This couldn't backfire, could it?... Regulating teen's access to social media edition

The New Zealand Herald reported over the weekend:

Utah became the first state to enact laws limiting how children can use social media after Republican Governor Spencer Cox signed a pair of measures today that require parental consent before kids can sign up for sites like TikTok and Instagram.

The two bills Cox signed into law also prohibit kids under 18 from using social media between the hours of 10.30pm and 6.30am, require age verification for anyone who wants to use social media in the state and seek to prevent tech companies from luring kids to their apps using addictive features...

Tech giants like Facebook and Google have enjoyed unbridled growth for over a decade, but amid concerns over user privacy, hate speech, misinformation and harmful effects on teens’ mental health, lawmakers have begun trying to rein them in.

This law, and others like it proposed in other US states and elsewhere, have a noble purpose of reducing young people's mental health problems, which are associated with social media use. By restricting teens' access to social media, it is thought that teens will have better mental health as a result.

However, I can already see a potential problem here (aside from the real possibility that this policy solution doesn't actually address how social media affects subjective wellbeing - see for example, this post). Some teens' parents are quite permissive, and those teens will have access to social media under these regulations, as their parents will consent to their teens using social media (and perhaps some of these teens would have access regardless of the regulations). Other teens' parents will try to prevent their teens' access to social media (to the extent that they can do so). This second group of teens could actually be at risk of worse mental health, not better mental health. Consider this: those teens are being excluded from access to social media, when many of their peers are not. For a teen, is there anything worse than feeling socially excluded? This isn't just fear of missing out (FoMO), but genuine anxiety about what their friends and peers are talking about on a platform that they don't have access to. Moreover, giving parents access to teens' social media accounts violates the teens' privacy in a way that may also lead to increased anxiety for some teens, who feel hypervigilant in terms of what their parents might see (many teens already have multiple social media accounts, only some of which are known to their parents). It seems likely then that some teens (not all teens) may actually be made worse off by this policy.

Maybe I'm scaremongering unnecessarily. However, I can easily see how this regulation leads to worse mental health for some teens (even if it may improve mental health for teens on average). I guess we will see how this plays out over time.