Why we shouldn’t ban kids from social media

Grown-ups around the world have spent the last year desperately trying to get kids to put down their phones. Worries about kids’ screen time are far from new (you could argue that they are nearly a century old), but in recent months, high-profile experts have raised the concern that social media use among young people is not just an annoying time suck but a bona fide public health crisis.

Rather than relying on parents to limit kids’ phone time (which, as many parents can attest, is sometimes easier said than done), a growing number of lawmakers are taking matters into their own hands by passing legislation that seeks to keep kids off social media entirely.

Australia made headlines late last year with its law barring children under 16 from social platforms. The law will require platforms like TikTok and Instagram to take “reasonable steps” to verify that their users are 16 or over, or face up to $32 million in fines (it’s not yet clear exactly which platforms will be subject to the law, but YouTube and WhatsApp are likely to be excluded, according to the New York Times).

Meanwhile, a Florida law scheduled to go into effect this month requires platforms to verify that their users are over 14, and that 14- and 15-year-olds have parental consent. The law, which also does not mention specific social media sites, has been challenged in court.

Similar restrictions are in place or under consideration in Utah, Texas, and elsewhere. They join some voluntary efforts by platforms to restrict kids’ use, like Instagram Teen accounts, as well as increasingly widespread school smartphone bans.

The Australian law was inspired, at least in part, by psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, which argues that smartphones and social media are behind a rise in reported depression and anxiety among young people in the last 10 years. There’s no conclusive research linking social media to these increases, but there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that scrolling on phones makes kids (and adults) feel bad, and the warnings of smartphone critics — including US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who called last year for a warning label on social media platforms — have reached the ears of lawmakers.

”Social media has a social responsibility,” Australian Communications Minister Michelle Rowland told the country’s Parliament last year. “That’s why we are making big changes to hold platforms to account for user safety.”

It’s not at all clear, however, how Australia’s law, which gave social media companies like Meta and X a year to put age guardrails in place, or any of the other social media bans in development around the world, are really going to work.

Experts say there are better ways to mitigate some of the potential dangers of social media than trying to institute an age-based ban. Those methods include reporting requirements and restrictions on tracking to make the experience of being online better for everyone, not just kids. “We should all be getting less algorithmically driven content,” Devorah Heitner, author of the book Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World, told me.

Every law banning kids from social media has to reckon with one basic problem: It’s notoriously hard to tell how old someone is on the internet. One approach is to require people to show a government-issued ID every time they visit a website, but that entails “a pretty serious trade-off in terms of privacy and surveillance,” said Shaanan Cohney, a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne who studies the intersection of technology and the law. Forcing people to show an official ID to access social media platforms would destroy online anonymity for adults as well as kids and make it easier for companies, hackers, and governments to spy on people.

Because of these concerns, researchers are working on ways to determine people’s age without asking for ID, by analyzing their faces, hand gestures, or other attributes. But these technologies aren’t ready for widespread use, Cohney said. Some facial age-matching algorithms, for example, have been shown to be less accurate on darker-skinned faces.

A lot of research also neglects the fact that teenagers may try to get around any age-verification systems: “A 14-year-old attempting to access social media is going to put on makeup and match their hand gestures in order to try and look as old as possible in order to defeat the technology,” Cohney said.

If kids can easily skirt the verification system, experts say parents could be left with a false sense of security and companies with little incentive to make their platforms safer because they can simply claim that kids aren’t using them.

“The age bans could actually let the companies off the hook in some ways,” Heitner said.

Enforcement issues are only part of the problem with the bans, some experts (and kids) say. Even if they work as intended, the laws would cut young people off not just from negative experiences on social media but from positive ones as well. Social media platforms, for example, can help LGBTQ+ youth connect with people who understand what they’re going through, something that’s especially important for kids in rural areas who may not know many other openly queer or trans people.

Social media platforms have also become a core part of our news and political environment. “We’ve seen internationally known and locally important activists at 14, at 15,” as well as influential teen journalists, Keitner said. Banning them from social media would silence their voices.

“I use my Instagram all the time for suicide prevention advocacy,” Anjali Verma, an 18-year-old high school senior and the National Student Council President, told me. “For me, social media has been a vehicle to make change.”

Verma campaigned with the ACLU against the Kids Online Safety Act, a federal bill that many advocacy groups feared would prompt platforms to censor content about LGBTQ+ people and their rights. But she’s not against all regulation of social media companies: “Tech platforms need to be held accountable to make sure that things that are toxic or harmful on these platforms aren’t being overly publicized” to young people, she said. (Meta’s recent decision to abandon third-party fact-checkers in favor of an X-style “community notes” approach is unlikely to help matters, and could expose adults and kids alike to more misinformation.)

Some experts say the best way to hold tech companies accountable is to require them to treat all of their users better. Getting targeted weight-loss ads on Instagram may be more damaging for teens than for adults, but “I would say none of us should be targeted with that stuff,” Heitner said. By the same token, platforms need to create better reporting and enforcement mechanisms to root out sexual harassment and threatening behavior.

In the meantime, it’s important to teach kids how algorithms and targeted ads work, as well as how to handle conflicts that start online, Heitner said. Verma has done some of this teaching herself, training middle school students to be “digital first responders” and report unsafe content or behavior.

“Regardless of these social media bans, we’re going to have social media in the future,” she said. For her, it’s important to teach kids “how to navigate that and be educated, so it doesn’t seem like it’s a scary, daunting thing.”

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In December, I asked for your thoughts on the positives of social media. One reader, Nicole, reached out with three book recommendations, which I’m now passing along to you:

Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World by Devorah Heitner. This reader recommendation inspired me to interview the author!

Digital for Good: Raising Kids to Thrive in an Online World by Richard Culatta. An expert in educational technology gives tips for helping kids become good digital citizens.

Please Unsubscribe, Thanks!: How to Take Back Our Time, Attention, and Purpose in a Relentless World by Julio Vincent Gambuto. Okay, this one might be less about the positives: The author and filmmaker gives tips for going on a “tech elimination diet.”

I love book recommendations, both for kids and for adults! Please keep sending to me at anna.north@vox.com.