‘Teen Consent’ Is Not a Solution to Social Media

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 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.

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.

There is one major domain where American law has long allowed minors to consent independently: sexual and reproductive health care. This exception emerged gradually over the second half of the twentieth century, driven by a specific public health crisis. Teenagers were refraining from treatment for sexually transmitted infections or access to contraception because they feared parental notification. Studies and anecdotes in the 1960s and 1970s documented that parental consent requirements were deterring minors from seeking care, leading to worse health outcomes.

States began allowing minors to consent to STI testing and treatment without parental notification. But the rationale was narrow and instrumental: we want teenagers to get tested and treated, parental consent requirements prevent this, and the benefit of treatment outweighs concerns about undermining parental authority in this limited context. Many states extended a similar logic to contraception, substance abuse treatment, and mental health counseling, though the specific ages and services vary considerably.

Even this carefully circumscribed exception remains controversial. Most recently, the debate has been over the administration of transgender medical care to minors. In United States v. Skrmetti last year, the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and hormone and surgical treatments for children, even when parents consent and doctors recommend the care. Around half of states now prohibit these treatments regardless of parental wishes, reasoning that some medical interventions are too serious or dangerous to be authorized even by parents. Where the interventions are available for minors, they require parental consent, with a few exceptions, like in Maine, where sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds can receive limited non-surgical treatment without parental consent.

Outside of health care, examples of teen consent are vanishingly rare. Consider teenagers’ interaction with schools. Students have constitutional rights to free speech and to due process while in school, but they have very limited scope of consent. Compulsory education laws require attendance, and participation in school activities almost always requires parental permission.

For the most part, schools are understood to operate in loco parentis, standing in for parents during the school day. But the recent Supreme Court case Mahmoud v. Taylor emphasized the importance of parental authority. The Court ruled 6–3 that a Maryland school board violated parents’ religious freedom by refusing to let them opt their children out of LGBTQ-themed storybook lessons in elementary school. The case reaffirmed that parents, not schools, make decisions about children’s exposure to sensitive content. But nobody suggested that the children could opt out for themselves.

Between 2023 and 2025, nine states enacted laws allowing teenagers to consent to data collection and platform features that would be prohibited otherwise. The details vary, but the pattern is consistent: once a child turns thirteen — the age at which the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) stops requiring parental consent — these laws allow teenagers to authorize practices otherwise deemed harmful enough to regulate.

These nine states — Montana, Colorado, New York, Connecticut, Delaware, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, and Kentucky — enacted or finalized comprehensive privacy laws that grant specific consent powers to teens ages thirteen to seventeen. Montana and Colorado allow teens to consent to targeted advertising and to the sale of their personal data; Montana permits minors to consent to “features that significantly increase, sustain, or extend” their use, the statutory phrase that covers infinite scroll, autoplay, variable reward schedules, and other engagement-maximizing designs. Colorado requires that high-risk profiling and targeted-advertising features be off by default for teenagers but permits thirteen- to seventeen-year-olds to opt themselves in, functionally allowing minors to activate the very engagement-maximization systems the law identifies as potentially harmful. Several other states focus primarily on data collection and sales.

More significant than any state law, however, is the movement to establish teen consent at the federal level through COPPA 2.0. The original, 1998 COPPA requires parental consent before collecting data from children under thirteen but leaves teenagers between thirteen and seventeen largely unprotected. Senator Ed Markey (D.–Mass.) has introduced multiple versions of COPPA 2.0 since 2011, attempting to extend some protections to teenagers. But the most recent versions nationalize the Montana approach: prohibiting certain practices for users thirteen to sixteen, unless the teen consents. This would create a federal framework treating teen consent as legitimate and sufficient, enshrining in law that a thirteen-year-old can allow online platforms to sell her data, create a profile of her, and manipulate her behavior.

Teen consent emerged from an ongoing three-way debate, but none of the camps actually supports it.

One camp argues that algorithmic online media is harmful enough that teenagers simply shouldn’t use it. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s best-selling book The Anxious Generation makes the case against social media for kids under sixteen. And voices across the political spectrum, from Clare Morell at the Ethics and Public Policy Center to NYU professor and podcaster Scott Galloway have joined him. The federal GUARD Act, introduced by Senators Josh Hawley (R.–Mo.) and Richard Blumenthal (D.–Conn.) in October 2025, would ban AI companions for all minors without an option for parental consent. The “Kids Off Social Media Act” (KOSMA) would ban all users under thirteen from social media platforms and prohibit algorithmic feeds for those under seventeen. A proposed Connecticut law would ban algorithmic feeds for minors, and Maryland successfully passed a law prohibiting data collection from minors for the purpose of creating personalized content. These thinkers and policymakers believe the harms to teenagers are severe enough and the developmental vulnerabilities significant enough that their consent is beside the point.

The second camp argues that parents, not the state or teenagers themselves, should make these decisions. At the state level, at least seven jurisdictions have passed parental consent requirements specifically for social media accounts or features: Arkansas, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, Nebraska, and Virginia. Versions of the “App Store Accountability Act,” which require app stores to verify users’ ages and obtain parental consent before minors can download any app or make in-app purchases, have passed in Utah, Texas, and Louisiana. A federal bill, introduced by Representative John James (R.–Mich.) and Senator Mike Lee (R.–Utah), is making its way through Congress.

These two camps often work in tandem. Some bills combine a ban for younger children with parental consent requirements for teenagers, or a ban on certain features and parental consent for others. Florida’s HB 3, which took effect in January 2025 and remains contested in federal court, bans social media accounts for children under fourteen while requiring parental consent for fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds. At the federal level, the “Protecting Kids on Social Media Act” (introduced in 2023 by Senators Schatz, Cotton, Murphy, and Britt) would ban accounts for children under thirteen and require parental consent for ages thirteen to seventeen.

But there’s a third influential camp in this debate: scholars who oppose both age-gating and parental-consent requirements. In their 2025 article “Rethinking Youth Privacy,” Danielle Keats Citron and Ari Ezra Waldman argue that the “parental control model” is fundamentally flawed. Parents, they contend, are often ill-equipped to protect children’s privacy, whether because they lack the time and the tools to do it well or because they actively “sharent” their children’s information for ego or profit. And making them responsible for child privacy lets platforms and policymakers off the hook. Citron and Waldman argue that young people understand privacy, have legitimate privacy interests of their own, and deserve to have their voices heard in decisions about online policy. Their proposal “foregrounds youth voices” by advocating for structural protections that children want rather than relying on individual consent frameworks.

In the absence of those structural protections and amid disorganized resistance to parental control and bans, teen consent has emerged as the path of least resistance. It sounds like regulation because platforms must obtain consent. It avoids the parental gatekeeping that raises concerns about family dysfunction and teen privacy from their own parents. It dodges the First Amendment challenges facing outright bans. And, crucially, it doesn’t require platforms to actually change very much.

The result is the worst possible outcome for all three camps. The ban advocates’ concern that social media exploits adolescent developmental vulnerabilities is not addressed by asking teenagers to consent to those exploitations. Neither is the parental consent advocates’ concern that parents should decide what is appropriate for their teenage children. And the institutionalists’ vision of structural protections that do not depend on anyone’s consent gets replaced with click-through consent screens that change nothing about how platforms operate.

Teen consent serves only platforms by allowing them to maintain access to teenage users and data without any real friction.

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.

Technology practices need to be sorted into these categories. Some tech features, content, and spaces should be categorically prohibited for minors. Many states already treat adult material this way, now requiring age verification to access porn sites. Targeted advertising based on psychological profiling and engagement-maximizing features appear to be addictive with no redeeming developmental value and so may also be easily banned. Other technology practices may belong in the parental consent category. Some parents are excited about AI chatbots for education, finding that these tools may provide certain benefits when carefully overseen by or used alongside an adult. Others may argue that social media used in moderation without manipulative features might facilitate connection and help develop digital skills, but, like driving or contact sports, they involve real risks that require parental judgment about when and how to permit access. These are the debates we should be having now.

A couple of recent developments point the way forward. Oregon and Connecticut have both amended their privacy laws to ban the sale of minors’ data and targeted advertising to teens, by explicitly removing previous teen-consent provisions. These reversals acknowledge what should have been obvious: 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.