As school districts struggle to control the spread of cyberbullying, pornographic images and online exploitation among their students, Texas lawmakers could consider banning social media from minors, among other sweeping measures, in the upcoming legislative session.

Over the last decade, Texas lawmakers have attempted to slow the spread of social media’s harmful effects by and preventing online platforms from collecting data on minors, the latter of which has faced court challenges by social media companies.

While law enforcement and prosecutors have traditionally been responsible for cracking down on these online dangers, lack of resources in those agencies has meant enforcement has fallen onto educators, who already struggle to meet the demands of instruction, let alone stay knowledgeable on all the ways children use the internet.

“Almost every kid comes to school these days, regardless of background, regardless of socioeconomic status, they have some type of smartphone device in their hand. So they will have access to unfettered content most of the time, no matter what we try to do,” said Zeph Capo, president of the Texas American Federation of Teachers.

Lawmakers have suggested several initiatives next session to address the online dangers affecting Texas children, including a filed by Rep. , R-Frisco, that would prohibit minors from creating accounts on social media sites and require age verification for new users. Other include adding funds to internet crimes units in law enforcement agencies, in artificially created pornographic images, and making of the dangers of the internet.

“Social media is the most dangerous thing our kids have legal access to in Texas,” Patterson .

While they welcome any efforts to reduce harm to children, school officials and cybercrime investigators say more needs to be done to hold social media companies accountable for enforcement.

“We need these businesses to be responsible business people and throttle some of this tremendously negative content, particularly when it comes to kids,” Capo said. “But, you know, they don’t want to do anything like that.”

Schools are hunting grounds

During a Senate Committee on State Affairs hearing in October, lawmakers listened to a litany of stories about how social media has affected young people in Texas: a middle school girl who developed an eating disorder after watching a TikTok video, a middle school boy addicted to cartoon pornography after his YouTube algorithm took him to a porn site, and a woman who testified to being groomed for sex work in high school as her images were posted on social media applications.

Most of these incidents had a starting point at school where children have frequent access to technology and teachers and administrators are too busy to provide oversight. Add in the fact that they know ways to circumvent campus firewalls, students are being groomed via social media on school grounds, said Jacquelyn Alutto, president of Houston-based No Trafficking Zone, during the hearing.

“Right now, schools are a hunting ground,” she said.

The Texas Tribune requested interviews with several school districts about online dangers in schools, including the Austin, Round Rock, Katy and Eanes school districts, but they did not respond. The Plano school district declined to be interviewed.

Last year, the American Federation of Teachers and the American Psychological Association, among other national organizations, called out social media platforms for undermining classroom learning, increasing costs for school systems, and being a “root cause” of the nationwide youth mental health crisis. The admonishment came after a detailed how school districts across the country are experiencing significant burdens as they respond to tech’s predatory and prevalent influence in the classroom.

The same year, in an attempt to hold social media companies more accountable, Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law , known as the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act. The SCOPE Act requires covered digital service providers to provide minors with certain data protections, prevent minors from accessing harmful content, and give parents tools to manage their child’s use of the service.

It also school districts to obtain parental consent for most software and social media applications used in the classroom and to look for alternatives to the internet for instruction.

However, many of the family-friendly websites and games that children might use for entertainment are also rife with potential sexual predators who pretend to be children.

“A little boy can be playing Robloxs in the cafeteria, and during that lunch break, a trafficker can target him, and he can be sexually groomed or exploited within a few weeks or months,” Alutto said.

And even harder to control is when students share pornographic images of themselves online, a reason why some child welfare groups want social media platforms restricted or outright banned for minors.

“This has also helped human traffickers groom and recruit children,” Alutto said.

Unknown damage

show 95% of youth ages 13 to 17 report using social media, with more than a third saying they use social media “almost constantly.”

Nearly 40% of children ages 8 to 12 use social media, even though most platforms require a minimum age of 13 to sign up, according to a study by the U.S. Surgeon General.

This has created a generation of chronically online children, and the medical community is still unsure of their longterm effects.

Although the SCOPE Act was passed to restrict kids from seeing harmful online content and give parents more control over what their children do online, social media companies have watered it down.

A federal district court judge earlier this year of the law that required them to filter out harmful content, saying it was unconstitutional under the First Amendment free speech right.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced in October that he was suing TikTok by allowing their algorithm to affect minors. TikTok denied the state’s allegations, pointing to about how parents in certain states, including Texas, can contact TikTok to request that their teen’s account be deleted.

This lawsuit, like across the country, is playing out in court, forcing Texas lawmakers to wait and see what more they can do in the upcoming session to hold social media companies accountable.

social media from children under the age of 16.

“The state needs to ensure that if technology providers want to do business, they must protect our children, stop the flow of (child pornography and child sexual assault) and report it,” Brent Dupre, director of law enforcement at the Office of the Attorney General of Texas, told The Texas Tribune.

Potential solutions?

Dupre’s department is one of three Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces in the state, and his agency alone covers 134 counties. His office receives 2,500 cyber tips per month for investigation from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, an overwhelming number of cases for an agency with only 11 officers.

The problem is so persistent that Dupre said his office was conducting a live training session with law enforcement officers a few months ago on how to pose in chat rooms as a minor when the trainer noticed a real adult was already trying to solicit their fake minor for sex.

“These proactive investigations aren’t done as frequently as we like because of the sheer caseload that we got,” Dupre said, noting how they work with other law enforcement agencies who are suffering with staff shortages.

Christina Green, chief advancement and external relations officer for Children’s Advocacy Centers of Texas, said her agency serves more than 60,000 child victims yearly, a majority of these cases being child sexual abuse, with very few of these cases not having a technology component. She said law enforcement agencies as well as hers need more resources to protect children.

“This field is rapidly developing, and the tools needed to continue must also develop,” she said.

Echoing school officials, Dupre said social media companies should enforce more restrictions on what minors can do on their platforms. He said companies should be required to track attempts to upload child pornography and other internet harm and be held accountable for allowing sexually explicit content to stay on their websites.

Dupre suggested lawmakers require chat and social media companies use artificial intelligence to scan for child pornography and child sexual assault material and block users from sending this kind of material on their platforms.

“To me, children who try to upload self-produced material should automatically have their accounts disabled,” he said. “Many technology providers scan for these photos and videos, which are then quarantined and reported, but not all providers lockout or cancel that user end-to-end encryption.”

She believes many efforts can be implemented to combat online crimes, including awareness and education for children and parents.

Green said one of their centers teaches children in schools about online risks as early as the third grade and repeats training yearly.

“We have been talking to parents about when you drop your kid off at someone’s house, do you know if devices will be used there? It’s like asking if there is a pool in the backyard. These types of questions need to become commonplace,” Green said.

This article originally appeared in , a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Georgia’s GOP leadership says fighting against cyberbullying will be a top priority when the Legislature convenes in January.

Sen. Jason Anavitarte, a Dallas Republican, said he plans to file a bill to tackle the issue, but he said the specifics of the plan are not yet hammered down.

“This legislation, when we introduce it, is going to be modeled after some similar states like Louisiana,” he said. “There are some bad examples out there that we won’t be copying because we do want to be sensitive to the First Amendment protection for citizens across the state.”

���dzܾ��������Բ�’s defines cyberbullying as “the transmission of any electronic textual, visual, written, or oral communication with the malicious and willful intent to coerce, abuse, torment, or intimidate a person under the age of eighteen,” and proscribes a fine of up to $500, a sentence of up to six months or both.

Anavitarte did not point to any specific states as bad examples, but in 2014, New York’s highest court a cyberbullying law on First Amendment grounds, and attempts to eliminate cyberbullying in other states have faced similar hurdles.

“There’s going to be teeth within the legislation itself,” said Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who joined Anavitarte at a Capitol press conference Monday to introduce the planned bill. “That’s not going to be limited to school districts, it’s going to have teeth in it where the people perpetrating these things, we’re going to try to hold them accountable.”

Jones said legislators will partner with school systems and social media companies to craft the bill.

Free speech

Some free speech advocates say schools or districts interfering with a student’s off-campus speech violates the First Amendment.

In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of a Pennsylvania high school student on free speech grounds who was suspended from the cheerleading team after making a profane social media post criticizing her school.

But the justices wrote that schools’ ability to regulate student speech “do not always disappear when that speech takes place off campus,” and listed “serious or severe bullying or harassment targeting particular individuals” as a circumstance in which schools may implement regulation or punishment, even if it takes place off campus, if the speech could cause a disruption on campus.

Parents and victims say cyberbullying can be more pernicious than traditional bullying because it is not limited to school hours, the anonymity of the internet can spur bullies to be more vicious than they would be in person and victims may not even know who is tormenting them. Widespread adoption of social media among tweens and teens has meant bullies can spread mean messages to much wider audiences than schoolground taunts.

In a published earlier this year, the Cyberbullying Research Center found that in 2021, 23.2 percent of 13- to 17-year olds nationwide reported experiencing cyberbullying within the previous 30 days, up from 17.2 percent in 2019 and 16.7 percent in 2016.

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But rather than comments whispered in hallways, students frequently share those juicy nuggets through anonymous online “” accounts on Facebook and Instagram that much of the student body follows religiously.

“People will be talking about it, like, ‘Did you just see the new confession?’ ” said Samantha Farrow, a junior at Stuy.

Many confessions are harmless — complimenting a classmate’s smile or admitting apprehension about prom — but others target and bully students. In Farrow’s freshman year, a post called her and two peers overweight and unattractive. Dozens of students came to their defense, she said, reassuring them the insult was completely untrue. But still, the post affected her.

“I was mad and I was upset,” Farrow remembered. “It was very degrading to my self-esteem as a 14-year old.”

Accounts like Stuy Confessions are hardly rare, students across the country report. Though the pages , lockdown may have increased their popularity and influence as teens lost the ability to connect in person for months on end.

When schools en masse shifted online, much of young people’s socializing also migrated into virtual spaces like Discord servers, Google Hangouts and TikTok. Now two years later, even as pandemic restrictions have fallen across the country, many online communities remain, students say, and impact K-12 classrooms in ways that adults fail to understand.

“It’s really going over [educators’] heads,” Farrow told The 74. “So much stuff happens on Facebook and Instagram, the confessions accounts, and they have no idea.”

“What people post on social media kinda seeps into the classroom,” she added.

In fall 2021, when Diego Camacho’s Los Angeles high school returned to in-person learning, students began taking pictures of their peers — sometimes eating, sometimes of their shoes under the bathroom stall — and posting them online anonymously without consent, he told The 74. 

He and other students “were constantly looking over our shoulders, looking around when we ate and some [of us] refused to use the bathroom out of fear [we] would end up on the pages,” said the high school senior. 

It took school administration two months to shut down the account, he said. While the page was active, it “created a lot of distrust between students,” said Camacho.

At Mia Miron’s middle school in nearby Pomona, California, Instagram pages of a similar style continue to pop up despite old accounts getting banned on numerous occasions, she said. With page titles based on the phrase “Lorbeer Lookalikes,” a play on their school’s name, users send photos they took of classmates to the accounts via direct message, and the page administrator then posts the images without indicating who submitted them.

“I just followed it to make sure nobody that I know would get hurt by not knowing their photo was on there,” explained Miron. 

Twice, the accounts have shared pictures of her sitting at her desk. The eighth grader doesn’t know who runs the account, she said, and did not give consent for those images to be posted. 

“I wouldn’t like my photo to be on there without my permission,” she told The 74.

While Miron says she hasn’t taken the posts personally, a friend of hers was cyberbullied on the page, she said, which took a toll on the middle schooler’s mental health. 

The 74 spoke with eight students in 6th through 12th grade and one college student about their experience of social media’s impact on education post-COVID. Most agreed that lockdown initially forced them to lean more heavily on online platforms to stay connected with peers and that some of those habits have since stuck around.

But the proliferation of online content and connection has also delivered some positive effects, students emphasized.

Kota Babcock, a senior at Colorado State University, said his roommate joined a pandemic Discord server they still use for weekly horror movie screenings. High schooler Ameera Eshtewi, of Portland, Oregon, hones her programming skills as a member of the online community . And Joshua Oh, a Gambrills, Maryland middle schooler, said Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter helped him and his peers quickly spread the word to wear pink in support of victims of an alleged sexual assault at a nearby high school.

Circulated within Oh’s student body, a satirical TikTok account pokes fun without crossing a line, the teen said. The “slander” page posts videos about students and teachers that he finds “funny when they are true.”

One of a cowboy coughing heavily and falling down on a train track is captioned, “What Lois thinks will happen if she doesn’t have gum for 00000.1 seconds.” Another video with the caption “Brandon trying to convince his ex to take him back” features a man in the rain to a Lil Nas X song. 

In a key difference from the pages at Miron and Camacho’s schools, none of the videos include images of actual students. 

And in Pomona, as a counter to some of the online toxicity within Miron’s middle school, a student also created a school-based TikTok account featuring an “appreciation post for the girls that got put down on that other Lorbeer account.” The pictures students’ smiling faces set to B.o.B’s Nothing on You.

Instagram and other social media can have degrading effects on youth mental health, including eating disorders and suicidal ideation, particularly for teen girls bombarded with unhealthy body image standards. Facebook (now Meta), Instagram’s parent company, has tracked the harms for years, internal documents reported by the , but implemented few measures to curb the addictiveness of its app, as teen users have driven much of its popularity.

Even when students use accounts to uplift each other, ZaNia Stinson, a high school student in Charlotte, North Carolina, said that she and her peers’ dependence on social media often makes them less present IRL — in real life. 

Teachers often collect phones during class, she said, and when the devices get returned afterward, “we don’t pay attention in the halls so we bump into people, like our heads are glued to [our] phones.”

During free periods at Stuyvesant, said Farrow, students will often sit next to each other in the hallway without saying a word, just scrolling. The tendency, she believes, to ignore human contact in favor of digital has worsened since COVID. From time to time, she herself pulls up Instagram during class without the teacher knowing, she admits.

Yet one online outlet has provided consistent solace for her since early in the pandemic. In June 2020, the high schooler created a Twitter stan account, or fan account, for K-pop megastars BTS, who she jokingly described as her “biggest passion in life.” She has fun chatting with other fans of the group and appreciates the low stakes because she doesn’t know any of the other users in real life, she said.

Social media is “a good outlet if you know how to use it the right way,” said Farrow. “But I don’t think a lot of people do.”

This story was brought to you via The 74’s Student Council initiative, an effort to boost youth voices in our reporting. America’s Promise Alliance helped in the recruiting of our diverse 11-member council and the idea was conceived as part of Asher Lehrer-Small’s Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship.