“techno-legal solutionism”—the belief that complex social problems can be solved through legally mandated technical fixes.
Nerd Harder: A Typology of Techno‐Legal Solutionist Logics in Child Online Safety Laws – Reid – 2025 – Policy & Internet – Wiley Online Library
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 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.
Yet lawmakers continue to embrace techno-legal solutionism through policies that attempt to engineer social outcomes via technical mandates.
Techno-legal solutionism follows a long history of techno-determinist and techno-solutionist beliefs that complex social problems can have neat technical solutions (Gardner and Warren 2019; Milan 2020; Morozov 2013; Sætra 2023).
The laws analyzed in this study reveal how techno-legal solutionism manifests in practice. State legislators have embraced a deceptively simple logic: if social media harm children, then we can protect children by controlling how social media platforms operate. This thinking reflects three key assumptions of techno-solutionism: (1) that complex social problems can be reduced to technical specifications; (2) that behavioral outcomes can be engineered through platform design; and (3) that legal mandates can effectively force companies to “nerd harder” at solving social problems.
These patterns reveal how techno-legal solutionism has become the default framework for addressing complex social challenges. Rather than engaging with the multifaceted nature of youth mental health or the complex relationship between technology and society, policymakers have embraced what seems like a simpler path: just make tech companies “nerd harder.”
