Legislating the Schoolyard Online: Do Anti-Cyberbullying Laws Reduce Youth Suicide Risk?

Abstract

Between 2006 and 2015, 48 U.S.\ states adopted laws requiring schools to address cyberbullying—yet youth suicide rates continued rising throughout this period. I exploit the staggered timing of state anti-cyberbullying legislation to estimate its causal effect on adolescent mental health using the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (1991–2017). Employing both Sun and Abraham (2021) heterogeneity-robust difference-in-differences and standard two-way fixed effects, I find that anti-cyberbullying laws had no statistically significant effect on suicide ideation, suicide attempts, or depressive symptoms among high school students. The TWFE estimate for suicide ideation is 0.111 percentage points (SE = 0.457, $p = 0.81$); for depression, $-0.202$ (SE = 0.423, $p = 0.63$). The one borderline-significant Sun-Abraham estimate—for suicide attempts (1.170 pp, $p = 0.047$)—is in the wrong direction (an increase) and vanishes under randomization inference ($p = 0.26$), consistent with a false positive. The null extends to states with criminal penalties for cyberbullying and persists across sex, suggesting that legislative mandates—whether through school policy requirements or criminal sanctions—are insufficient to meaningfully reduce the mental health burden of online harassment among adolescents. These findings inform the current debate over social media regulation by demonstrating that first-generation anti-cyberbullying statutes did not deliver measurable mental health benefits, underscoring the need for more targeted interventions.