Courtesy of Kentucky Lantern
Bella Cornett sees a direct line between a social media influencer who posted videos of tricks with vaping smoke and the bullying she endured in her Kentucky high school.
Cornett, 19, said her friend group at the time watched those social media videos as first year high school students and “thought that was so cool.”
They started vaping too, she said. Then, for some, came marijuana, drinking and “harder stuff.”
“Us being in eighth grade and freshmen…we shouldn’t have been seeing that,” Cornett said.
She eventually tried vaping too — because, she says, she was bullied into it.
“I think — then and now — I did it more because they were pressuring me so much, and they kept making it seem like it was so fun and so cool,” she said.
Cornett and other teenagers who spoke to the Kentucky Lantern recently about their experiences with social media said it can be a positive place for connection — but that it needs more guardrails to protect them and more options for parental control. Two of the teenagers are minors who spoke to the Lantern with parental consent.
One Central Kentucky Republican tried unsuccessfully to do just that during the 2026 legislative session — and plans to try again next year.
A bipartisan effort with big backing
Rep. Matt Lockett, R-Nicholasville, filed House Bill 227 in January and it amassed 27 cosponsors, both Republican and Democrat.
The bill took a sweeping aim at “addictive” online features like doomscrolling and autoplay by blocking these features for children. It would have also required social media platforms to estimate the age of users and restrict usage for those under the age of 15 to child settings unless a parent consented otherwise.
The bill proposed giving parents passwords to the children’s accounts so they could monitor and manage the time spent online.
It had the support of Kentucky’s highest law enforcement official, Attorney General Russell Coleman, whose track record includes suing TikTok and Character.AI, an artificial intelligence company.
In committee, Wil Schroder, the senior counsel for Coleman’s office, testified in favor of the bill.
“Attorney General Russell Coleman fully supports this bill, and the office stands ready to defend it should it be challenged,” Schroder said on Feb. 18. “Our attorneys have reviewed this bill, and are encouraged that it is content neutral in every way, and believe that it will pass a constitutional challenge should it face one.”
It passed the House unanimously on March 9 but progress petered out in the Senate, where it died.
Lockett doesn’t blame senators. He said Meta lobbying against the bill “kicked into high gear” once it passed the House.
“I think it’s unfortunate that a company like Meta wants to protect their bottom dollar so much that they’re willing to do it on the backs of kids,” he told the Lantern.
Meta did not respond to two emails from the Lantern seeking comment. The Lantern also attempted to reach each of the company’s registered lobbyists via phone calls and email.
According to the Kentucky Legislative Ethics Commission, Meta lobbied on the bill in February, March and April. The company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, lobbied for other bills as well, spending around $5,600 during the session, according to a legislative agent compensation report from the Kentucky Legislative Ethics Commission.
Meta Platforms has the following lobbying agents registered with the Legislative Ethics Commission:
- Megan Arnold, registered since Jun 10, 2024
- Sherman Brown, registered since Dec. 11, 2023
- Jeffery Busick, registered since Dec. 11, 2023
- Jeff Harper, registered since Dec. 11, 2023
- Scott Jones, registered since Dec. 11, 2023
- Sara Massey, registered since Jan. 1, 2024
- John McCarthy, registered since Dec. 11, 2023
- Libby Milligan, registered since Dec. 11, 2023
- Chris Rinkus, registered Feb. 20, 2026
- Amy Wickliffe, registered since Dec. 11, 2023
In early June, the company announced an expansion of its 13+ content setting, which “is designed to hide content that’s inappropriate for teens in places like Feed and Reels, and to limit teens’ ability to interact with Profiles, Pages, Groups and Events that primarily post inappropriate content.”
Meanwhile, the senate’s failure to pass the bill “should not be viewed as opposition,” said Sen. Lindsey Tichenor, R-Smithfield. A bill stalling often represents “a matter of the legislative process and the need for deliberation, especially when a topic is complex,” she said.
“There’s not a shortage of examples we could identify where a proposal took a couple of years or more to get over the finish line. I trust the same is true here,” said Tichenor, who serves on several health and education committees in the Kentucky Senate.
Tichenor called Lockett’s bill an effort to “elevate an important conversation about protecting children online” and “I share his concern that families are navigating an increasingly digital world where technology often moves faster than public policy.”
“As with any complex legislation, there are important questions surrounding implementation, constitutional considerations, the interaction with federal law and ensuring government policy reinforces, not replaces, the essential role parents play in raising their children,” she said. “Those are challenges to solve, not reasons to stop pursuing the goal. I hope to see the proposal brought forward again, and (am) willing to carry the torch in the Senate.”
‘The right thing to do’
Lockett’s passion for social media protections comes from constituent concerns and his own two children, both adults now, he said.
“Social media, of course, was a thing when they were teenagers. I was unaware of—I think probably most people were at that time, just several years ago—were unaware of how dangerous … social media could be,” he said. “I noticed that they spent a lot of time on it…and I was able to curb that.”
In the course of pushing for the legislation, he said, some pushback he heard was “if parents would just be parents … then the government wouldn’t have to be involved.”
“While that’s a good statement, and somewhat may be true, what happens with the kids that don’t have parents that are as involved, or don’t have parents at all?” he said. “This is the right thing to do for our Kentucky kids. This is the right thing to do because I believe it is the government’s responsibility to protect its citizens.”
This is especially true, he said, because it involves “children who don’t understand what’s happening to their own brain.”
“This is something I believe that this is the right thing to do, while not being heavy handed from a government standpoint, while not encroaching on First Amendment rights, but at the same time holding these big tech companies accountable to say ‘you’re not going to profit billions of dollars every year off the backs of our children while their brains are destroyed by your product,’” he said. “It did become kind of a personal mission, and still is.”
He plans to introduce HB227 again in 2027.
‘Our brains are just so moldable’
Cornett, who works in Graves County for now and hopes to go to college soon, quit vaping by sophomore year. She didn’t like how it made her feel, and always suffered from headaches.
“Our brains are just so moldable,” she said. “And with us being so young….that was such a big, impactful time of our lives.”
During her freshman year, the Too Good for Drugs program came into her class. Cornett recalls sitting right in front and listening to every word of the presentation.
“I’m putting this stuff into my body, and I don’t even know if I want this in my body,” she recalled thinking. “I’m doing it to fit in.”
She now uses social media for her work at the health department in Graves County and says it’s now a positive outlet because she uses it to educate people about mental health. She still tries to limit her personal time on social media, though, and recently took a 5-month hiatus.
“I think I wasted a lot of time scrolling,” she said. “I spent so much extra time on there that I shouldn’t, because I’m so much more productive now.”
Bowling Green teenager Cayden Dunn got a phone around second grade. For a long time, social media was a way to connect with his speech and debate community. Around sixth grade, he said, it turned into a more urgent tool.
“It wasn’t just, ‘oh, I’m trying to connect with people that I can’t talk to on a daily basis,’” he said. “It was more of, ‘even though I can see you tomorrow morning, and even though I’ll see you at school, let’s talk tonight,’” said Dunn, 17.
Dunn’s mom helped shield him from more addictive features of social media, he said, but he saw it sucking in the people around him, denting people’s ability to form personal relationships outside a digital world.
“I’ve definitely seen how me and another person are having a one-on-one conversation, and they’re scrolling through their phone at the same time, and how that can kind of impact day to day life, and how we build relationships in our new era,” he said. “It kind of makes me feel unheard, because I’m a huge eye contact person.”
Dunn graduated from Bowling Green High School this year and will begin college courses at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire this fall with the aim of working in law or politics.
Bullying and connectivity: The duality of social media
Shannon Moody, the incoming executive director of Kentucky Youth Advocates, said social media’s duality is that it can certainly help with connectivity when there is none otherwise available, like during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it can also intensify underlying mental health issues.
“Especially during points of isolation, kids were able to use social media as a means to stay connected to their friends and their peers, which is really important. We want that connectivity,” Moody said. “Where we see social media become problematic, and this is especially true for children who are already prone to anxiety or depression, but social media can exacerbate signs of anxiety and depression and other mental health issues like eating disorders that especially impact young girls, but impact a lot of young people generally.”
Young people tend to compare themselves to edited, polished images they see online, Moody said, which can also lead to depression and anxiety.
Cornett experienced this comparison; she was anxious about her clothes, the vehicle she drove, even where she was in life, all because she saw glamorized videos online that told her what her life should look like.
And bullying is also easier, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence that enables people to “post photos that are there that are not real, that are generated,” Moody said.
Dunn, the Bowling Green teenager, believes the 24/7 nature of social media is a key part of the puzzle that makes bullying “widespread” and “almost unescapable.”
“Social media did not invent bullying, but I feel like it kind of removed the final barrier for it going back generations,” he said.
Social media keeps people keyed into connection or bullying long after school ends, he said, and it “penetrates every aspect of your life.”
“A hurtful comment, a rumor, an embarrassing photo, all of those things kind of stay with you all day,” Dunn said.
The algorithm system doesn’t help, said Aleah Stigall, 17. She described a spiral: If a person likes a video based on their mood, their feed will be filled with that content, which can be harmful in a depressive or anxiety episode.
“I could like a couple things, and then it’s all I see,” she said. “So, sometimes I really struggle with that.”
Stigall, who just graduated from Boyle County High School and will attend the University of Kentucky this fall, started an educational initiative called “Disconnect to Connect: Let’s Get Real.”
She goes into schools and encourages students to build connections offline because in 2019, she felt phones were already replacing human connection.
“I went to a sleepover with all my friends, and back in 2019 I didn’t have a phone yet, so all of my friends had phones, so instead of doing all of the fun girly sleepover things, they just wanted to watch TikTok or make TikToks,” Stigall said. “I really struggled with that. Especially as an only child, I was looking for an opportunity to get out of my house and spend time with my friends, and I just did not get that.”
Moody, with Kentucky Youth Advocates, said the concern for children is valid: Excessive screen times impact sleep and can cause social media addiction and other mental health issues.
“There’s a lot of concerns, and especially with bills like House Bill 227, I think the aim there was to address those addictive features, put in some common sense protections,” Moody said. “I think we also need to understand that a lot of the age verification processes and things of that nature are really hard to enforce, especially on the state level, if those platforms are willing to even adhere to state policy changes.”
Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
