Social Media Bans Aren’t Enough to Make Children Safe
Even before France approved legislation banning social media for children under 15 last January, 13-year-old Benjamin was already wondering what life without social media would look like. “If we want to play football, we won’t be able to organize it. What will we do? Send letters instead?” he joked in an interview for Le Monde . His reaction captured the central challenge behind the growing wave…
Banning social media for children under 15 has become a common strategy for governments around the world, following France's legislation in January 2024. However, simply removing access to these platforms may not be enough to ensure children's online safety. A recent report from Australia revealed that despite a similar ban, 4.7 million under-16 accounts were still restricted by platforms.
Two months later, one in five Australian teenagers under 16 were still using TikTok and Snapchat. Even if all children's social media accounts vanished, it remains unclear whether such bans truly make children safer online. Governments are implementing these bans without addressing the underlying issues, such as recommender algorithms, engagement-maximizing design, opaque moderation, and extractive data practices.
For instance, in Indonesia, the child safety framework enacted in March prohibits children under 16 from holding accounts on "high-risk" platforms. The UK government plans to follow suit by banning social media for under-16s, introducing overnight curfews for 16- and 17-year-olds, and expanding child-safety rules to cover risky AI features.
The European Commission has also proposed the EU KIDS Act, which would ban children under 13 from social media, set 15 as the EU-wide minimum age for opening an account independently, and require platforms to demonstrate that their services are age-appropriate and safe by design. However, based on the author's experience with Child Online Protection initiatives in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, the bans do not tackle the real problems.
Instead, the focus should be on the systems that generate harm, such as recommender algorithms, engagement-maximizing design, opaque moderation, and extractive data practices.
Written by urgent.news from IEEE Spectrum's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
