It is clear that social media affects mental health and poses a danger to children and adolescents. One study showed it took just 40 minutes of browsing for a platform in Mexico to recommend content to a teenage girl that contains references to suicide.
What’s most concerning is that these aren’t isolated glitches but rather a result of how algorithms are designed to hook users and keep them on the platforms longer. With infinite scrolling and the instant gratification it provides, social media can become as addictive as cigarettes.
These factors, coupled with concerns about screen time and other worries, have led many countries to enact bans or restrictions on social media for kids. Last year, Australia became the first country to try to keep people under 16 off the apps. In June, the United Arab Emirates enacted a measure locking youth under 15 out of platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and X.
Just last week, the UK revealed a plan to institute a midnight social media curfew next spring for 16- and 17-year-olds—one they can opt out of. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in June that he hoped to pass a more stringent ban on social media for under-16s “before Christmas.” Starmer formally resigned earlier this week, but the legislation is likely to proceed. On Tuesday, lawmakers in France passed a bill banning social media for anyone under 15. President Emmanuel Macron is expected to sign it into law.
However, something is happening that, at first glance, seems contradictory. Many of the organizations that have spent years researching these risks and defending children’s rights are not supporting such bans. On the contrary, they warn that disconnecting children from these spaces might address the symptoms but leave the root causes of the problem intact—and could even create new risks.
Australia’s measure was hailed internationally and held up as a model. Six months after its implementation, however, seven out of 10 parents reported that their children still have accounts on Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat. This is not surprising. Not only because adolescence is typically a time of rebellion but also because it is natural to resist being excluded from spaces where a large part of their social life takes place and where the people they’ve grown up with are hanging out.
Social media platforms are much more than just entertainment for young people, especially for those who grew up during the Covid-19 pandemic. Comparing them to cigarettes ignores the fact that they also serve important functions. They are spaces for socializing, learning, and accessing information that is often unavailable elsewhere, especially in places where educational gaps and disparities in access to public services persist. Generally speaking, how many times has Reddit saved us with an answer we couldn’t find in a textbook, at school, or at a public institution? And how many times has a YouTube tutorial or a thread on X taught us something that no one else explained to us?
Furthermore, social media can provide a sense of community and a space for self-expression to those who don’t always find it outside the internet. For teenagers who belong to historically marginalized groups—such as LGBTQ+ people, people of color, or people with disabilities—these spaces can also offer an opportunity to explore and build their identities with greater freedom, find role models, and feel less alone.
Precisely because social media is much more than just entertainment, it is worth asking whether some solutions might simply replace one harm with another. Age verification, for example, involves collecting highly sensitive data, making platforms more attractive to cybercriminals and putting the privacy and safety of minors at risk. This is not a hypothetical. When Discord implemented its age verification system in 2025, it suffered a data breach involving more than 70,000 identity documents.
