On October 13, 2025, New York City stepped into the legal ring with tech giants, launching a lawsuit against the parent companies of Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube. The city’s bold move is the latest salvo in a growing battle over the impact of social media on children’s mental health and cognitive development—a fight that’s playing out in courtrooms, legislatures, and living rooms across the country.
The city’s lawsuit accuses these companies of fueling a mental health crisis among children and creating what officials call a public nuisance. According to the complaint, "Youth are now addicted to Defendants’ platforms in droves, resulting in substantial interference with school district operations and imposing a large burden on cities, school districts and public hospital systems that provide mental health services to youth." The city alleges that the platforms have triggered depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm, and even suicidality among thousands of young people, including those in New York City itself. "Defendants have created nothing short of a national crisis," city attorneys wrote, as reported by TNND.
This legal action isn’t happening in a vacuum. Over the past several years, a growing chorus of states and cities have taken tech companies to court, seeking to hold them responsible for the effects their products have had on the nation’s children. The evidence fueling these lawsuits is mounting. Repeated studies have found a clear link between increased social media use and higher rates of anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues—especially among underage users.
Just hours before New York City filed its suit, a major study published in JAMA added new urgency to the debate. The research, based on the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, followed more than 6,000 children aged 9 to 10 through early adolescence. The findings were stark: preteens who used increasing amounts of social media performed worse in reading, vocabulary, and memory tests compared to peers who used little or no social media.
Study author and pediatrician Jason Nagata of the University of California, San Francisco, told NPR, "It's critical to understand how social media use during school hours specifically affects learning, especially as so many schools are considering phone bans right now." The researchers grouped kids by their patterns of social media use. About 58% used little or no social media, 37% increased to about an hour per day by age 13, and 6%—the so-called "high increasing" group—spent three or more hours on social media daily by that age.
The results revealed a clear "dosage effect." Even those in the low-use group, who spent about an hour per day on social media by age 13, scored 1 to 2 points lower on reading and memory tasks compared to non-users. The high-use group fared even worse, scoring 4 to 5 points lower. "So those who had the highest social media use have lower scores," Nagata explained, "but even the low users had smaller differences in their cognitive scores." Psychologist Sheri Madigan of the University of Calgary, who wrote an editorial for the study, summed it up: "It's problematic at really high uses, but it's also problematic at even in small doses."
These findings echo what educators and psychologists have been reporting anecdotally for years. Mitch Prinstein, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, commented, "It confirms a lot of what we have been hearing about from schools all across the country, which is that kids are just having a really hard time focusing on being able to learn as well as they used to, because of the ways in which social media has changed their ability to process information, perhaps."
The concern runs deeper than just test scores. Adolescence is a critical period for brain development—second only to the first year of life in terms of growth and reorganization, according to Prinstein. Heavy social media use, with its constant stream of likes, comments, and feedback, may be rewiring young brains to be hypersensitive to peer approval, potentially at the expense of skills needed for learning and memory.
Earlier studies using the same ABCD data found that nearly two-thirds of kids start using social media before age 13, with the average user juggling three accounts. Half the kids with smartphones admitted they lose track of how much time they spend on their devices. A quarter said they use social media to forget about their problems, and 11% reported that social media use had negatively affected their schoolwork.
With mounting evidence, policymakers are scrambling to respond. In the absence of comprehensive federal action, states are taking matters into their own hands. On October 13, 2025, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law requiring tobacco-style warning labels on social media platforms, joining New York and Minnesota, which passed similar laws earlier in the year. Minnesota became the first state to implement such warnings back in July. Newsom’s statement captured the crossroad: "Emerging technology like chatbots and social media can inspire, educate and connect — but without real guardrails, technology can also exploit, mislead, and endanger our kids."
Google, which owns YouTube, pushed back strongly against the New York City lawsuit. Spokesperson José Castañeda said, "YouTube is a streaming service where people come to watch everything from live sports, to podcasts to their favorite creators, primarily on TV screens, not a social network where people go to catch up with friends. We’ve also developed dedicated tools like Supervised Experiences for young people, guided by child safety experts, that give families control." Meta, Snap, and ByteDance, the parent companies of Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok, did not respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, Congress faces its own gridlock. There’s bipartisan interest in passing comprehensive regulations for social media platforms, but lawmakers have struggled to agree on the details. John Wihbey, an associate professor of media innovation at Northeastern University, explained, "The companies should be addressing the addictive nature of the technology products they're pushing to children. There's no question that no more needs to be done, the mechanism is the question." He added, "Sometimes regulating new technologies takes decades. The issue may be now that the innovation cycles are just something faster that unlike TV or radio or satellite or cable, can do a lot of damage within a short cycle."
The challenge extends beyond social media. The rapid rise of artificial intelligence, especially AI-powered chatbots, has sparked similar concerns about children’s safety and wellbeing. Yet, as with social media, efforts to create regulatory guardrails for AI have been slow, partly out of a desire to keep the U.S. at the forefront of technological innovation.
Globally, some countries are moving faster. Denmark announced plans to ban social media for users under 15, and Australia will require social media companies to prevent under-16s from creating or keeping accounts starting December 2025. Sheri Madigan hopes other countries will follow suit, saying, "I think that we'll see a trickle effect on that. That's going to be really beneficial for kids."
As the legal, scientific, and political battles intensify, one thing is clear: the debate over kids, screens, and social media is far from over. The choices made now—by lawmakers, courts, companies, and families—will shape a generation’s wellbeing and the digital landscape they inherit.
