Gen Z’s worst nightmare: TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat couldn’t be used during school hours.
What the bill does
Rep. Angie Craig (D-MN2) introduced the No Social Media at School Act, which would require social media companies to use “geofencing” to block access to their products on K-12 school grounds during school hours.
The bill carves out exceptions for push notification of weather alerts, Amber alerts for missing children, and emergency responders.
The specification of “school hours” means social media couldn’t even be used in the cafeteria at lunch or in the hallways between classes. However, it could still be used on school campuses after hours. For example, posting photos and videos at night from football games on the gridiron, or from school talent shows in the auditorium.
The bill also carves out multiple examples of websites or apps that don’t qualify as social media and wouldn’t be subject to a ban. These include: email, Wikipedia, e-commerce like Amazon and eBay, videoconferencing like Zoom, and (perhaps controversially) gaming.
Context
In 2023, Florida became the first state to restrict cell phones in schools statewide. Just in the two years since then, a groundswell of 34 states across the political spectrum have passed policies either restricting or banning cell phones in schools.
In summer 2025 alone, similar policies were enacted by blue state Oregon, swing state North Carolina, and red state Ohio.
As education policies are generally set at the municipal and state level, no member of Congress appears to have introduced legislation banning or restricting cell phones in schools nationwide.
The closest might be the Focus on Learning Act, bipartisan legislation encouraging school districts to adopt phone-free classrooms by establishing a federal grant program to pay for lockable pouches and magnetized containers. The legislation has not yet received a vote.
But even if enacted, it wouldn’t directly change public policy, just nudge it through incentives. This bill, though, would directly change public policy. While it still wouldn’t ban cell phones themselves in schools, banning social media would certainly curb the main thing teens do on their cell phones.
What supporters say
Supporters argue that social media is distracting tens of millions of children from both education and face-to-face interactions with peers.
“We all know how negatively social media is impacting our students’ mental health, attention span, and ability to focus—especially at school,” Rep. Craig said in a press release. “Schools should be places for learning and socializing, not scrolling.”
“While Minnesota's teachers and administrators work hard to create a safe and engaging environment for our students, we have to hold Big Tech accountable for how their platforms are impacting our kids,” Rep. Craig continued. “My bill requiring tech companies to block access to social media during school hours is a start.”
What opponents say
Opponents counter that the answer is to use social media in schools in a curtailed and responsible way, rather than banning it entirely. They say that when done right, social media could actually help education.
For example, Matt Evans at the University of San Diego wrote an article titled “Social Media in Education: 13 Ideas for the Classroom.”
Odds of passage
The bill awaits a potential vote in the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
It has not yet attracted any cosponsors, from either party—despite the increasingly bipartisan consensus on banning or restricting cell phones in classrooms at the state and municipal levels.
Jesse Rifkin is a freelance journalist with The Fulcrum. Don’t miss his report, Congress Bill Spotlight, on The Fulcrum. Rifkin’s writings about politics and Congress have been published in the Washington Post, Politico, Roll Call, Los Angeles Times, CNN Opinion, GovTrack, and USA Today.
SUGGESTIONS:
Congress Bill Spotlight: Banning Trump Administration From Renaming Naval Ship Harvey Milk
Congress Bill Spotlight: Making Trump Assassination Attempt a July 13 National Holiday
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.