The Global Debate: Social Media Bans for Youth vs. Comprehensive Digital Safety

It is clear that social media affects mental health and poses a danger to children and adolescents. One study showed it took just 40 minutes of browsing for a platform in Mexico to recommend content to a teenage girl that contains references to suicide.

What’s most concerning is that these aren’t isolated glitches but rather a result of how algorithms are designed to hook users and keep them on the platforms longer. With infinite scrolling and the instant gratification it provides, social media can become as addictive as cigarettes.

These factors, coupled with concerns about screen time and other worries, have led many countries to enact bans or restrictions on social media for kids. Last year, Australia became the first country to try to keep people under 16 off the apps. In June, the United Arab Emirates enacted a measure locking youth under 15 out of platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and X.

Just last week, the UK revealed a plan to institute a midnight social media curfew next spring for 16- and 17-year-olds—one they can opt out of. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in June that he hoped to pass a more stringent ban on social media for under-16s “before Christmas.” Starmer formally resigned earlier this week, but the legislation is likely to proceed. On Tuesday, lawmakers in France passed a bill banning social media for anyone under 15. President Emmanuel Macron is expected to sign it into law.

However, something is happening that, at first glance, seems contradictory. Many of the organizations that have spent years researching these risks and defending children’s rights are not supporting such bans. On the contrary, they warn that disconnecting children from these spaces might address the symptoms but leave the root causes of the problem intact—and could even create new risks.

Australia’s measure was hailed internationally and held up as a model. Six months after its implementation, however, seven out of 10 parents reported that their children still have accounts on Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat. This is not surprising. Not only because adolescence is typically a time of rebellion but also because it is natural to resist being excluded from spaces where a large part of their social life takes place and where the people they’ve grown up with are hanging out.

Social media platforms are much more than just entertainment for young people, especially for those who grew up during the Covid-19 pandemic. Comparing them to cigarettes ignores the fact that they also serve important functions. They are spaces for socializing, learning, and accessing information that is often unavailable elsewhere, especially in places where educational gaps and disparities in access to public services persist. Generally speaking, how many times has Reddit saved us with an answer we couldn’t find in a textbook, at school, or at a public institution? And how many times has a YouTube tutorial or a thread on X taught us something that no one else explained to us?

Furthermore, social media can provide a sense of community and a space for self-expression to those who don’t always find it outside the internet. For teenagers who belong to historically marginalized groups—such as LGBTQ+ people, people of color, or people with disabilities—these spaces can also offer an opportunity to explore and build their identities with greater freedom, find role models, and feel less alone.

Precisely because social media is much more than just entertainment, it is worth asking whether some solutions might simply replace one harm with another. Age verification, for example, involves collecting highly sensitive data, making platforms more attractive to cybercriminals and putting the privacy and safety of minors at risk. This is not a hypothetical. When Discord implemented its age verification system in 2025, it suffered a data breach involving more than 70,000 identity documents.

New technologies always come with new risks, but the goal is not to ban innovation or cut off access for vulnerable groups. It is about seeking to understand how these technologies affect them and responding with proportionate measures to manage those risks.

As Angie Contreras, a representative of Cultivando el Género and a specialist in online child protection, points out, digital life is not a space separate from everyday life, but rather an extension of it. The answer should not be to exclude children and adolescents from digital spaces, but to ensure that platforms are designed to be used safely, with the same protections and rights that minors enjoy offline.

In this sense, social media is more like a bicycle than a cigarette. We know accidents can happen, but no one suggests banning them. We build bike lanes, establish traffic rules, teach people how to use them, promote helmets and knee pads, and demand safety standards. We reduce the risks without giving up their benefits.

What would these solutions look like when applied to the digital world? Perhaps the first step is to include children and adolescents themselves in the debate, Villena suggests. Only by understanding why and how they use these platforms will it be possible to design responses that address the real risks without sacrificing the benefits these spaces also offer.

In particular, each stakeholder has a unique role and responsibility in creating a safer future for minors in digital environments. Governments must develop public policies and regulations based on evidence rather than knee-jerk reactions. Brazil, for example, has demanded the incorporation of more accessible parental controls, a reduction in addictive design practices such as infinite scrolling, greater transparency regarding how its algorithms work, and that major tech companies have specialized staff in the country to ensure accountability.

Platforms must take greater responsibility for the design of their algorithms, as this is one of the main challenges. It is urgent that schools incorporate digital literacy as part of their daily curriculum and design protocols to prevent, detect, and address situations of online violence. Families and caregivers need tools and guidelines to support children in their digital lives.

Both those who support children and those who navigate these spaces need support to know how to respond to risky situations online, says Dafna Viniegra, founder of Infancia Libre de Abuso Sexual. Initiatives such as the VigIAchatbot strengthen these capabilities and provide guidance on the challenges of the digital world for children. Children and adolescents themselves must be considered as rights-holders, not merely as people who need to be protected.

That is the direction new regulatory proposals are beginning to take. Lorena Villavicencio, executive secretary of Mexico’s National System for the Comprehensive Protection of Children and Adolescents, stated that they are preparing an initiative to regulate social media, but that it is not just a matter of controls. “We believe the most important thing is to ensure, from the very design of the platforms, that enhanced protection for children and adolescents is built in,” Villavicencio says.