Facing a Budget Squeeze, New Jersey Decides To Go After Big Tech

As New Jersey faces a major impending budget deficit in the next few years, Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill is asking lawmakers to fund a crusade against social media companies in the name of “online safety.” 

During Sherrill’s first budget speech on Tuesday, in which she said her state is facing a “$3 billion structural deficit,” the governor warned of the ills of technology on kids. Big Tech “isn’t just the Big Tobacco of our era,” Sherrill said, “it’s worse, and it’s exactly the kind of situation where government has a role to play to keep our kids safe.” 

To address this perceived problem, Sherrill is proposing setting aside $125,000 in the state budget for a new Office of Youth Online Mental Health Safety within the Health Department. This office would “research and make recommendations to guide responsible use of social media platforms among youth” in “preparation for New Jersey’s first cell phone-free school year this fall.” She also proposed spending $500,000 on a new Social Media Research Center to “study the impact of digital technology on young people’s mental health.”

It is unclear whether such a research center would be guided by genuine scientific inquiry or by anti-tech ideology. Sherrill already seems convinced that digital technology negatively affects youth mental health. During her speech, she declared, “In New Jersey, we’re not going to rely on Big Tech to come clean about the harm these technologies cause. We are going to lead the way.” 

While a growing number of state and federal lawmakers are asserting that social media undisputedly harms teens’ mental health, not all research supports this narrative, as Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown has frequently pointed out. One 2022 Pew Research Center study presented a more “nuanced picture of adolescent life on social media,” finding that most teens say social media can strengthen their friendships, while still acknowledging that there are other pressures that may come from being online. Only 9 percent of the teens surveyed said that social media has had a “mostly negative” effect on them personally, with the majority saying the effect has been neither positive nor negative, and 32 percent of those surveyed described their experience as mostly positive. This is not exactly the picture of doom and gloom painted by Sherrill. 

Even assuming that social media causes harm, government interventions have often led to infringements on online freedom in the name of protecting kids. The U.K.’s Online Safety Act, which requires platforms hosting any sort of material deemed harmful to children to verify users’ ages, has effectively censored swaths of the internet for those unwilling to give the government sensitive data. In complying with the act, social media sites in the U.K. have restricted posts about Ukraine and Gaza, Substack posts, and Reddit forums. The U.K. has even attempted to impose its country’s online safety rules on U.S. companies, so far with little success. Alarmingly, U.S. lawmakers are eagerly trying to implement these policies on their own constituents. Several states, including Utah and Texas, have attempted to enact similar age-verification laws that would restrict access to online speech, prompting legal challenges from free speech groups. 

Although Sherrill has not yet proposed age-verification laws, she signed an executive order on her first day directing state agencies to prioritize promoting online safety. The order calls for preventing “harms such as cyberbullying, deepfakes, online exploitation, and exposure to harmful or addictive content.” 

New Jersey legislators seem ready to back Sherrill’s campaign against Big Tech. In February, a trio of lawmakers introduced a bill that would require certain social media platforms to display a “black box warning” detailing the dangers of social media use whenever a user accesses a platform.  These sites would also be required to monitor user activity “for problematic behaviors,” as determined by the commissioner of health, and would have to give that user resources related to their “problematic behavior.” 

Faced with a budget squeeze, New Jersey lawmakers are gearing up to splurge on government-run crackdowns on social media platforms. In addition to wasting taxpayer dollars, these projects could infringe on New Jerseyans’ rights.