How Sherrill plans to protect kids and adults from harms of social media
New Jersey Democratic gubernatorial candidate U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill blames tech companies for mental health issues, scams and extremism.
Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic candidate for New Jersey governor in 2025, is proposing a plan to protect children and society at large from some of the worst effects of social media and the internet.
“As every parent knows, social media can have a devastating impact on our children — from promoting poor sleep habits to increasing loneliness, anxiety, and depression,” Sherrill’s campaign says in a proposal on her website. “At its worst, it has become a haven for cyberbullying and for glorifying substance abuse, sexual exploitation, eating disorders, and even suicide.”
Sherrill has a number of proposals for how to better protect kids from those negative effects. If elected, she says, she will work to enact an age-appropriate design code requiring social media companies to prioritize the health, privacy and safety of users under 16 and prevent companies from deploying deceptive design tricks to manipulate users into, for instance, unknowingly signing up for subscriptions or providing personal information.
She also supports requiring social media to display warning labels to disclose the risk of mental health harms for adolescents, creating what her website calls a “social media addiction observatory” at a New Jersey higher education institution, banning phones in schools and more.
New Jersey kids aren’t the only ones who need protection from social media companies, Sherrill says. All New Jerseyans must deal with tech companies’ failure to stop scams on their platforms.
Sherrill says tech companies need safeguards that Republicans simply have not been willing to put into place.
“With the Trump administration pushing for even less oversight of Big Tech, New Jersey must step up to protect our children, workers, and democracy, and ensure that technology serves people, not the other way around,” her proposal says. “We can be leaders in innovation while also prioritizing the responsible and ethical development of new technologies and AI. By promoting fairness, transparency, and accountability, we can prevent bias, safeguard human rights, and ensure that technology advances in a way that benefits society as a whole.”
In her proposal, Sherrill also pledges to force social media companies to screen advertisers and to prosecute them for hosting scam networks.
“New Jersey residents reported losing more than $250 million to scams last year — money that could have gone toward a new car, a downpayment on a home, or putting food on the table,” Sherrill says. “These scammers, who often reside abroad, exploit our weak data privacy laws to target seniors, veterans, and immigrants with paid ads on social media. In this system, scammers and social media companies make millions while New Jersey families can lose their life savings.”
And, Sherrill says, she will hold social media platforms accountable for algorithms that amplify “extremist and terrorist content, and that cause extreme harm to children.”
“Social media platforms, bolstered by AI, are intentionally designed to amplify our biases and fuel outrage,” she says. “By engaging users in this way, Big Tech maximizes profits through increased engagement, views, and screen time. Unless the design of these systems changes, algorithms will continue to prioritize sensationalism, accelerate the spread of misinformation, and push vulnerable individuals toward violence.”
The New Jersey Independent reached out to the campaign of Sherrill’s Republican opponent Jack Ciattarelli to see if he has any plans to address the issues Sherrill describes, but did not receive a response.
