Social Media Bans Are Gaining Popularity. They’re Also a Bad Idea

French teens are about to start the school year with access to one less vice.

On July 23, France’s Parliament approved legislation that will ban children under the age of 15 from accessing social media. Under the law — which President Emanuel Macron has said he will sign — new verification requirements will go into effect in September with the goal of preventing children under 15 from opening new accounts. In January, the law will expand retroactively to encompass all existing social media accounts. Meanwhile, a host of other countries across Europe, Asia and Latin America have passed or are preparing similar laws to curtail social media use by minors. The U.K. government and China, for example, have instituted “late-night bans” for users under 18.

But while there is popular support for reform, the wave of social media bans has drawn pointed criticism from digital security experts, free speech advocates and young people themselves.

Amnesty International has raised concerns over the impacts on vulnerable populations such as LGBTQ+ children who lack support networks. “A ban that furthers isolation, and obliterates connections and community, will not meet the government’s objectives of improving young people’s lives,” Amnesty said , when Australia was considering the world’s first social media ban for users under 16. There are also major privacy concerns. Age verification involves giving more personal data to the same companies that have been accused of manipulating data to create addictive products. This personal information would remain online and vulnerable to leaks and hacks.

But perhaps the most important line of critique involves the record of failure wherever age verification has been tried. A study released in early July by the testing firm KJR found that many of the age verification tools used by social media platforms were failing to even request proof of age. A Reuters analysis of Australia’s age verification law concluded that the failure was systemwide: “While the process has so far focused on the accuracy of photo-based age-assurance software, the initial vetting stage — which guesses a person’s age range based on their general online ​activity — does not appear to be picking up young users for further checks.”

We should not leave tech companies in charge of deciding what to censor.

These failures have not lessened the interest of the U.S. public and lawmakers in online “safety” bills. A Pew Research poll found 56% of respondents support a social media ban for children under 16, with only 21% opposed. In the Senate, momentum has been building behind the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act, which would go beyond age verification and “require government-directed moderation policies for online speech, and even create new rules about private and encrypted communications,” as the Electronic Frontier Foundation puts it .

These efforts reflect a growing understanding that social media presents multiple potential harms to young people. A 2023 systematic review of scientific studies on adolescents and social media found connections between social media use and depression. This link is confirmed by internal research from Meta that was released in discovery during a lawsuit filed against the company by the state of Tennessee, one of 42 states to sue the tech giant in 2023 alleging that Facebook and Instagram were designed to create dependency among children. Last year, a New Mexico jury found Meta liable for $375 million in civil penalties for enabling harm against children, including child exploitation. Horror stories of intimate photos sent via Snapchat being used for blackmail or bullying abound, as do manosphere brainwashing stories and TikTok scams.

These are all good arguments for taking action, but not for social media bans that are unlikely to work, assuming they survive constitutional challenges. (In September 2024, a Utah judge blocked that state’s age verification law on free speech grounds.)

There is a better and more direct way to address the social media crisis: regulate tech companies.

Rather than focus on the impossible task of keeping young people off existing social media — as unlikely to succeed as efforts to stop teenagers from accessing cigarettes, alcohol, drugs and “adult” movies — we should be regulating social media companies and placing meaningful limits on what kind of data they can collect. As Human Rights Watch said in comments to a Japanese working group on youth in digital spaces:

Technology companies have long freely gathered vast amounts of personal data from children — piecing them together to deduce intimate characteristics including each child’s identity, location, interests, emotions, health, and relationships — and used this information to design and deliver products and services that prioritize profits over protecting children’s rights and wellbeing. Human Rights Watch’s own research on educational apps — including products recommended in Japan by the Ministry of Education — found that the vast majority secretly surveilled children and sent their data for behavioral advertising. There have also been reports of AI chatbots using data gathered through their conversations with children to nudge them towards self-harm.

Forcing tech companies to be transparent about how their algorithms work would also provide critical insight into how these corporations are deciding what users “want” to see — and more importantly, what gets hidden. But any meaningful regulation must start with data protection, something the U.S. has been notoriously lax about for decades.

The town squares of social media already exist, and the communities people rely on are real.

Young people can find support and learn about sexual health and gender issues, intimate partner abuse, drug safety and politically sensitive topics. For all its toxicity, social media has created countless new ways for people to find support that does not otherwise exist in their immediate communities. That needs to be protected and improved through robustly and transparently moderated hate speech policies ( Meta and X have both made controversial changes to theirs) and a commitment to fighting dis- and misinformation — even if those aren’t easily legislated.

Sadly, in the deregulatory orgy taking place under the current administration, any attempt to rein in tech companies — and force them to make safer products and collect less data — is a nonstarter compared to age-verification technologies that attempt and fail to keep adolescents away from Instagram porn and eating disorder tips. We should not leave tech companies in charge of deciding what to censor in the name of “protecting” children.

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