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Free Speech

Restricting Speech By Purportedly Protecting Children

Around the world, governments are censoring speech with the stated goal of shielding youth from online harms.

Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff | 5.6.2026 9:38 AM

While governments around the world have imposed speech restrictions to fight misinformation and hate speech, they also have attempted to curb free speech for a less controversial reason: protecting children. But many of these restrictions stem from vague, unspecified, or speculative harms and corral wide swaths of speech that do not harm children. Censoring speech in the name of protecting children is not a terribly new phenomenon, especially in authoritarian countries. In 2012, for instance, Russia's parliament passed a law allowing the country's media censorship agency to unilaterally blacklist websites and take them offline, without any court approval. The lawmakers' justification was protecting children from online harm, but civil liberties groups correctly predicted that the government would use these powers to curb far more speech. In recent years, such efforts have moved beyond authoritarian countries and taken hold in Western democracies.

The United States has seen repeated attempts to curb speech in the name of saving the children. Although they have failed, governments have continued to try over many decades. In 1969, the US Supreme Court struck down the Des Moines, Iowa, school district's ban on black armbands worn to protest the Vietnam War, writing that "state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism." In 1997, the Supreme Court invalidated much of the Communications Decency Act, which criminalized the online transmission of "indecent" content to minors, writing that the "interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship." And in 2011, the court struck down a California law that banned sales of "violent video games" to minors, writing that the First Amendment does not give the government "a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed."

The moral panic did not stop with those cases. Across the country, states are scrambling to address the harms associated with minors' use of social media. Many high-profile commentators and politicians have criticized social media for harming the mental health of teenagers, though there is substantial debate as to whether they have presented sufficient evidence of causation. In May 2023, then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory on social media and youths' mental health: "The most common question parents ask me is, 'Is social media safe for my kids?' The answer is that we don't have enough evidence to say it's safe, and in fact, there is growing evidence that social media use is associated with harm to young people's mental health."

States have stepped in to try to regulate social media. Among the highest profile recent attempts is Utah's Minor Protection in Social Media Act, which the state legislature enacted in March 2024. The Utah law requires social media companies to "implement an age assurance system to determine whether a current or prospective Utah account........

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