Australia has moved to require social media companies to prevent under 16s from holding an account, and there’s always talk of us following suit in the UK. I want to talk a little today about why I think that’s a bad idea.

This is something of a misleading heading because I specifically don’t want to retread this debate. There are a lot of very strong opinions out there as to the harmful nature of social media, and a few of those strong opinions even try to bring with them something resembling evidence.

One framing I really like (from one of my supervisors at the OII, Andy Przybylski) is: “harmful compared to what?”

Are you imagining that if children weren’t spending hours each day on social media, they’d be out selling lemonade, climbing trees, and generally living in 1950s America? I mean, minus the smoking, lead paint and the polio. And all those comics that are “rotting their minds”. Or maybe you’re comparing it to the 1990s - where the average American child spent about 4 hours per day watching TV, with the violence, passivity, and developmental harm. The moral panics of the past - now recast as the virtuous alternatives of the future.

“Is social media harmful” isn’t really a legitimate question unless you also consider the replacement activity. It’s like studying the social impact of vaping without considering the replacement activity (smoking).

Won’t anybody think of the children?

Kids these days spend all their time on their phones. Technically true (or at least, they spend an awful lot of time there). But you know who else spends all their time on their phone? Everybody else. Adults use social media just as much as children/teens, and they do so in pretty much just as habitual a way (self promo is allowed, right?).

Ah, but the adults aren’t damaging their mental health with their TikToks and their YouTubes. Children are.

Except there’s not really the evidence to support that. We’ve got correlational “evidence”, but that exists for both children and adults. The better designed the study, the less convincing the results. And honestly, the majority of studies here don’t focus on the mental health impact of social media on adults.

Ah, but children have small and puny brains without impulse control. Us smart adults know how to regulate our time and control our impulses.

Do we? Gestures to world around me - really? Yes children show poorer impulse control than adults. But aren’t we all somewhat helpless in the face of the mighty tech companies?

OK, OK. But children are in school and are subject to peer pressure and group dynamics and could end up being excluded from social groups if they don’t “fit in” and share the right things.

Famously, teenagers before the internet were kind, caring, non-cliqueish and didn’t obsess over social status. I’ll grant you, children are less able to opt-out of the social zoo that is school. But is it really children who are the ones sharing “share for our boys in blue - my real friends will” or changing their profile picture to match the latest world event?

Ah, but brain development. Not like the panic we had over violent TV/video games. Children’s brains are still developing and we don’t know whether social media is fundamentally disrupting children’s development.

I agree - we don’t know. Brain development continues up until around 25 or so, and so it’s possible that social media does cause longer-term problems with brain development. Possible. Not proved. It’s possible social media causes long-term cognitive decline in adults. Possible. Not proved.

So why do we propose banning social media for children?

Do something - but not to voters

Well, firstly, there’s precedent.

We ban gambling for children, even though the vast majority of harm caused by gambling comes from adults. Now you could argue that more harm would befall children if we let them gamble, but I honestly don’t think you should.

By and large, children don’t have money. And even if they do, they don’t have other people who are dependent on it. If children were free to gamble (they sort of already are, what with in-game microtransactions and variable rewards and all the features of gambling, just without the label), I still think that the majority of harm would be borne by adults. Additionally, alongside a child’s gambling ban, we heavily regulate the gambling industry for adults. Children’s social media bans don’t appear to come with similar adult regulatory scrutiny.

We also do the same with junk food and packaging - most harm caused by health issues pertaining to junk food consumption come from adults. Do we believe adults aren’t susceptible to marketing? If so, it’s a strange global economy we’ve got going on.

In both of these cases (and in others), the harms are there for children and adults, but it’s only children who get banned.

Secondly, who is going to vote against it? Banning things for people who can’t give you a good kicking in an election is just plain smart. Odious. But smart.

Finally, it’s not even clear to me that you could ban social media for adults. They wouldn’t take it. Frankly, social media is just too ingrained into the social fabric, and is just too useful and addictive to be banned. So if you have to do something and you can’t meaningfully do anything else…I guess it’s a ban for children.

Let’s Regulate It

Ugh.

Regulate it is the easy answer you give when you can see a problem but don’t know how to fix it. The UK already has regulation (Online Safety Act, ICO Children’s Code), and how’s that going? Social media companies are global, product changes ship weekly, enforcement is…where? And the bits that’d actually hurt are so tangled up in politics and privacy that…well, as I said, how’s that going?

So when somebody says “regulate it” I want to know who is regulating what and what happens when the platforms don’t comply?

“Regulate it” is the European version of “somebody somewhere please do something” - a cry into the void for help.

Conclusion

It’s easy to ban something for somebody else, or something that you don’t use (in the same way as it’s easy to tax other people - the rich, bankers, benefits scroungers, energy executives) but that doesn’t make it right.

Adults have always been uncomfortable with how “the youth” spend their time. From young women being “corrupted” by novels in the 1700s to children in the 1950s having their brains rotted by comic books, the wanton ways of the “youth of today” have always been a thorn in the side of their elders.

I don’t use TikTok and it’s no skin off of my back if it gets banned. Banned or not, though, I don’t see a reason to ban it only for children. It doesn’t seem to be more harmful for them. They don’t seem to be using it lots more than adults.

If you’re going to ban TikTok because it’s harmful or for geopolitical reasons, fine. But ban it universally; if we’re not willing to do that, stop pretending that a child-only ban is principled. A child-only ban is what you do when you want to do something but can’t think of anything better to do, and you don’t want to impact voters.