A UC Davis repository collects every US bill since 2022 aimed at minors’ use of social media and other platforms, sorted by state, year and topic.

As of March 2026, every US state had introduced at least one bill to regulate social media or other digital platforms for people under 18. That is an unusual degree of legislative unanimity on a contested subject, and until now there was no single place to see what any of the bills actually said.

A paper in the Journal of Children and Media describes the Youth Digital Policy Repository, a database built at the University of California, Davis that collects 379 US bills dating back to 2022 and sorts them by location, year and topic — age verification, parental consent, targeted advertising and others.

The project lead is Samantha Vigil, a doctoral candidate in communication at UC Davis; the primary investigator is Drew Cingel, an associate professor of communication there. Co-authors include Matthew Shawcroft of UC Davis, Sarah Coyne of Brigham Young University, Sonia Livingstone of the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Jane Shawcroft of The Ohio State University.

What the database holds

The repository tracks bills through their fate as well as their content, recording whether each was introduced, passed, failed or enacted. That distinction carries most of the analytic value: a count of bills introduced measures legislative attention, and a count of bills enacted measures what the law actually is, and those two numbers diverge sharply in this area.

The coding was done by undergraduate research assistants, who identified, read and categorised the bills. The repository is to be updated twice a year, in June and November, and the team plans to expand it beyond the United States.

“This repository provides a centralized source of regulations, both attempted and passed, to inform future legislation,” Vigil said.

“Adolescent mental health and well-being is such an important outcome,” she said.

Cingel framed the audience in similar terms: “We hope that it helps politicians and policymakers in state governments across the United States,” he said.

A deliberately unglamorous kind of research output

A database is not a finding, and it is worth being clear that this paper reports infrastructure rather than a result. Its value is in what it makes possible: comparisons between states, tracking of how model language propagates from one legislature to another, and the ability to ask whether any of these laws have measurable effects — which requires first knowing precisely which jurisdictions adopted what, and when.

That last question is the one the field cannot currently answer, and it is the reason a repository of this kind is more useful than it sounds. Policy evaluation needs variation in timing and content across comparable places, which is exactly what fifty states legislating independently produces, and which is useless without a careful record of it.

The limits are the ordinary ones for a hand-coded database. Coverage depends on the search strategy used to find bills, categorisation depends on judgement calls made by the coders, and a twice-yearly update cycle means the repository lags a fast-moving legislative calendar. The release does not describe the coding protocol or report any reliability checks between coders, which is the detail a user of the database would want.

The public opinion behind the bills

Legislators are responding to something. A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that 48 per cent of US teenagers aged 13 to 17 described social media as harmful to people their age, and 44 per cent of parents named social media as the leading harm to their child’s mental health.

Cingel notes that research links social media use to poor mental health among US children and teenagers, and points to platform features — infinite scrolling, content-recommending algorithms — as playing a part.

This is where the underlying science should be reported honestly, because it is genuinely contested among researchers and the release presents only one side of it.

One body of work, associated with Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, reads the timing of the rise in adolescent mental health problems against the arrival of smartphones and concludes that the connection is causal and substantial. Another, associated with researchers including Amy Orben, Andrew Przybylski and Candice Odgers, finds the average association in large datasets to be very small — comparable in size to effects nobody legislates about — and argues that the cross-national evidence and the timing do not hold up under scrutiny. Both camps are reading largely the same data.

There is more agreement on two narrower points: that effects differ considerably between individuals, with some adolescents affected much more than the average, and that specific design features are a more tractable target than screen time as such. The second of those is closer to what most of these bills attempt.

The United States and everyone else

The comparative picture is where the repository’s eventual international expansion would earn its keep, because other countries have moved differently.

Australia passed a law in 2024 banning social media for those aged 16 and under, which took effect in December 2025. The United Kingdom announced a similar ban in June, to begin in 2027.

The American approach has been more fragmented, and Vigil’s reading is that US lawmakers have been more hesitant than their counterparts elsewhere to propose outright bans — preferring age verification, parental consent requirements and advertising restrictions.

Part of that is constitutional rather than a matter of appetite. Several US state laws in this area have been challenged on First Amendment grounds, with age verification and parental consent requirements facing arguments that they burden minors’ and adults’ access to protected speech, and courts have blocked a number of them. A legislature that cannot ban will reach for the instruments that might survive review, which is one explanation for the particular shape of the 379 bills.

“Social media and AI and other technologies are so ingrained in the world that children are growing up in,” Vigil said, in support of tracking the policy response as it develops.

The article was published on 24 July 2026. The authors reported no potential conflicts of interest; the release does not state the project’s funding sources.

---

Notes

1. “The youth digital policy repository: A tool for tracking digital media legislation aimed at minors.” Journal of Children and Media, 2026. DOI: 10.1080/17482798.2026.2698291.
2. University of California – Davis. “All 50 states have introduced bills to regulate digital media for kids, and a new database tracks them.” EurekAlert!, 4 August 2026. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1138750.

Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels.com