May 2nd, 2026 Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin signed a bipartisan bill into law that limits the amount of time that Virginias under the age of 16 years old will have their time limited on social media. The reason for the bill seems to be that lawmakers think that kids are spending too much time on social media. Me? I do agree with that since I think Americans spend too much time on algorithm driven, corporate owned social media. Not just kids.

From WJLA: New Virginia law limits teens’ social media to 1 hour daily: What parents should know

The bill was co-sponsored by State Senator Schuyler VanValkenburg, a Henrico County teacher who’s seen firsthand the effects of excessive screen time on students.
“You see how much it hinders their ability to do well in school, and you see how much it hinders their socialization with their friends,” VanValkenburg said.

Does it? I’d like to see the proof of that. Perhaps instead of chatting with their friends on social media for hours, they should talk to their friends on the house phone for hours like I did when I was kid. Or instead of mindlessly watching TikTok videos for hours, they can mindlessly watch cable television for hours, like I did when I was a kid. Those are better ways to spend one’s youth, right?

WTVR: Virginia passes law to limit time teens spend on social media to one hour a day

[…] the social media platforms that would be subjected to the legislation include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, TikTok, Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest, and YouTube.

One of my initial thoughts on this law was that there are many, many social media platforms. If one of them boots a kid off after sixty minutes, won’t they just go to another one? The answer to that is: yes. That’s fine. It’s right in the text of the law - the limit is not per person, but per social media service. The text of the bill doesn’t actually name those eight social media services, or any social media services specifically, but let’s presume that those are the ones that Gen Alpha are using. They can have eight hours per day of social media time online with the best case scenario of the wording of this bill. But, hey, let’s be honest here. I don’t know anyone under the age of sixteen that is using Pinterest. And X looks like it’s fortunately dying. Facebook seems like it’s not popular under a certain age.

What if you’re a 15 year old and learning math from Khan Academy on YouTube? It got me through my math courses in my bachelor’s program. Well, tough luck. This law doesn’t care if you’re group chatting with people in a study group. As long as it’s on one of these platforms - anything more than 60 minutes == bad.

Fortunately, the bill does give the platforms the ability to give parents the option of increasing or decreasing the time limits. How the platforms are to verify that a legal guardian is the legal guardian of the 15 or younger year old account holder? No real specificity on that. What’s going to stop a 15 year old from just creating a fake account for their own parent and claiming their other account as their child?

From WTOP News: Va. Gov. Youngkin signs law restricting social media to 1 hour a day for kids under 16

Youngkin attempted to add amendments to raise the age back up to 18 and ban infinite scroll features.

In a rare moment where I not only agree with Governor Youngkin but really wish he had gotten his way on this. I think infinite scrolling is an intentional method for social media platforms to keep people plugged into to their firehose of algorithmic nonsense.

Back to the WTOP News article:

It also calls for a neutral approach to asking someone’s age when they create an account, and it says there has to be a way to accurately verify a young person’s age. The bill says companies can’t use the age information for anything else, and allows parents to increase or decrease the daily one-hour limit.

Actually - the bill absolutely does not require any degree of accuracy when verifying a young person’s age. Here’s the text from the bill:

B. Any controller or processor that operates a social media platform shall (i) use commercially reasonable methods, such as a neutral age screen mechanism, to determine whether a user is a minor and (ii) limit a minor’s use of such social media platform to one hour per day, per service or application, and allow a parent to give verifiable parental consent to increase or decrease the daily time limit.

Do you know what a “neutral age screen mechanism” is? I didn’t. I had to look it up.

From the FTC’s Complying with COPPA: Frequently Asked Questions:

In designing your age screen, you should ask age information in a neutral manner, making sure the data entry point allows users to enter their age accurately and does not default to an age 13 or over. An example of a neutral age screen would be a system that allows a user freely to enter the month and year of birth. Avoid encouraging children to falsify age information by, for example, stating that certain features will not be available to users under age 13. In addition, consistent with long standing Commission advice, FTC staff recommends using technical means, such as a cookie, to prevent children from back-buttoning to enter a different age.

The word “neutral” is that the mechanism for collecting age data should not prejudice the person filling it out by informing them that their access to the service is going to be impacted if they honestly answer. But there is nothing in the mechanism that actually keeps the respondent from lying. Ever have a web site ask you to enter your date of birth and have absolutely no further information required? That’s a “age screen mechanism”. I don’t know about you, but essentially every age check I was ever asked online before I turned 18? I lied on it.

To me, this law seems like it is completely unenforceable and an empty win for some sort corner of whatever culture war is going on. As stated, I do think that corporate owned, algorithm driven social media platforms are a harm, but universally, not just to children. In addition to the state not doing anything to police this, leaving, I guess, parents to sue these enormous corporations when they don’t boot their kids off of their platforms after 60 minutes a day - it’s not even comprehensive.

Join the fediverse. Federated social media exists. The servers can be owned and operated by anyone, and I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that nobody in the Commonwealth of Virginia is going to make sure that Lemmy or Mastodon are enforcing any sort of “neutral age screen mechanism”. But, hopefully because of that that’ll push people off of the corporate owned, curated, and surveilled social media platforms to something federated.