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Teen Social Media Bans Miss the Point
Late last year, Australia became the first country in the world to enact a ban on social media for teens under age 16. The move was celebrated at the time by parents, child-safety advocates, and politicians across the political spectrum. But less than a year in, it suggests the ban is failing: A state-sponsored survey of parents indicated that seven in 10 teens are still using social media, while academic research has reported even lower rates of compliance.
Many researchers predicted this outcome. Candice Odgers, a teen mental health expert, warned us years ago that bans could backfire: “Teens will find creative ways to access these or even more unregulated spaces, and we should not give them additional reasons to feel alienated from the adults in their lives.” Her prediction echoed the recommendations of Meghan Moreno and Jenny Radesky, co-leaders of the Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health, who likewise argued that in lieu of regulation, there should be a focus on supporting positive online engagement.
I agree with these sentiments. As a cultural anthropologist who has long studied how young people engage with technology — from CD-ROMs to today’s AI-powered platforms — I am also very skeptical of the social media bans that are spreading across the world, including in countries such as France, the United Kingdom, Malaysia, and Turkey. I am skeptical because these policies are animated by two persistent but problematic narratives: technological determinism and adult saviorism. Both overshadow science and lived experience.
Technological determinism is the belief that technology wields an inexorable power that people cannot resist and, once put into the world, becomes an external force shaping culture and society. It is held by both those who fear technology and techno-solutionists alike.
The net impact of social media is complicated, which is why technological determinism is so compelling.
Technological determinists start with the question of whether technology is good or bad, and then work from there. “The Smartphone Kids Are Not Alright” and “Social media is devastating teens’ mental health”: In scary headlines like these, technology is the subject, and teens are passive victims. Here, social media is a singular force with uniform impacts for all children and teens.
While the question of social media being good or bad for teens makes for good headlines, the same cannot be said for policy. The binary inevitably narrows the solution space to a single question: whether teens should have access to technology. Policymakers obviously seek to expand access to the good and ban the bad. But unexamined are questions of design and use — how technologies are built and what teens do with them.
What I’ve found in my research is that social media cannot be easily extracted from teens’ lives, as if it were some kind of contaminant to be flushed from the body. In fact, a better metaphor for social media would be a circulatory system: it provides vital functions — integral and always “on” but susceptible to compromise or impairment — serving as a vessel of both the good and the bad.
Teens use social media in a dizzying array of ways — to connect with friends and family, enjoy entertainment, get information, play games, create content, and organize movements. While social media can be weaponized for bullying or hate, over half of all teens turn to social media as a source of social and emotional support. Research has consistently found that marginalized teens have a higher risk of encountering negative online content, but also benefit the most from online connection and digital self-help. For example, education researcher Tiera Tanksley’s scholarship describes how difficult it is for Black girls to avoid images of Black death and dying online, but also how they proactively seek out Black joy, laughter, and healing.
This is all to say that the net impact of social media is complicated, which is why technological