A jury recently delivered a message parents, 糖心动漫vlog, and young people have been living with for years: Social media platforms are manipulative by design.
In a closely watched case, a California jury found tied to their platforms. This decision reflects a shift in how we are thinking about accountability in the digital age.
Lawmakers have been accelerating efforts around , school cellphone bans, and . Other countries are going even further. Australia has altogether.
It鈥檚 a turning point, yes. Some of that urgency is very much warranted. But if we鈥檙e not careful, we could get the next part wrong. Because when adults feel urgency, we tend to reach for control. There鈥檚 a familiar pattern in American policymaking where we adults panic about something young people are doing, , and only later realize we forgot to ask the young people themselves. We are on the verge of doing that again.
To be clear, the California case itself reflects one young person鈥檚 experience, a powerful reminder that youth voices are already shaping this conversation. But too often, those perspectives surface only after harm has occurred. We should be building systems that listen to young people before decisions are made, not just after.
Nearly , according to the Pew Research Center, with 40% reporting that they鈥檙e online 鈥渁lmost constantly.鈥� Research shows that heavy social media use, meaning more than three hours a day, is . Those facts are real, those harms are real, and accountability is overdue.
But what鈥檚 also real is that social media is not an optional add-on in young people鈥檚 lives. For many young people, these platforms are where friendships form, identities take shape, and communities are built and grow. Seventy-four percent of teens told Pew that social media helps them feel more connected to their friends. While adults debate whether to shut it down, young people are asking a more practical question: How do we make it better?
After decades working alongside young people鈥攊n classrooms, in community organizations, in national youth leadership efforts with the 鈥擨 hear the same message on repeat: Social media isn鈥檛 simply good or bad. It is the environment they grew up in.
Young people are clear-eyed about the risks. They talk openly about cyberbullying, misinformation, and the relentless culture of comparison. But they also speak of its value for connection, creativity, and belonging.
For today鈥檚 teenagers, logging off isn鈥檛 like putting down a magazine. It鈥檚 closer to stepping away from the basketball court, the lunch table, the bleachers. Which makes it all the more remarkable that the people navigating this world every day are still largely absent from the rooms where adults are deciding how to regulate it.
Earlier this year, I saw how different the conversation becomes when young people are actually in the room. At a , researchers, policymakers, and young people came together to talk about social media. At one point, a young panelist offered something that cut through hours of adult debate. Adults, she said, tend to focus on how much time teens spend online. Young people think more about how they spend that time. Are they learning something? Creating something? Building community? Or simply scrolling?
It was a small comment, but it reframed the entire conversation from panic to design. And design is where the real solutions live. In education settings, when students are consulted on technology use, the conversation often shifts from blanket bans to more nuanced approaches, like identifying when phones support learning or safety and when they distract from it. That kind of input leads to policies that are more targeted, more realistic, and more likely to be followed. For example, instead of prohibiting devices all day, some schools are experimenting with structured use, such as allowing phones for specific learning activities, navigation, or communication but restricting them during focused instruction time.
We already have models for giving young people a seat at the table. In , the city鈥檚 youth council works directly with municipal leaders to shape policies affecting young people, including mental health and digital safety. At the , researchers work alongside a youth advisory board of teens who help shape research on social media, artificial intelligence, and how technology shows up in schools and daily life.
When we actually trust young people with real responsibility, they rarely stop at advice. They start building answers. Take Russell Zhang, a high school student who launched a community initiative called to teach students in his community how AI works and how to use it responsibly.
His instinct wasn鈥檛 to fear technology. It was to understand it and to make that understanding accessible to others. That difference matters. One approach leads to restriction. The other builds literacy, agency, and the ability to navigate new tools responsibly. And with most students already engaging with these technologies, often without formal guidance, the key question is whether we鈥檒l prepare them to do so well.
Young people often see the path forward before adults do. None of this means abandoning adult responsibility. Social media companies should absolutely be held accountable for addictive design and toxic content. Policymakers should demand transparency and stronger safeguards. Schools need clear expectations about technology use in classrooms.
But rules designed without input from the people they aim to protect tend to fail in practice. By listening to young people, we can build more balanced approaches, clearer norms for use, better alignment with how students actually learn and communicate, and greater buy-in from the very people those policies are meant to support. When it comes to navigating the online world they inherited, young people aren鈥檛 just the subjects of this conversation. They may be the people most prepared to help us fix it.
