for professional learning.
Among educators’ many complaints: social media fuels fights and bullying among students that spill over into real-world conflicts on school grounds; viral dares and trends have led to students vandalizing school property; notification on students’ cellphones distract them during class time; and students’ inability to stop scrolling at night means they’re missing out on sleep crucial to their learning and mental health.
For their part, social media companies say they have taken meaningful measures to provide young users with safer and healthier experiences on their platforms—bolstering parental controls, removing suspected underage users, and giving minors’ accounts the highest privacy settings by default, to name a few examples.
And the research on how social media affects kids’ mental health is still emerging. Studies so far have yielded mixed findings.
So far, the effort to more heavily regulate both youth access to social media as well as social media companies’ use of young users’ data has been a largely bipartisan effort. Democratic-led states such as California and New York, and conservative-led states such as Arkansas, Florida, and Utah have been at the forefront with state legislation. And on the federal level, the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act passed the U.S. Senate with strong bipartisan support in July, but it was not brought up for a vote in the House by the end of the year.
In today’s political climate, though, even causes that have had support from both political parties can become partisan quickly, Carpenter said.
“If Trump and Musk decide to go a certain way and rally their base to their perspective on social media, then I could see it being a no-go in a number of states,” he said.
Looking ahead, Carpenter expects some state lawmakers will attempt to regulate social media in tandem with cellphones. While the two technologies are inextricably linked, policymakers so far have been addressing them as separate issues.
At least 19 states have passed laws or enacted policies that ban or restrict students’ use of cellphones in schools or have recommended local districts enact their own bans or restrictive policies, according to an Education Week analysis. And many more are poised to take up the issue in the spring.
Carpenter also thinks policymakers vying for more social media regulation will continue to home in on different elements, such as focusing on how algorithms deliver content to young users. California, for example, passed a law in September that made it illegal for social media companies to recommend or prioritize content based on minors’ data without their parents’ consent. The law was challenged by Netchoice, a tech industry group that represents companies such as Google, Meta, Snap, and X and has been blocked by a federal judge while the case makes its way through the courts.
Finally, Carpenter predicts more policymakers will start to see digital media education as a crucial part of their efforts to make social media safer for children.
“Is the next phase doubling down on education around digital media?” he said. “Between AI and social media, there may be enough of a wakeup call that we need to educate more about how these technologies work.”
