Officials across the country have introduced a wave of new restrictions on social media. These laws are unlikely to solve the harms associated with such platforms—indeed, they could exacerbate them.
In Texas, for example, Gov. Greg Abbott recently signed a law requiring app stores to handle age verification for social apps. Age verification has been tried before, with results that are mixed at best. When they were implemented for online pornography, searches skyrocketed for virtual private networks, which allow people to evade such restrictions; other users migrated to offshore platforms beyond U.S. regulation. Barring minors from social apps could easily lead to a series of similar loopholes or workarounds.
Explicit or clearly dangerous apps and services (containing nudity, hate speech, etc.) are filtered out by app stores and only operate within mobile browsers. But new social platforms capitalize on the fact that the line between mobile apps and mobile websites is becoming increasingly blurred. Advances in programming frameworks now enable apps and websites to have increasingly similar code, while the advent of Progressive Web Applications helps mobile websites look and feel exactly like apps. Improvements in operating systems such as iOS 17.4 even allow mobile websites to act as full-fledged apps on your device's home screen.
