Nerd Harder: A Typology of Techno‐Legal Solutionist Logics in Child Online Safety Laws

ABSTRACT As jurisdictions worldwide grapple with regulating social media's effects on youth, US state legislatures have emerged as important laboratories for “techno‐legal solutionism”—the belief that complex social problems can be solved through legally mandated technical fixes. Although similar approaches are evident in the EU's Digital Services Act and various national regulations, US states offer particularly revealing cases for understanding how technical mandates get operationalized into specific requirements. Our analysis of recently enacted state‐level child online safety laws (COSLs) demonstrates how techno‐solutionist logic manifests in three interdependent patterns: (1) the checklist fallacy (reducing safety to discrete technical features), (2) the false promise of age verification (assuming identity verification will prevent harm), and (3) the design determinism myth (overestimating design's power to shape social outcomes). The United States offers unique insights through its state‐level experimentation, while similar techno‐solutionist approaches are emerging worldwide (e.g., UK's Online Safety Bill, EU's Digital Services Act). The appeal of techno‐legal solutionism transcends borders: from California to Brussels, it offers policymakers seemingly clear solutions to complex problems. However, our analysis shows that this approach fundamentally misunderstands both the social shaping of technology and the complexity of youth well‐being. Technologies can influence outcomes by offering (or not) certain design features (i.e., affordances); yet these designs do not determine the outcomes. This overconfidence that technology can determine an outcome risks ignoring the more complex and nuanced forces shaping children's online experiences. Moving forward requires abandoning the fallacy that we can simply “nerd harder” our way to youth safety—and instead embracing the more challenging work of developing comprehensive, nuanced approaches that recognize both the limitations and possibilities of technical intervention.