HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday spent the 2025-26 school year visiting high school classes, to learn about teen social media use and said he found a recurring theme: Most students access social media daily and they know it is harming them.
That input prompted Sunday to compile a report calling on social media companies, legislators, school administrators, parents and teens to monitor social media use and create more content guidelines to protect students’ mental health.
“This is absolutely not an indictment on social media,” Sunday said Wednesday during an event in the Capitol unveiling the report. “This report is our best effort to represent what the students told us. This was a learning endeavor on our part, which is absolutely crucial.”
What Sunday found in Pennsylvania schools reflects a national trend, with 95% of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 reporting they use at least one social media platform and nearly half saying they are online “almost constantly,” according to a 2024 Pew Research Center.
Sunday hosted three roundtable discussions during the school year that brought together 160 students, as well as staff and administrators, from 35 schools across three intermediate units and five counties. Lancaster County schools were not part of the discussions, but several schools from Berks County participated and two Berks Catholic High School students spoke Wednesday.
Social media and cellphone use, particularly in school settings, is a growing concern among educators and legislators. A bell-to-bell cellphone ban that would restrict student phone use during the school day was approved by the state Senate in February and awaits a vote in the House.
Sunday’s report features input from high schoolers on the addictive nature of social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube, which serve as a primary means of communication and connection for teens but correlate with higher rates of self-harm and negative self-image.
Student responses to a potential cellphone ban were mixed with some thinking schools could manage phone usage without a ban and others noting that a ban for all students could diminish social pressure to stay constantly connected.
The report also covered emerging online risks of artificial intelligence, including AI chatbots, like Character.ai, that are designed for friendship, support and even romance. Sunday said his office is actively learning about the technologies while demanding product vendors implement more protections for users.
Sunday and attorneys general of New Jersey, West Virginia and Massachusetts in December led a bipartisan coalition of 42 state attorneys general who issued a letter to AI companies “demanding that they take action to ensure that their chat bots are not producing harmful outputs.”
Social media ‘darkness’
“It is not a state secret that there is a darkness to social media,” Sunday said. “The Office of Attorney General is committed to exploring that darkness and the harm that it causes for Pennsylvanians.”
Rosalie Perlman, a junior at Berks Catholic High School, praised Sunday’s “teenTalk” discussions for giving students an opportunity to collaborate and share their challenges with social media.
“To hear so many of the thoughts that I have myself put into words, and being able to explain that to someone in a position of power was very helpful, as I want to be active in my community when it comes to advocating for mental health,” Perlman said.
Children who spend more than three hours per day on social media face twice the risk of experiencing symptoms of anxiety and depression, according to a 2023 U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services cited in Sunday’s report.
“Toxic communities can form toxic words,” Perlman said. “People are braver behind a screen, so I think it’s important to acknowledge the dangers of it, as much as it is a tool.”
Gabby Frey, also a junior at Berks Catholic, said she came away with her own recurring theme from the talks this year: Social media can and should be used more to impact students’ lives positively.
Report recommendations
The students in Sunday’s report also highlighted social media’s addictive nature, creating a “constant pressure to measure up” and compare themselves to others, which leads to self scrutiny and, sometimes, a diminished sense of self-worth.
In the report, Sunday encourages teens to prioritize in-person connections, setting boundaries around screentime to have healthier, less frequent interactions with social media.
“We are not telling students to delete their social media apps,” Sunday said. “We are suggesting that they consider curating what they see on their devices by disabling and blocking harmful spam content and set limits on how long they are online and stick to those limits.”
The report instructs parents to limit screentime, use parental controls and maintain open, ongoing communication about their children’s online experience. A student anonymously quoted in the report said, “If you feel like you’ll get in trouble, you’re not going to say anything.”
Recommendations for school leaders include introducing digital safety education to students before middle school; promoting the attorney general’s anonymous tipline Safe2Say Something and training educators to recognize and respond to signs of mental health concerns.
Sara George, assistant director of the office of early childhood and student services for Berks County Intermediate Unit 14, asked school leaders to support student organizations that create community and a place for students to voice their concerns.
“Ensure that students feel that their voice is being heard and that there is a place for mental health concerns and that there is a place for them to speak openly about the challenges that they are going through,” George said. “They can truly not just make change, but they can assist you in making the changes for your building, your area, your school district.”
The report asks social media companies to strengthen content moderation to detect and remove inappropriate material, implement stronger age verification systems and prominently promote mental health resources.
If they don’t, Sunday said, legislators will.
“Let me be clear, if social media companies will not protect their users, especially our children, from the harmful effects of their platforms, I will use every tool that I have to hold them accountable and to force those necessary changes,” Sunday said.
Including himself in the directive, Sunday recommends government leaders establish and enforce stronger regulations for social media companies while considering legislation addressing harmful or abusive online behavior.
Harmful online behavior
Students increasingly use AI tools for academic and personal purposes, including as a resource to talk through emotional or mental health concerns. AI has also been used nefariously to create deceptive images and, at its worst, child sexual abuse material.
“It is a huge issue,” Sunday said. “In the world we live in, the technology that people are using to nudify other individuals, the harm lasts forever, and so the stakes are so much higher now.”
A Lancaster County private school, Lancaster Country Day, was at the center of a 2024 criminal investigation into two students who used AI to alter the images of 59 girls and one adult so their faces were morphed onto naked bodies that were not their own, but appeared to be.
Both students were placed on probation after they were found guilty of creating the AI images.
In 2024, state legislation made it illegal to disseminate artificially generated sexually explicit images of children under 18. Sunday spoke in support of proposed legislation to require mandatory reporters, including educators, to alert child protective services when a child disseminates artificially generated sex material of other children.
That bill unanimously passed the state House earlier this month and is awaiting a vote by the Senate. Sunday said his office already has prosecuted multiple AI-generated sex abuse material cases as felonies.
“Dealing with the new technologies that face us is the issue of our time,” Sunday said. “The advancement of technology and public safety cannot be mutually exclusive.”
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