{"id":286311,"date":"2026-06-25T09:22:03","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T14:22:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=286311"},"modified":"2026-06-25T09:24:20","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T14:24:20","slug":"banning-teens-from-social-media-is-bad-and-also-doesnt-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2026\/06\/25\/banning-teens-from-social-media-is-bad-and-also-doesnt-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Banning teens from social media is bad and also doesn’t work"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The UK recently passed a new law<\/a> that effectively bans children under the age of 16 from using most social-media platforms, a move that the UK government notes was based explicitly on Australia’s similar law<\/a>, which was passed in 2024 (Britain’s law comes into effect next year). The law covers platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat,\u202fFacebook\u202fand X but it excludes messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal. Some social app features \u2013 such as livestreaming\u202fand the ability to be contacted by strangers \u2013 will be blocked from users under the age of 18, and those features will also be blocked in related services like online gaming apps. According to the UK’s description<\/a>, all of these new rules will be backed up by stronger requirements for age checks. In the preamble to the British version of the law, the government tries to answer the question “Why are these changes being made?” and this is the explanation it gives:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The government ran a national consultation from March to May 2026, one of the largest engagement exercises undertaken by this government. The results showed overwhelming public demand for action, with 9 in 10 parents backing a social media ban for under\u201116s, and two-thirds of young people agreeing under-16s should not be allowed to use at least some social media platforms. These changes reset the rules so that children are protected from the platforms and\u202fonline\u202ffeatures that create the most harm.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

One thing you might notice about this explanation<\/a> is a complete lack of any evidence that such a law a) is necessary and b) works. All we have is a statement that suggests that most parents and young people \u2013 or at least most of those who chose to respond to a request for input \u2013 wanted this law to be passed. Or if not this law specifically, then they at least wanted “action,” whatever that means. I’ll get to the part about whether such laws are necessary, but the lack of data on whether such legislation will work or not is interesting, since the British law is based on an Australian law<\/a> that has been in effect for almost two years now. Surely by now there would be some evidence that it is working? If there is, the British government doesn’t supply any, which isn’t that surprising because as far as I’ve been able to determine that kind of evidence doesn’t exist<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can\u00a0see other issues\u00a0and sign up here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Not only is there no real evidence that the ban is working in terms of protecting kids under 16 from online harms (which themselves are poorly defined), but there’s plenty<\/a> of anecdotal evidence<\/a> to suggest that it isn’t working in a more practical sense \u2013 i.e., it’s not keeping teens off social media in any real way, because there are innumerable ways for them to evade the restrictions with ease. Even the Australian government itself has confirmed this in its recent eSafety report<\/a>, which noted that despite the platforms in question removing or blocking millions of accounts, a survey of parents with teens who had social-media accounts showed that around seven in ten children under 16 remained on social-media platforms despite the legislation (you might wonder why those parents couldn’t just prevent their children from doing so, but answering that question is beyond the scope of this newsletter at the moment).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Australia’s eSafety Commission, which wrote the report<\/a>, blamed most of this failure (not surprisingly) on the platforms and their “poor practices” in abiding by the legislation. The commission says that as a result, it plans to pursue “enforcement action against the platforms that fail to take reasonable steps and demonstrate systemic failure in keeping children aged under 16 off their platform, focusing on those with the highest number of young users, and features and functions associated with harm.” The platforms that are the target of these enforcement actions<\/a> are Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube \u2013 in other words, the platforms that have the vast majority of social-media users, and likely also the vast majority of under-16 users. Potential enforcement actions include publishing a “platform provider notification,” seeking a “court-enforceable undertaking,” and seeking penalties of up to $49.5 million.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong><\/em>: In case you are a first-time reader, or you forgot that you signed up for this newsletter, this is The Torment Nexus. Thanks for reading! You can find out more about me and this newsletter in <\/em>this post.<\/em><\/a> This newsletter survives solely on your contributions, so please sign up for a paying subscription or visit my Patreon, which you can <\/em>find here<\/em><\/a>. I also publish a daily email newsletter of odd or interesting links called When The Going Gets Weird, <\/em>which is here<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The gates don’t work<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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If you got to the end of the previous paragraph and thought “$45 million is like rounding error to these companies,” you have put your finger on one part of the problem with making this kind of enforcement work in a practical sense. Meta makes $45 million in revenue every half an hour, based on its financial reports<\/a>. Even ten times that amount would be like fining someone five dollars, which means there is zero incentive for Meta to put any more effort into blocking teens than it does already, which isn’t much. But that’s just one problem with this legislation, and it may be the smallest. The biggest is that millions of teens clearly don’t agree<\/a> with these age restrictions \u2013 despite the UK government’s statement that they do \u2013 and they seem more than happy to continue getting around such restrictions wherever possible. And it is childishly easy to do so:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We know that when a user is asked to verify their age, they are given a few options to conduct the check. One popular method is face scanning. BTN tested out Yoti, the facial analysis service used by platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Threads. We had 11 year nine students create a Yoti account. The app only told us whether users were under-18, close to 18, or over-18. Every student passed as under-18, although two 14-year-olds were estimated to be close to 18. The students also said face-scanning technology could be tricked.”I think I used my sister’s face,” said Vinaya, 14. “One of my friends printed out a photo of like Michael Jackson and used that on the face recommendation ID thing and it worked, and he got like 21 age plus,” said Norman, 14.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I know some fans of age-gating social media laws will probably argue at this point that just because the potential fines amount to a rounding error for platform companies, and just because lots of teens (70 percent or so) are either not being found or are getting around the restrictions, that doesn’t mean the law itself is bad or wrong, and it doesn’t mean it isn’t helping prevent harms. So I will be explicit in what I’m saying: The potential fines ARE a rounding error and the majority of teens ARE either not being affected or are finding a way around the law, AND ALSO the law itself is bad<\/a>, and it isn’t helping prevent any harms (which as I’ve mentioned before, are poorly defined in the first place) AND it may actually be making things worse for some of the children that the law is designed to help. So in other words, these well-meaning laws are a disaster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you’ve been following The Torment Nexus at all, you may have read some of my previous pieces<\/a> on the last two parts of this equation<\/a>. Simply put, there is little or no evidence that social media causes harm in terms of emotional well-being in large numbers of teens. And that doesn’t mean that I personally<\/em> haven’t found any such evidence, it means that psychologists who specialize in child mental health \u2013 including some who have been investigating this specific question<\/a> for years, through multiple well-organized and professional studies \u2013 have been unable<\/a> to find any evidence. There is plenty of evidence that teens with emotional problems, including anxiety and depression, use social media. What’s missing is any proof that the use of social media causes<\/em> the issues in question. In fact, there’s some evidence that social media use can actually help:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In one paper, Twenge found that teens who spend a lot of time on their phones were two times more likely to suffer from depression (a rate of 7 percent versus the 3.5 percent rate for non-excessive users.) Odgers pointed out in her Nature<\/em> piece that the data “suggests not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers.\u201d And in a study of teens that was done in 2021, close to 45 percent of respondents said that using social media usually makes them feel better,<\/em> not worse.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Indistinguishable from zero<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Canada is considering a law similar to those in Australia and the UK, and so are dozens of other countries<\/a>, including Spain, Norway, Poland, the U.S. and the EU. In almost every case, the primary justification is that surveys of parents show that they overwhelmingly want this kind of legislation. But why is that seen as sufficient justification for banning kids from social media? If we paid attention to surveys about this kind of thing, comic books would have been<\/a> banned, and so would video games, not to mention songs<\/a> with explicit words for sex, TV shows that are about gay relationships, and plenty of other things. Shouldn’t there be a more stringent test before we do such things? Millions of people opposed COVID vaccines despite abundant evidence that they worked, but when it comes to banning kids from social platforms no evidence seems to be required:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cThere\u2019s nothing here that isn\u2019t present in any of the past panics about video games, Dungeons & Dragons, or silent movies,\u201d Andrew Przybylski, a professor of human behavior and technology at the University of Oxford, told Vox<\/em>. \u201cEach of these, you have a new technology, a vulnerable group and a new mechanism. It\u2019s always \u2018This time it\u2019s different,\u2019 but there\u2019s nothing in these claims that actually distinguishes it in terms of scientific evidence.\u201d Ferguson wrote that one of the features of moral panics is “advocates for the panic claim that research consistently supports the panic when in fact it does not.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

A meta-analysis of 226 studies in 2022 involving more than a quarter of a million participants found that<\/a> the association between social media and feelings of well-being was “indistinguishable from zero.” Proponents of a ban often point to research by Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State. But in a study published in Nature<\/em>, Przybylski tried to reproduce some of her findings and was unable to show more than a mild correlation. In fact, he says the average correlation between screen time and well-being “was analogous to the correlation between wearing glasses and well being,” and therefore might just be a statistical anomaly. The impact of smartphone use appears to be more or less the same as the impact of eating potatoes<\/a> on a regular basis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If there is so little evidence that social media causes anxiety or depression in teens, why do so many parents and others believe that it does? As I’ve pointed out before, they believe it because news articles keep telling them so. \u201cSmartphones and social media are destroying children\u2019s mental health,\u201d the Financial Times<\/em> wrote<\/a>, while the Guardian<\/em> described<\/a> the smartphone as \u201ca pocket full of poison.\u201d Some, if not all, of these articles are based on books by Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the Stern School of Business, including a best-seller called The Anxious Generation<\/em>, in which Haidt talks about how smartphone use and social media have caused an epidemic of anxiety among young people. But Candace Odgers, a psychology professor at UC Irvine who has spent years on this question, has written <\/u>that<\/a> Haidt’s suggestion that digital technologies are causing an epidemic of mental illness “is not supported by science.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another aspect of this problem is that in order for a law like the UK’s or Australia’s to work at all requires a massive invasion of privacy \u2013 not just for children but for anyone who uses services such as Facebook, YouTube, X, and Reddit, even if they use thdm for completely legal purposes. How do you verify someone’s age online? The internet was designed in such a way that no one knows<\/a> if you are a dog, let alone a child. The only way to do this is to use government ID, facial scanning, and other highly invasive<\/a> processes of that nature. The bottom line is that not only have age-gating social media laws not proven to be necessary, they don’t work in several crucial ways, and in fact arguably can’t<\/em> work, in the sense that they aren’t going to accomplish what their proponents say they are designed to accomplish. And yet multiple countries are rushing to implement them, despite a conspicuous lack of evidence. Sounds like a moral panic to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Got any thoughts or comments? Feel free to either leave them here, or <\/em>reach me on <\/em>Twitter<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>Threads<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>BlueSky<\/em><\/a> or <\/em>Mastodon<\/em><\/a>. And thanks for being a reader.<\/em><\/p>\n

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