Parents or States: Who Should Decide How Much Social Media Time

 

by Clay Calvert, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Technology Policy Studies

In late February, a federal court in NetChoice v. Jones blocked Virginia from enforcing a statute that limits minors’ usage of a “social media platform to one hour per day” unless they obtain “verifiable parental consent to increase or decrease the daily time limit.” The ruling correctly lets parents make both the initial and ultimate decisions about how much time their children spend on social media platforms rather than letting lawmakers dictate a “parental adjustable default” of 60 minutes that necessitates a parent’s veto to overcome.

Placing the initial how-much-time choice in parents’ hands rather than the government’s is logical. Every child is unique, and parents typically are in far better positions than miles-away lawmakers to understand their children’s distinctive capacities, needs, and interests regarding social media content.

Virginia’s default time limit seemingly reflects a blunt legislative judgment that somehow 60 minutes—why not 75 minutes, or 90, or 120?—of social media usage is the most a hypothetical, average minor should experience per day unless a parent says otherwise. Additionally, by defining a minor as a “person younger than 16 years of age,” the law treats 15-year-olds the same as six-year-olds despite important differences in cognitive development.

Imagine the government establishing a one-hour default limit on how much television minors can watch on any given station unless a parent overrides the government’s cap. That sounds ridiculous, and it is. For me, as a child during the 1970s, it would have meant the government limiting my Tuesday viewing on an ABC station to Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley unless my father gave the government his verifiable consent so I could also watch Three’s Company. My father apparently didn’t mind me gazing at Suzanne Somers; I still completed my homework, and life went on without the government rationing my TV-viewing time.

Allowing parents—not lawmakers—to make the initial determination about social media usage is especially important when it comes to letting minors access content that’s fully protected by the First Amendment. Indeed, Virginia’s one-hour cap applies to any content on a social media platform, be it political, educational, religious, or social interactions between minors. To wit, US District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles observed that under Virginia’s law, “a minor would be barred from watching an online church service if it exceeded an hour on YouTube” and “a minor is prohibited from watching science or history programming on YouTube that is longer than one hour without their parent’s consent.”

Should the government really establish a time limit for watching such content on a social media platform, especially when it doesn’t enforce usage limits for watching the same subjects on other platforms—over-the-top streaming services, cable television channels, and over-the-air broadcast stations? One suspects that such speaker-based discrimination against social media platforms may partly be due to an older generation’s frets about technology it didn’t grow up with.

Judge Giles unsurprisingly determined that


Virginia has the authority to enforce a prohibition that a parent puts in place to prevent their child from accessing information. But Virginia does not have the legal authority to block minors’ access to constitutionally protected speech until their parents give their consent by overriding a government-imposed default limit.

The First Amendment problems, however, run deeper than those affecting minors. Stemming from legislation known as Virginia Senate Bill 854 (SB 854) that former Governor Glenn Youngkin signed into law in May 2025, the statute restricts more than just minors’ ability to access and engage in speech that the First Amendment safeguards. Giles explained the measure also implicates the First Amendment rights of platforms to engage “in expressive activity when they disseminate third-party content.”

Furthermore, adults’ First Amendment freedoms are burdened—they must surrender personal information to prove they’re at least 16 years old to use a social media platform for more than one hour a day. As Giles wrote, “all users are restricted from accessing protected speech, even adults, until they can show that they are not a minor.” (emphasis added).

Are there constitutional solutions to the alleged problem of social media addiction that ostensibly animated SB 854? Giles noted that parents already have the power to restrict “access to smartphones like schools do during instruction time” through parental control mechanisms. She added that “even if parents are not using the available parental controls, Virginia could work with companies and launch advertising campaigns to ensure parents know how to use the current tools effectively.” In short, technology and education—not speech-restrictive regulation—provide paths forward.

Ultimately, as NetChoice’s Paul Taske noted, the decision “reaffirms that the government cannot ration access to lawful speech—even if it has noble intentions. Fundamentally, parents must stay in the driver’s seat when it comes to decisions about their families.” Unmoved, Virginia is appealing Giles’s decision.

https://www.aei.org/technology-and-innovation/parents-or-states-who-should-decide-how-much-social-media-time-is-too-much/