Banning Teens from Social Media Isn’t Protection, It’s Overreach

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that the EU will partner with Australia to restrict children’s access to social media, expanding on Australia’s world-first ban for users under 16 and joining a growing international movement to limit youth access online. While these bans aim to protect young people online, they risk cutting off millions of teenagers from vital platforms for staying informed, connected, and expressing themselves, while also threatening adults’ online anonymity. A more effective solution would focus on addressing real online harms directly, preserving social media’s benefits, and empowering parents and teens with greater control over their digital experience.

Australia was the first country to implement a nationwide social media ban for children under 16. This ban would primarily affect children aged 13 to 15, as major social media platforms already restrict children under 13 from creating accounts. The ban places the burden of “taking reasonable steps to prevent access” to users under 16 on platforms themselves and gives the country’s eSafety Commissioner the power to enforce this requirement. It includes exceptions for educational and informational content, but no exceptions for teens who have their parents’ permission to use social media or who already have social media accounts.

Following Australia’s ban, government officials began calling for similar bans in the UK and New Zealand. These bans are part of a global debate over the best way to mitigate the potential harmful effects of social media on children, including exposure to predatory adults or age-inappropriate content, overreliance on social media rather than face-to-face interaction, negative body image that may lead to disordered eating, unhealthy social comparison, excessive screen time, and a lack of physical activity.

However, social media also has many benefits for teens, including access to community, contact with distant friends and family, support for members of marginalized groups, entertainment, educational content, and political and social awareness. While some teens have overall negative experiences with social media, many have overall positive experiences. Policymakers should weigh both experiences equally and come up with solutions that maximize the benefits of social media for young people while minimizing the risks.

In addition to cutting teens off from the benefits of social media, banning all children under a certain age from social media is nearly impossible to implement without violating the privacy and free speech rights of adults. In order to ensure children cannot lie about their age in order to gain access to social media, platforms would need to verify the ages of all users. This could include requiring all users to perform ID checks, turning over their personal information, and forfeiting their anonymity.

While there are less invasive ways to attempt to age-gate social media, such as age estimation powered by artificial intelligence (AI), no method of age verification is foolproof. Teens could access their parents’ IDs, create their own fake IDs, use VPNs to evade location-specific social media bans, or convince their parents to set up an account on their behalf.

Rather than passing blanket bans that treat all teenagers the same, regardless of their unique circumstances or parents’ preferences, countries should allow children to benefit from social media while giving them and their parents more control over their online experience. An alternative to age verification could be a child flag system, which would require device operating systems to create a “trustworthy child flag” for user accounts that signal to apps and websites that a user is underage and requires apps and websites that serve age-restricted content to check for this signal from their users and block flagged users from this content.

Rather than using ID checks or biometric verification to determine whether to activate this child flag option, this would be an opt-in process built into existing parental controls on devices. Parents could activate or disable the child flag option depending on their own values and the maturity of their children. Additionally, devices could default to certain parental controls recommended for children, with different settings recommended for different age groups, much like movie and video game rating systems.

Countries should also prioritize the development of digital IDs that allow users to turn over only relevant information about themselves, such as whether or not they are over a certain age, without revealing personal information and sacrificing their anonymity. In addition, countries should fund research and testing of photo-based AI age estimation to evaluate and improve these systems’ accuracy.

By implementing less invasive and more convenient measures of identifying underage users and giving parents the final say on their children’s online experience, countries would create options for parents and children to protect themselves. This more nuanced approach would more effectively address the potential harms of social media, along with other online spaces, while preserving the benefits of age-appropriate online spaces for children and teens.