Here's why blanket bans on social media don’t work – and they impact young people’s rights
Australia and now the UK are implementing social media bans for under 16s, but experts argue that these policies fail to protect young people from digital harms and infringe on their rights
In 2024, Australia became the first country to ban under 16s from ten major social media platforms, and Keir Starmer’s government has announced the UK following suit. But blanket bans on young people’s access to social media don’t provide the desired protection from digital harms.
They conflate restricted access with safer access, framing young people as vulnerable objects for protecting, rather than as rights-bearing participants in digital society.
The logic behind bans assumes that reducing young people’s exposure will automatically reduce digital harms. However, not addressing the structural conditions that produce online harms constructs young people’s presence online as the central source of harm, rather than the business practices of powerful platforms.
The design features of social media platforms – their inadequate content moderation, predatory advertising and algorithms – are far more harmful to users, regardless of age.
Taking a rights-based perspective further highlights the shortcomings of blanket ban social media policies. For young people, social media platforms are sites of social participation, identity-formation, information access, and civic engagement.
Restricting access risks overemphasising protection to the detriment of young people’s rights to free information, expression, association, and political participation, as identified in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. These concerns increase for marginalised young people (particularly LGBTQ+ young people) who rely on online communities for support and to access information unavailable elsewhere.
Rather than treating young people’s social media use as a problem to be eliminated, policy must recognise it as an enduring feature of modern life and work in collaboration with young people to identify and enact harm reduction.
Australia did not consult young people about the ban – and this failure to involve young people is a recurring feature of policymaking around online safety. Public debates frequently position young people as being both uniquely at risk from digital harms, but also as being uniquely risky users of digital technologies. Drawing on popular anxieties about cyberbullying, manosphere radicalisation, screen addiction, declining attention spans, and mental health crises, this framing is emotionally powerful but ultimately misguided in its policy application. By focusing on the management of young people’s digital behaviours, it ignores capacities to hold platforms to account, and normalises invasive state intervention.
When young people are consulted about their digital lives, they describe resourcefulness, not victimhood. Discounting these experiences from policymaking reproduces paternalistic logics that problematise young people at best and at worst, by leaving harmful platform structures intact, push young people towards more dangerous online lives.
The policy challenge should not be whether or not young people’s online participation should be made illegal, but how to support that participation. This means moving beyond prohibitive proposals and towards the inclusion of young people’s experiences in digital policymaking, developing targeted responses to specific harms and building safer digital infrastructures.
These alternative approaches all have one goal in common: lifting young people’s voices and integrating them into policy that truly supports their wellbeing.
Professor Ariadne Vromen and Dr Maia Almeida-Amir are based at the University of Glasgow’s School of Social & Political Sciences
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