SCOTUS takes on kids' free speech online

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Adam Clark Estes is still away, but we wanted to highlight another major development in the tech world.

I'm taking over the keys to Adam's newsletter to share my new piece on whether the Supreme Court is going to decide that the internet has made the First Amendment obsolete.

The short answer is that this Court, despite all of its many flaws, has largely still protected the free speech rights of adults. But several states have passed laws that violate the First Amendment rights of children — the latest is a Texas law that would forbid people under 18 years old from downloading any app to their phone or tablet without their parents' permission.

These laws are rooted in real concerns that the internet is rewiring young people's brains, but they are terribly overbroad. And they cannot be squared with longstanding First Amendment principles. The question is whether this Court will continue to enforce those principles now that many state legislatures are screaming, "Will anyone please think of the children!"

—Ian Millhiser, senior correspondent

Getty/Vox

In a sense, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is getting what he wanted.

It’s not a great time to be a parent. Young people get their information from platforms that did not exist just a few years ago and that many adults have never even heard of. Many parents, who did not grow up using TikTok or even YouTube, do not know how to counsel their children on how to function in a hyper-online world. Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, which argues that smartphones kicked off an epidemic of mental illness among young people, is a runaway bestseller for a reason.

The Texas state legislature, meanwhile, has a simple solution to this problem. What if we just take away young people’s First Amendment rights?

Last year, Texas enacted the “App Store Accountability Act,” which would forbid anyone under the age of 18 from downloading any app to a “mobile device” without their parent or guardian’s explicit permission. The law also forces app sellers such as Apple’s App Store or Google Play to verify the age of every single person who uses them, and to determine who is the parent or guardian of every minor who uses an app store.

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