TWENTY-TWO YEARS after Facebook first began buzzing across college campuses around Boston — still bearing “The” at the start of its name — parent company Meta and the other companies it inspired are at a tipping point in Massachusetts.

The state House of Representatives voted earlier this month to ban anyone 13 years old or younger from using various platforms, and to require age verification and parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds.

Two days later, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that a state lawsuit against Meta can proceed, puncturing the tech giant’s attempted immunity defense under a federal law known as Section 230. And last week, Gov. Maura Healey went live with her own proposal, which calls for significant new limits on the potentially addictive features that social media can offer to young users while stopping short of an age-related prohibition.

How did we get here? In the span of just over two decades, social media went from a novel feature of a quainter internet to a ubiquitous component of online life and, as the most gung-ho reformists now allege, an exploitative tech leviathan fueling a youth mental health crisis.

This week on The Codcast, Boston College professor Ana Martínez Alemán, who has studied the effects of social media on students, and Northeastern University professor John Wihbey, the author of Governing Babel: The Debate over Social Media Platforms and Free Speech – and What Comes Next, unpack that overriding question and more.

States are still figuring out how to approach regulating the industry, and policymakers might look outside the nation’s borders for inspiration. Australia late last year began enforcing a ban on social media use by anyone younger than 16, but Wihbey said “the jury’s still out” on how well that has worked, especially as young users deploy fake accounts to get around age-verification systems.

“It’s a really difficult problem because there are lots of tradeoffs with data privacy concerns,” Wihbey said. “Do we really want to have unique government IDs or biometric information being passed to the big tech companies so they can then restrict young people?”

One especially thorny decision for legislators is where to draw the line. Australia banned all social media for users younger than 16; the Massachusetts House bill would do so for anyone under 14.

Martínez Alemán said those age cutoffs are somewhat arbitrary and don’t line up with brain development, which research shows continues through teenage years and into a person’s early 20s — a point state justices cited when they deemed life imprisonment without parole for anyone under the age of 21 to be unconstitutional.

The ages from 10 to roughly 25, Martínez Alemán, can be “fertile ground for algorithms that can target” insecurities, impulsivity, and self-image. She stressed the importance of building social media “literacy” for younger users to better educate them on what they might encounter online, how to interpret it in context, and where the line between reality and performance blurs.

“I wouldn’t want my 16-year-old necessarily free to engage with [social media] without some semblance of literacy,” she said. “This is a multi-nodal moment. It’s going to take parents, schools, synagogues, churches, to really bring literacy around this for our kids.”

In this episode, guests discuss whether there’s a research consensus about how social media affects young people (6:30), what makes social media different from prior technological innovations that fueled moral panic like television (25:00), and the significance of the SJC’s Meta decision (30:00).

And for more details on what policy changes are on the move in Massachusetts, check out our explainer here.