Published: April 2026
INTRODUCTION
Since Australia banned social-media for all under-16s in December 2025, governments worldwide have debated introducing legislation banning social media for children. The House of Lords in the UK passed an amendment to ban social media for under-16s in January 2026, but this amendment was rejected by the House of Commons two months later. Instead, the government is consulting on introducing restrictions [Ref: BBC News]. Nonetheless, the idea seems to have substantial support: over 70 per cent of adults across the US, Europe and UK support a social-media ban for under-16s [Ref: YouGov].
As the use and power of social-media sites have increased – especially with the change in social-media feeds, from running on timelines to algorithms – the harm caused by social media has increasingly been seen to require government intervention. For example, the Conservative Party in the UK has been pushing hard for a ban [Ref: Conservative Party]. But is a ban the right policy?
The increasing use of algorithms – which tend to reinforce particular topics and sources of content at the expense of others – along with the rise of short-form content, has raised concerns, as content is no longer shown based on the user’s friends and contacts. Instead, the content users see is chosen by the service providers and pushed for profit and maximum engagement. Commentators have argued that this has fueled polarisation and social fragmentation, as young people are no longer operating socially online, but are atomised by highly individualised content.
However, there is a lack of consensus over what should be included in a social-media ban. For example, Australia decided not to include YouTube, although it did stop under-16s having their own profile; many have challenged the established definition of ‘social media’. YouTube, while having a different platform style and allowing for longer videos than some other services, is the most popular platform for children and remains driven by the same largely unregulated, algorithmic content as other short-form video platforms, like TikTok. Even though the youngest children have moved to YouTube Kids, and younger teenagers are not allowed to have their own profiles, a large volume of content is still consumed. Many commentators and critics claim this is still causing harm as it allows for large amounts of misinformation and ‘addictive’ content to be viewed by children. This raises the question: what are the harms of social media – is it the interaction with strangers, or the consumption of short-form content? What are we trying to protect children from?
There are very few adults who believe that nothing should be done about children on social media. However, some question whether a blanket ban is the best way forward [Ref: Guardian]. Many are concerned that a ban from mainstream sites will either be ineffective, because children can find workarounds, or it will drive young people to ‘underground’ online spaces, taking media consumption further away from oversight and accountability. Moreover, others believe that by bringing the government in to regulate what children do at home, the authority of parents is being damaged and the relationship between parents and children is undermined. In this view, children are no longer socialised by the authority of their parents, but by having their behaviour dictated by the government [Ref: Spiked].
There are further concerns that a social-media ban for children will be used as a ‘Trojan horse’ – giving way to a mandatory digital-ID system for adults. Proponents present a national digital-ID system as a safer alternative, rather than being open and honest about the risks of data breaches and the loss of anonymity online [Ref: Spectator]. The discourse of protecting children, becomes a way to control and censor adults.
Moreover, by enforcing a ban to stop children using social-media sites, governments may be allowing tech companies to avoid accountability for any content that does still reach children, since those children are not meant to be there in the first place. Could this give social-media services an excuse to deregulate their content further?
DEBATE IN CONTEXT
What is the evidence?
In March 2026, Kaley (her surname anonymised for privacy), a 20-year-old woman from California, won a landmark case against Meta and Google, following the claim that these social-media platforms were deliberately addictive and had therefore damaged her mental health as she was growing up [Ref: BBC News]. Those who brought the legal case to court argued that the ‘infinitely scrollable feed and video autoplay are designed to keep people on the apps and have made the products addictive’ and have thereby caused harm to the mental health of children and young people [Ref: Guardian].
Rob Nicholls notes that this is particularly an issue as social-media companies are claimed to be using the ‘behavioral and neurobiological techniques used by poker machines’ to maximise youth engagement and, by proxy, advertising revenue, as younger users are easier to capture [Ref: The Conversation]. This can lead teenagers to spend a large amount of time online – as demonstrated by Kaley, who spent 16 hours a day on social media. Thus, young people can clearly be seen as a huge opportunity for companies to maximise profit through engagement. Does this mean that social-media companies have prioritised profit over the mental health of their users?
Since Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book, The Anxious Generation, governments, intellectuals and parents have pointed the finger at social media for the 10 per cent rise in mental-health issues among young people [Ref: UCL]. In 2022, 34 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds in the UK said they suffered from anxiety or depression [Ref: Resolution Foundation]. Some claim this rise is related to the increased use of algorithms, as they can create self-reinforcing tendencies to serve up extreme or harmful content, creating communities connected by mental illness, and encouraging young people to open up in the online space rather than to trusted adults.
As the father of Molly Russell, who committed suicide in 2017 after engaging with a high volume of content related to suicide and self-harm, argued: ‘That inescapable stream of harmful content, the cumulative effect that content would have had on a growing brain, a young person, a 14-year-old, turned Molly from that bright, hopeful young person into someone who unbelievably thought she was a burden and a problem and that the best thing for her to do would be to end her life.’ [Ref: Guardian]
However, this claim that social media has caused the rise in mental ill-health has been contested. Others argue that the rise of mental-health diagnoses is caused by other social issues, such as poverty, instability and insecurity. A study by the NHS highlighted that those who suffered from a mental disorder were more likely to be economically disadvantaged, with parents not being able to afford sports clubs, activities, adequate clothes and shoes for their daily life [Ref: NHS]. This was the position taken by Meta following Kaley’s case of social-media addiction, who claimed that Kaley’s home life, ‘with parents who were unstable, critical of her appearance and at times emotionally, verbally and physically abusive’, was more to blame for her mental-health issues than the vast amount of time spent online [Ref: BBC News].
Moreover, there could be many other reasons why mental-health issues in younger generations may have increased. With rapid social change, rising financial instability, and increased concerns about climate change reflecting often gloomy and apocalyptic narratives, is it surprising that young people feel more anxious? And as there has been an increased discourse around well-being and mental health, are the rising numbers more due to the expansion of diagnostic categories and a reduction in stigma around mental-health issues? [Ref: Psychology Today] Is social media just an easy scapegoat for rising diagnoses of mental-health problems in younger generations?
Letting the young live: can children still run wild?
Social media is not only seen to cause direct harm through the content it promotes, but also through its ability to distract children from more meaningful or valuable activities. Short, colourful videos have replaced reading, and playing FIFA online has drawn kids away from playing outside, keeping children pent up in the house and diminishing their attention spans.
The UK education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, stated: ‘Every child deserves a childhood – real experiences, real friendships, real opportunities. We are determined to make that a reality, both inside and outside the classroom.’ [Ref: Gov.uk] However, there is a contradiction emerging, as while advocates argue that we need a ban on social media to encourage young people to go back to the ‘good and healthy’ pursuits of youth clubs and sports teams, there are increasingly fewer spaces for young people to go. Since 2010 in the UK, £1.2 billion has been stripped from youth-service budgets, and from 2011 to 2023, over 1,200 council-run youth centres in England and Wales were closed [Ref: Unison]. With the privatisation of sports pitches, and the loss of public spaces for young people, where can they go if not online? Are smartphones pervading childhood simply because there are no longer the spaces offline for children to play and to interact?
Giving way to anxious parenting: the damage of safetyism continued
Over the past 30 years or so, parents have increasingly believed that their children would be safer kept at home, rather than roaming the streets of the city or exploring the depths of the forest. This has led to a substantial rise in children staying inside.
As far back as 1995, the UK children’s charity Kidscape noted parental fears of abduction and assault, while other research showed a sharp decline in children going to school on their own compared to the early 1970s [Ref: Independent]. A survey from 2016 showed that 75 per cent of children in the UK now spend less time outside than prison inmates [Ref: Guardian]. As parents have become more concerned about cars, strangers and dirt, children have spent more time online. How else can children be entertained when they are kept inside and can no longer play, unsupervised, with their friends? Children have been pushed onto screens due to parental anxieties about the outside world, meaning they have had to find new ways to build connections and friendships while playing creatively away from the surveillance of their parents [Ref: The Conversation].
Safetyism – where safety in general, and emotional safety in particular, is prioritised over all else – has had many negative impacts on young people. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, in their 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind, argued that it has led to a generation of more risk-averse and less resilient young people. If young people are not allowed to play unsupervised, and given the opportunity to take risks, how can they be expected to grow up?
This argument can also be applied to social media. If we don’t socialise young people with social media – in its good, bad and ugly forms – could their ability to use and understand it as adults be worse? Social-media bans are often called to protect children from the vast amount of unregulated content, the rise of misinformation and AI-generated images. These are said to be damaging for children who are now growing up in a post-truth world and are no longer able to have an objective sense of true and false, or right and wrong.
Moreover, as social-media bans also require digital-ID for adults, they will negatively impact the freedom and capabilities of young people in the future. The requirement for adults to identify themselves online, thereby removing anonymity on the web, is infantilising, as citizens are no longer seen to be trusted by governments to act freely online. Evidence shows that digital-ID can be used by governments to track and censor whistle-blowers, journalists and those with more contrarian views. This could have adverse effects on young people’s ‘mental health’, as it could lead to increased anxiety and paranoia, as they occupy a ‘surveilled digital panopticon where every action you take online is tied to your government ID’ [Ref: Guardian]. Both young people and adults will be restricted from speaking freely and making mistakes online, damaging their ability to think critically and openly.
However, children themselves argue that they are better at dealing with misinformation than those over 50. And a study by UC Berkeley demonstrated that the best way to make children better at dealing with misinformation is to expose them to more, not less [Ref: UC Berkeley]. This study highlighted that ‘children in the more unreliable environments were more likely to debunk potential misinformation’, suggesting that it is better for children to be on largely unregulated platforms as they are more critical of the content they consume. This warns us against driving children to their own ‘protected’ platforms, as the appearance of safety gives a false sense of security and allows for more information to go unchecked, a phenomenon that has been seen on YouTube Kids [Ref: Common Sense Media].
Pushing them offline – pushing them further away
As there are fewer offline spaces for children to explore, concerns are being raised that if they are forced off mainstream social-media sites, they will be pushed onto darker, less well-known corners of the internet. As Dr Harry Dyer argues: ‘A ban won’t stop teenagers using social media; it just pushes them into riskier behaviour. They’ll turn to VPNs, fake accounts, and unregulated corners of the internet where there are fewer safeguards, not more.’ [Ref: University of East Anglia] With limited options for real-life activities, and parents still being anxious about letting kids play freely outside, it is likely they will remain at home with their computers. If mainstream social media is unavailable to them because of a ban, such children may have nothing but the ‘dark web’ to explore [Ref: Unicef].
Moreover, social-media bans may separate children from adults even further. Children may be discouraged from sharing bad experiences online and could increasingly hide their social-media profiles from trusted adults. Instead of encouraging conversations with adults, and education about the potential risks of technology, children could be pushed out and left to deal with the difficulties on their own. Does making them more isolated and vulnerable to exploitation, misinformation and abuse do more harm?
This is particularly concerning for the relationship between children and their parents. As it stands, different families have different rules over social-media use; some parents don’t allow smartphones at the dinner table, while others limit screen time to a certain number of hours a day. The rules are currently decided by the family for the circumstances of that family, as parents should know their children’s needs and be responsible for acting in relation to them.
By using the law to manage parental decision making, is the government undermining parents and questioning their competence to manage the family? This could have a negative impact on families as children are encouraged by the state to question the competence, responsibility and authority of their own parents, and undermine their position as ‘trusted adults’. Yet the fact that many parents are struggling to control the screen time of their children, especially to keep teenagers offline, can be seen as they feel overwhelmed by the digital tide and ‘powerless to protect their own kids’ as social media has become so central to their children’s everyday lives [Ref: The Free Press].
Who is responsible and who is accountable?
Social-media companies have often claimed that they try to enforce regulations to protect children. Since 2015, Instagram has required users to be ‘at least 13’ years of age, but has consistently failed to properly verify accounts [Ref: Guardian]. Similarly, YouTube Kids, while claiming it is providing an ‘easy-to-navigate environment, (with) a wide range of high-quality videos, parental controls and fun features for kids’, has been criticised for the inappropriate clips and ‘AI slop’ that saturates its content [Ref: Futurism]. While the harms are different, the ability of YouTube to continue to push harmful content into feeds while claiming to protect children creates concerns for parents who are told that YouTube is safe for kids.
This has similarly been the case for Meta, which argues that ‘teens under 18 are automatically placed into teen accounts’ which means they can only message or follow people that they are already connected to. However, this has been largely ineffective, as they have been ‘very good’ at linking minors with predators, and still show teenagers harmful or inappropriate content related to body dysmorphia, self-harm or inappropriate sexualization [Ref: Guardian]. This suggests that despite knowing that there are huge numbers of young people on social media, the companies running these services don’t recognise their duty of care to younger users and don’t invest their time or resources into reducing the exploitation that occurs on their sites.
Freya India argues that the most detrimental impacts of social media come from the exploitation of insecurity caused by the unrelenting drive for profit by tech companies. This, she argues, has been at the forefront of the most recent technological changes, especially in the drive from timelines to algorithms, as social-media sites have been focused on pushing the most outrageous and capturing content in the pursuit of profit [Ref: GIRLS].
With this in mind, if social media is banned for under-16s, who is responsible for enforcing it? The UK’s Online Safety Act 2023 ‘puts a range of new duties on social-media companies and search services, making them more responsible for their users’ safety on their platforms’ [Ref: Gov.uk]. Since 2023, platforms have been required to prevent children from accessing harmful and age-inappropriate content, and Ofcom has been expected to regulate and enforce these protections. However, some argue that this has not worked because companies take insufficient responsibility for the well-being of children, prioritising commercial interests instead [Ref: LSE] and regulatory bodies have struggled to hold companies to account due to the large amounts of activity taking place overseas [Ref: UK Parliament].
With this in mind, can we trust social-media companies to keep kids offline and enforce the bans put in place?
READINGS
For
It is no fluke that social media platforms are addictive and causing harm. They were designed that way
Van Badham Guardian 27 March 2026
Of course we should ban kids from social media
Ian Holdroyd New Statesman 2 April 2026
Protecting children from social media is not moral panic
Justine Roberts Financial Times 28 January 2026
This European nation is banning social media for children – what the UK can learn
Graham Keely i Paper 9 February 2026
Against
The case against social media bans, prohibitionists rely on faulty arguments
Olympia Campbell UnHerd 2 February 2026
There is no evidence that social media harms children’s mental health
Christopher Ferguson Spectator 14 February 2026
Parents, not the EU, should decide what kids can do online
Joanna Williams Substack 29 May 2025
Age restrictions alone won’t keep children safe online
UNICEF 10 December 2025
In depth
Why the World Is Drawing a Line on Social Media for Kids
Jonathan Haidt Substack 17 February 2026
Smartphones have not destroyed a generation
Pete, Posting Alone Substack 27 March 2024
Backgrounders
A social media ban for kids puts all our privacy at risk
Maya Thomas Spectator 27 April 2026
The countries that have social media bans, or are planning to implement one
Sky News 8 April 2026
The dangerous lesson from Australia’s social media ban
Joanna Williams Spectator 15 April 2026
Why I no longer support social media bans for teenagers
Stella O’Malley UnHerd 26 March 2026
The world wants to ban children from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all
Taylor Lorenz Guardian 2 March 2026
I research the harm that can come to teenagers on social media. I don’t support a ban
Emily Setty The Conversation 21 January 2026
Only parents should decide if their kids use social media
Ella Whelan Spiked 21 January 2026
Can We Save Kids from Social Media?
David Remnick New Yorker 13 March 2026
Countless horror stories linked to social media – but a ban for children isn’t cut-and-dried case
Sky News 29 March 2026
Australia’s teen social media ban is a flop. But there’s no joy in ‘I told you so’
Samantha Floreani Guardian 1 April 2026
Don’t blame parents for ‘cotton-wool kids’
Helene Guldberg Spiked 6 August 2008
Audio / Visual
Social Media Bans: Are We at a Global Turning Point? (Jonathan Haidt)
Radical with Amol Rajan