Gen Z girl looking at smartphone screen feeling upset scrolling on social media.
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Governments around the world are making efforts to crack down on teen social media use amid mounting evidence of potential harms, but critics argue blanket bans are an ineffective quick fix.
Australia became the first country to enforce a sweeping social media ban for under-16s in December, requiring platforms like Meta’s Instagram, ByteDance’s TikTok, Alphabet’s YouTube, Elon Musk’s X, and Reddit to implement age verification measures or face penalties.
Several European countries are now looking to follow Australia’s lead, with the U.K., Spain, France, and Austria drafting their own proposals. Although a national ban in the U.S. looks unlikely, state-level legislation is underway.
It comes after Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Threads, faced two separate defeats in trials related to child safety and social media harms in March.
A Santa Fe jury found Meta misled users about child safety on its apps. The next day, a Los Angeles jury ruled that Meta and YouTube designed platform features that contributed to a plaintiff’s mental health harms.
These developments are set to “unleash a lot more legislation,” Sonia Livingstone, social psychology professor and director of the London School of Economics’ Digital Futures for Children center, told CNBC.
However, Livingstone said a social media ban for teens is a slapdash solution from governments that have failed to properly police tech giants for years.
“I think the argument for a ban is an admission of failure that we cannot regulate companies, so we can only restrict children,” she said, explaining that the U.S. and Europe already have a lot of legislation in the books that isn’t being enforced.
“When are governments really going to enforce, raise the stakes on fines, ban the companies if necessary for not complying,” she added.
Enforce existing laws
Experts argue the sector has for too long escaped accountability and the rigid requirements faced by other industries.
“[Governments] should be implementing the law [and] big tech companies should be facing a slew of regulatory interventions that forbid a whole series of practices that they currently do,” Livingstone said.
She highlighted the U.K.’s Online Safety Act, which “requires safety by design” — this means features such as Snapchat’s “Quick Add” that invite teens to befriend others should be stopped, according to Livingstone.
Livingstone believes that a blanket ban wouldn’t even be under discussion if social media companies had undergone appropriate premarket testing to establish if their features are safe for their target audience.
“There are lots of areas where we have a well functioning market that requires testing to establish it meets the standards…[before products] can go into the market,” she said. “If we did that for AI and for social media, we would be in a whole different place and we’d not be having to talk about banning children from anything.”
Josh Golin, executive director at Boston-based non-profit Fairplay for Kids, told CNBC that he’d like to see “privacy and safety by design legislation rather than blanket bans” across the U.S.
This includes passing the Children and Teen Online Privacy Protection Act to put a stop to personal data-driven advertising towards children, so there’s “less financial incentive for social media companies to target and addict kids.”
Golin added that passing the Senate’s version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is also key to ensuring platforms are held legally responsible for design features that can cause addiction or other harms.
He added that Meta has already successfully lobbied to stop KOSA even though it passed the Senate in 2024. But, if it continues to block legislation further, Golin thinks this could see further pressure “line up behind bans because addictive and unsafe is not OK.”
A ban is ‘lazy’ and ‘unfair’
A sweeping social media ban only punishes a generation of young people who have become increasingly dependent on online means of interaction, according to Livingstone. She said bans are a “lazy” solution from governments and an “unfair” outcome for young people.
“It’s the 15 years in which we don’t let our children go outside and meet their friends. It’s the 15 years in which we stopped funding parks and youth clubs for them to meet in,” she said.
“So a ban now is to say to ‘Children, we can’t make the regulation work. We can’t update it fast enough. We haven’t built you anything else to do, but that’s just tough. We’ve terrified your parents into feeling that there’s nothing they can do, and we’re going to take you away from the service where you hoped you would feel some sociability and entertainment.”
Dr. Victoria Nash, associate professor and senior policy fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, described social media bans as an “extreme” measure that alienates young people from the benefits these platforms provide.
“We know children and young people get their news online and through apps, so you cut that off,” she said. “My view would be that I don’t think this justifies a ban. To me, what this justifies is more responsible behavior by social platforms to cut down on their most harmful features.”
She said that bans could drive young people and children to less regulated corners of the internet, which don’t have the same protections.
Many Australian teens flouted the social media ban when it first came into force in December. A BBC report found that downloads of VPNs, which hide users’ locations to avoid country-specific restrictions, increased before the ban.
Additionally, downloads of some apps that weren’t yet affected such as Lemon8, Yope and Discord also surged in the days after the law came into effect, per the report.
“I think it [a ban] certainly gets rid of all the harmful aspects, but it gets rid of the good ones too and I’m just not yet sure if that’s proportionate,” Nash added.
