By: Amanda Reid
From Volume 15 (2025-2026)
Download this article in PDF format from the Jerome Hall Law Library’s Digital Repository.
Abstract:
The recent wave of state-level social media regulation represents an unprecedented experiment in territorial control of digital platforms. While constitutional questions around state authority remain central to these debates, this article examines a distinct but complementary concern: the mathematical reality of how overlapping technical requirements multiply compliance burdens. These laws aim to protect youth online through technical mandates, yet they create a regulatory patchwork that generates multiplicative rather than additive costs. Following combination theory [N(N-1)/2], each new state regulation creates conflict points with existing requirements.
This article analyzes how this regulatory multiplication affects platform architecture, user experience, and safety outcomes. By examining technical requirements from recently enacted state laws, three key findings emerge. First, state-specific technical mandates force fundamental changes to platform architecture, with each new jurisdiction multiplying system complexity that reduce reliability and divert resources from actual safety improvements. Second, contradictory state requirements create compounding operational burdens, particularly disadvantaging smaller platforms and new entrants—potentially leading to strategic market exit from heavily regulated states and increasing market concentration. Third, the regulatory patchwork paradoxically undermines its own safety goals by incentivizing technical workarounds, fragmenting user experience, and constraining safety innovation—effects that compound as platforms attempt to reconcile growing numbers of conflicting state requirements. These findings suggest the need to rethink assumptions about territorial regulation of global platforms and highlight how mathematical principles can help explain the systemic challenges of fragmented digital governance. This research contributes to both practical policy debates about platform regulation and theoretical understanding of scale challenges in digital governance.
