Utah governor gearing up to sue social media companies for causing harm to youth

Gov. Spencer Cox (R-UT) said he plans to sue various social media companies over harm caused to Utah youth, months after he passed new regulations to limit youth access to social media.

Cox said on CBS News’s Face the Nation that lawsuits will arrive “in the coming months” to hold social media companies accountable.

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“We believe they’ve known about the dangers; some of this has been leaked out, Meta and others, very clear evidence that they knew the harms that their products were causing to kids, and that they intentionally tried to hide that information,” Cox said on Sunday.

The governor signed a series of bills into law in March that regulates and limits teenage and child access to social media, including age requirements and parental access. The laws set him up to clash with the social media industry, which claims that the bills violate teenagers’ First Amendment rights.

While multiple states have been pushing for laws to allow them to regulate social media’s effects on teenagers, Utah’s laws are the first of their kind in the United States.

Cox acknowledged that they will be hard to enforce and expects legal pushback.

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“I suspect that at some point, the Supreme Court will weigh in on this decision when it comes to restricting youth access,” he said.

“What we’re trying to do is give families more control over what is happening on social media,” Cox said. “When you look at the new research that’s coming out, there’s not just a correlation between social media use and an increase in suicide, anxiety, depression, self-harm; there is a causal link there.”