The United Kingdom announced this week that it plans to ban certain social media sites for all children under 16 years old. Although framed as a child-protection measure, the proposal would affect far more than teenagers. By requiring intrusive age verification and limiting access to online platforms, it risks undermining privacy, anonymous speech, and freedom of expression for everyone.

The UK is following in the footsteps of Australia, which enacted a similar ban last year. Both countries are imposing the bans out of concern for the impacts of social media on children’s mental health. “Parents want to keep their kids safe and happy, but the online world has made that harder than ever,” UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a statement announcing the policy.

The UK plans to ban children under 16 from using social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X, and YouTube, but it will not ban Signal, WhatsApp, and other messaging services. The government’s announcement did not sufficiently justify how a selective ban on only certain platforms would address its concerns about harms to children.

The government also plans to examine restrictions on certain social media features, such as infinite scrolling, for 16- and 17-year-olds.

The government justified its move in part on the basis of a consultation with more than 116,000 children, experts, and parents, who overwhelmingly said they want a social media ban. It’s worth noting how the government admits (on a webpage that is several clicks away from its announcement) that its consultation findings have a self-selection bias and are not representative:

“The consultation was open to anyone who chose to respond. The results reflect the views of parents and carers who were motivated to take part, and are not representative of parents and carers nationally. As with any open public consultation, respondents may differ systematically from the wider population in their views and characteristics.”

Regardless, the government did not explain why parents are unable to control the platforms that their children access. Nor did it articulate the strength of the data supporting its assumption that social media harms children under 16. In January, the UK government released a report authored by 14 scholars, which found a “small but consistent correlation” between adolescent social media use and poor mental health. But the report warned that “while longitudinal studies can demonstrate the sequence of events, they cannot confirm causality without the use of more robust causal methods.”

This is in line with research around the world, which is equivocal at best on the issue of whether social media harms teenage mental health. A 2024 report by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that its “review of the literature did not support the conclusion that social media causes changes in adolescent health at the population level.”

Assuming that the UK government is correct to conclude that social media could harm teenagers’ mental health, it ignores the many potential benefits of social media in providing community and access to information. “Social media has the potential to connect friends and family. It may also be valuable to teens who otherwise feel excluded or lack offline support,” the National Academies report found. “Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, questioning, and other (LGBTQ+) teenagers may find support online that they do not have in their offline world, as do young people coping with serious illness, bereavement, and mental health problems.”

And even if one were to discount these benefits and conclude that banning children from social media would be desirable in the abstract, it is unlikely that the UK policy would accomplish that goal. Six months after Australia’s ban went into effect, the government reported that about 70 percent of children continued to use social media. Children are well aware of how to circumvent age-assurance technology, such as facial recognition and ID checks. If the overwhelming majority of children continue to use social media despite the ban, the policy primarily succeeds in increasing surveillance rather than reducing access.

Starmer acknowledged that possibility but said it is not a reason to refrain from the social media ban. “They get around other laws, too, but we don’t say, ‘Oh, look, a teenager managed to get a drink somehow, so let’s not bother banning alcohol sales to children,’” Starmer said, according to the New York Times. “We don’t do that, that would be utterly ridiculous, and so I just don’t accept that argument.”

What Starmer failed to acknowledge is that underage drinking is quite different from the use of social media, which provides the ability to express and receive information and therefore carries many more potential social benefits and raises fundamentally different constitutional questions.

Starmer also fails to account for the policy’s impact on adults. The announcement said that the government would introduce “highly effective age assurance” measures, but it did not specify the required technology. This technology either estimates age from a facial scan or requires the user to upload a driver’s license or passport.

Indeed, the UK recently began requiring age verification for online “harmful” content such as pornography, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that the use of these technologies on platforms such as Reddit was “chaotic,” requiring people, including adults, to surrender their anonymity to continue to use platforms. EFF wrote that “users reported various bugs in the age-checking process, like being locked out or asked repeatedly for ID despite complying.”

Requiring sensitive information such as facial scans or photo IDs risks real privacy violations. This is not merely hypothetical. Last year, Discord’s age-verification provider suffered a data breach, compromising 70,000 users’ government identification cards.

The UK’s minimization of the severity of these problems is particularly ironic, as it has a long and proud history of anonymous speech. For instance, in the 1700s, a pseudonymous writer known only as Junius wrote dozens of letters to a London newspaper, criticizing King George III and many government officials. His letters had a great impact on public sentiment, and to this day, his identity is unknown.

Under the UK’s plans, the next potential Junius would be less likely to criticize the government on social media, as a third-party age assurance provider would have collected Junius’s face scan or photo ID.

Jeff Kosseff is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at The Future of Free Speech and the co-author (with Jacob Mchangama) of the new book The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026).

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For the past few years, one of the most contentious issues in the online speech world is “jawboning,” or government pressure on companies to censor certain speech. Although jawboning has typically been associated with pressure on social media companies, we have more recently seen serious allegations of jawboning against broadcasters and artificial intelligence providers.

A new bipartisan bill seeks to prevent jawboning in all those contexts and to grant victims of jawboning the right to sue government employees who attempted to censor them. Introduced last week by Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression Act (“JAWBONE Act”) defines impermissible government jawboning and provides much-needed transparency to government pressure on speech intermediaries.

The bill would make it illegal for a federal agency or federal employee to “coerce” an online service, AI provider, or broadcaster into changing or removing speech, or suspending or terminating individual users.

Central to the bill is its strong and broad coverage. It defines “coerce” as “to take a harmful, hostile, or unfavorable action, to imply the possibility of taking such action, or to threaten such action.” Among the factors that determine whether coercion exists are:

• “the word choice and tone of any relevant communication from the agency, officer, or employee,”

• “the existence of any federal regulatory or enforcement authority over the recipient of any relevant communication from the agency, officer, or employee,”

• “whether any relevant communication from the agency, officer, or employee referred to adverse consequences to the recipient,”

• “whether any relevant communication from the agency, officer, or employee was private or public,”

• “whether any relevant communication from the agency, officer, or employee included an affirmative disclaimer that the communication lacked legal force,”

• “whether any relevant communication from the agency, officer, or employee included a factual statement without legal force that could be useful to the decision-making of the recipient,”

• “whether any relevant communication from the agency, officer, or employee was for the purpose of aiding compliance with existing law,” and

• “whether any relevant communication from the agency, officer, or employee led the recipient to act contrary to its own policies.”

The bill’s test for coercion is more detailed than, but similar to, the four-part test for unconstitutional jawboning that the Supreme Court articulated in a 2024 First Amendment case, National Rifle Association v. Vullo. In that opinion, the Court held that to determine whether a government communication constitutes a coercive threat, courts should consider “(1) word choice and tone; (2) the existence of regulatory authority; (3) whether the speech was perceived as a threat; and, perhaps most importantly, (4) whether the speech refers to adverse consequences.”

One might wonder why there is a need for a jawboning bill in light of that strong First Amendment precedent. The JAWBONE Act addresses a major shortcoming in the current legal framework: although the government might have violated the First Amendment, victims of jawboning often lack effective remedies. It is difficult to sue the federal government for constitutional violations. The Supreme Court only allows these suits, known as Bivens claims, in a few specific types of cases and has expressed an unwillingness to extend such lawsuits to First Amendment claims. In other words, even if a plaintiff has strong evidence that the federal government violated their First Amendment rights, there might not be a mechanism to sue for damages.

The JAWBONE Act addresses this problem by creating a private right of action, allowing jawboning victims, state attorneys general, and online services to bring a civil lawsuit against federal agencies or employees for violations of the law. The right of action allows compensatory damages, costs, attorneys’ fees, and equitable relief.

The bill addresses another obstacle to jawboning cases: defendants often move to dismiss for failure to state a claim or lack of standing before any discovery has occurred. Without discovery, the plaintiff may not have alleged enough facts to survive a motion to dismiss. The bill allows the court to grant a limited 30-day discovery period before ruling on the motion to dismiss. This enables the plaintiff to gather sufficient evidence to allow the suit to proceed beyond the dismissal motion.

The bill allows a private right of action not only against federal agencies, but against federal employees in their individual capacities. The JAWBONE Act requires the federal government to indemnify those employees unless the court determines that the employee “acted in a willful and wanton manner in incurring liability.”

In addition to creating a private right of action, the JAWBONE Act would provide much-needed transparency to the federal government’s interactions with social media platforms, AI providers, and broadcasters. It would create a centralized, publicly available portal for federal agencies to report their communications with those companies regarding expression on their platforms.

Jeff Kosseff is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at The Future of Free Speech and the co-author (with Jacob Mchangama) of the new book The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026).

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One of the most viewed television news programs in the United States reported on a government program that prosecutes thousands of people simply due to what they have posted online. And it provided not even a scintilla of concern for the free speech implications.

On Sunday’s episode of 60 Minutes, reporter Sharyn Alfonsi reported on Germany’s “coordinated effort to curb online hate speech.” Alfonsi had a front-row seat to this effort, as she participated in COPS-style ride-alongs as German police raided people’s homes and seized their electronic devices.

Without displaying a shred of concern about giving the government power to prosecute people for online speech, Alfonsi devoted much of the segment to an interview with three German hate speech prosecutors. They told her it is a crime to insult people in public, and the penalties can be higher if the speech is online.

“Because in internet, it stays there,” one prosecutor said. “If we are talking face to face, you insult me, I insult you, okay. Finish. But if you’re in the internet, if I insult you or a politician…” [sic]

“It sticks around forever,” Alfonsi concluded.

Yet Alfonsi displayed no concern, asking instead about the reactions of people when their cell phones are seized, the severity of the crimes, and how the police and prosecutors build their case against online posters.

Alfonsi failed to mention egregious examples of German authorities stretching the definition of “hate speech” and “public insult,” such as a recent prosecution of a man for using a poop emoji to describe Germany’s Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck and the raid of a Berlin woman’s home after she posted “from the river to the sea” on her social media accounts.

Alfonsi highlighted a 2021 police raid against someone who called a German politician a word for a male body part. “So it sounds like you’re saying, ‘It’s okay to criticize a politician’s policy’ but not to say ‘I think you’re a jerk and an idiot?’” Alfonsi asked.

“Exactly,” the prosecutor said. “Comments like ‘You’re a son of a bitch.’ Excuse me for using, but those words has nothing to do with a political discussions or a contribution to a discussion.” [sic]

Still, Alfonsi was not alarmed that prosecutors had the unilateral discretion to determine whether an online discussion about a politician constituted a “contribution to a discussion.”

Alfonsi also highlighted the case of a German politician who sued Meta to cause the company to remove fake quotes that were attributed to her. “After all this, are you seeing less hateful comments now on your social media feeds?” Alfonsi asked

“Yes,” the politician responded, “there are less hateful comments. And there was one tweet which says, ‘Don’t say that to her, she would take you to court.’”

“You might sue them,” Alfonsi concluded.

A balanced news article would, at the very least, quote a free speech advocate who is alarmed by a politician chilling online speech with the specter of a lawsuit — something that might be of concern to a news organization currently facing an FCC investigation and lawsuit over its editing of an interview with a presidential candidate.

But such viewpoints were entirely missing in the 60 Minutes piece. Instead, Alfonsi featured an interview with Josephine Ballon of HateAid, who was concerned that some companies are not complying with the Digital Services Act, a new European law that threatens platforms with massive fines if they do not adequately develop procedures to respond to harmful content.

Alfonsi noted that such prosecutions and regulations would be impossible in the United States. But she strongly implied that Germany is taking the better course. “In the United States, most of what anyone says, sends, or streams online – even if it’s hate-filled or toxic – is protected by the First Amendment,” she said. “But Germany is trying to bring some civility to the world wide web by policing it in a way most Americans could never imagine.”

To 60 Minutes, one of the most storied news organizations in the United States, the First Amendment is a bug and not a feature. And that should worry us all.

Jeff Kosseff is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at The Future of Free Speech and the author of the new book Liar in a Crowded Theater: Freedom of Speech in a World of Misinformation.

The United States Supreme Court may soon hear a TikTok case that could set a vital nationwide precedent for online speech law. But it’s probably not the case that you’re thinking about.

The legal and technology world has been focused on the fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision last week to uphold a law requiring TikTok to find a new owner or shut down. But a separate TikTok case could determine the fate of Section 230, a 1996 law on which many online platforms have built their business models.

Last August, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled against the company in Anderson v. TikTok. The tragic case arose out of “Blackout Challenge” videos, which depict TikTok users engaging in self-asphyxiation. Ten-year-old Nylah Anderson watched a video and unintentionally hanged herself. Anderson’s mother sued TikTok under state tort law, including negligence.

A Pennsylvania district court judge dismissed the case under Section 230, which immunizes online services such as TikTok from claims that arise from third-party content. For nearly three decades, Section 230 has been key to the strategic growth of social media platforms, search engines, and other online services that rely on user-generated content. The law also has attracted critics who believe that online platforms should be liable for harmful user content.

This lawsuit focused not only on the user content, but on the TikTok algorithm that allegedly caused the Blackout Challenge video to appear on Nylah’s For You Page. Still, other courts, including appeals panels in the Second and Ninth Circuits, have held that Section 230 protects platforms from claims arising from algorithmic promotion or amplification of user content.

The Third Circuit panel that heard the appeal of Anderson v. TikTok disagreed with those other courts and reversed the Pennsylvania judge’s dismissal of the case. Section 230 does not apply, the panel reasoned, because in a 2024 case, Moody v. NetChoice, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protects platforms’ content moderation decisions. The majority wrote:

“Given the Supreme Court’s observations that platforms engage in protected first-party speech under the First Amendment when they curate compilations of others' content via their expressive algorithms, it follows that doing so amounts to first-party speech under § 230, too.”

The Third Circuit refused TikTok’s request for an en banc rehearing, so TikTok is preparing to file a cert petition with the Supreme Court. The petition would have been due this week, but TikTok recently obtained an extension to Feb. 20. In an indication of the case’s importance, TikTok has hired former Solicitor General Paul Clement to represent it at the Supreme Court.

In his request for an extension to submit a cert petition, Clement previewed his argument: that the Third Circuit opinion goes against Section 230 interpretations in many other circuits and that Moody v. NetChoice had nothing to do with Section 230. He wrote:

“NetChoice simply accepted the industry’s argument that websites engage in First Amendment protected editorial judgment in deciding whether and how to display content. It did not hold that third-party speech becomes a website’s own speech simply because the website displays and organizes it.”

Although the Supreme Court declines to grant the vast majority of cert petitions that it receives, this petition might be tough to decline due to the circuit split that the Third Circuit created. The Supreme Court has never interpreted the scope of Section 230.

In 2023, it granted cert in Gonzalez v. Google, but resolved the case without interpreting Section 230. “You know, these are not like the nine greatest experts on the internet,” Justice Elena Kagan said during oral argument in Gonzalez. Despite that, these nine justices may have no choice but to decide the fate of a vital internet law.

Jeff Kosseff is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at The Future of Free Speech and the author of the new book Liar in a Crowded Theater: Freedom of Speech in a World of Misinformation.

In upholding the law that requires ByteDance to divest TikTok or shut it down in the United States, the Supreme Court set a dangerous First Amendment precedent that will allow legislators and executive officials in the future to limit speech based on vague national security and privacy concerns.

The Court emphasized the purported “narrowness of our holding,” which approved the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. The unsigned opinion argues that the entire ballgame came down to data protection and national security:

“Data collection and analysis is a common practice in this digital age. But TikTok’s scale and susceptibility to foreign adversary control, together with the vast swaths of sensitive data the platform collects, justify differential treatment to address the Government’s national security concerns.”

“National security.” The Court used the phrase more than a dozen times in fewer than 20 pages. But the Court – like the Justice Department that argued in support of the law – had trouble articulating more than a possibility of China accessing and misusing the TikTok data. The Court wrote:

“Even if China has not yet leveraged its relationship with ByteDance Ltd. to access U.S. TikTok users’ data, petitioners offer no basis for concluding that the Government’s determination that China might do so is not at least a reasonable inference based on substantial evidence.”

“Might” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and reliance on what “might” happen is a far cry from the Court’s previous considerations of the First Amendment and national security.

The Court failed to acknowledge New York Times v. United States, a 1971 opinion in which the Court rejected the Justice Department’s national security-related request to block newspapers’ publication of the Pentagon Papers. In a concurrence, Justice Hugo Black wrote:

“The word ‘security’ is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment.”

Today’s Court did not heed Justice Black’s caution.

This is not to minimize the rational concerns about China potentially using TikTok to violate millions of Americans’ privacy. The danger in the opinion is allowing the mere potential for such harms to override the free speech interests of 170 million American users of TikTok.

To avoid running into a First Amendment roadblock, the Court engaged in twists and turns to justify applying a lower standard of scrutiny that is reserved for “content-neutral” speech restrictions. The Court reached this conclusion even though the law targets TikTok by name (as did the bill’s supporters in Congress), and the law has exclusions for certain types of platforms, like product and travel review sites.

The Court sidestepped these content-based designations by reasoning that the law has a “content-neutral justification: preventing China from collecting vast amounts of sensitive data from 170 million U.S. TikTok users,” and that it “neither references the content of speech on TikTok nor reflects disagreement with the message such speech conveys.” This rationale ignores the fact that the restrictions affect certain platforms more than others. And the reasoning also allows the government in the future to avoid strict scrutiny by claiming that a speech restriction is motivated by concerns over privacy rather than over speech.

In applying this lower level of First Amendment scrutiny, the Court continued to look only at the data privacy justifications, minimizing the fact that many of the law’s supporters repeatedly stated that they were concerned about China’s potential influence of the TikTok algorithm. The Court acknowledged that the Government asserted “an interest in preventing a foreign adversary from having control over the recommendation algorithm that runs a widely used U.S. communications platform, and from being able to wield that control to alter the content on the platform in an undetectable manner.”

Surely that is a content-based restriction? Not at all, the Court reasoned. Despite the abundant evidence of the speech-regulating motivations, the Court swiftly found that the “record before us adequately supports the conclusion that Congress would have passed the challenged provisions based on the data collection justification alone.”

It is unclear what TikTok’s fate will be in the United States. But the impact of this short opinion threatens to be far more enduring than any single app. Under this opinion’s rationale, the government can impose a sweeping restriction on a speech platform by merely citing national security and privacy concerns. Such an approach may be commonplace in other countries, but the United States has long prioritized First Amendment rights over privacy and national security.

Such free speech values were epitomized in Justice Louis Brandeis’s 1927 concurrence in Whitney v. California (stressing the importance of “freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think”) and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1919 dissent in Abrams v. United States (“the principle of the right to free speech is always the same.”)

In his brief concurrence in the judgment today, Justice Neil Gorsuch cited both opinions and wrote, “[a]s persuaded as I am of the wisdom of Justice Brandeis in Whitney and Justice Holmes in Abrams, their cases are not ours.” Indeed, both Brandeis and Holmes would acknowledge as much. But they also would expect that today’s Court would apply the principles that they articulated in those opinions. That, unfortunately, did not happen.

Jeff Kosseff is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at The Future of Free Speech and the author of the new book Liar in a Crowded Theater: Freedom of Speech in a World of Misinformation.