Credit: Sardaka, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
“We cannot ban our way out of a youth mental health crisis”: social media bans for teenagers lack evidence and pose risks, scientists say.
In December 2025, Australia banned young people under 16 from having social media accounts. France, Greece, Spain, Denmark, Malaysia, Norway, India, Egypt, Canada, Türkiye, and the United Kingdom are hot on their heels.
French president Emmanuel Macron said: “Banning social media for those under 15: this is what scientists recommend.”
American senator Brian Schatz, author of the Kids Off Social Media Act, said: “Studies have revealed that when children and teens reduce or eliminate exposure to social media for longer than a month, their mental health benefits.”
Proponents of youth social media bans claim that we have strong scientific evidence showing that bans will improve teenagers’ wellbeing.
Dr Monika Neff Lind, a clinical psychologist at the University of California Irvine, has questioned whether those claims are true given we have never studied the question of how social media bans will affect young people.
She said: “When we want to test claims like ‘banning social media improves youth wellbeing’, scientific experiments are one of our most powerful tools to figure out what is causing something to happen.
“In experiments testing the effects of social media restriction on wellbeing, we randomly assign people to at least two groups: one quits using social media for a period of time and the other is the control or comparison group, which continues to use social media as usual.
“Given the strength of ban proponents’ claims, my co-authors and I were curious to know how strong the experimental evidence supporting their position was.
“In our new study, we collected and reviewed all of the experiments that have tested whether social media restriction improves wellbeing, and we were shocked by what we found; not a single social media restriction experiment has included people under the age of 16.
“We do not know how social media bans will affect the young people being targeted by them because we have never tested this with them!”
Neff Lind added that although strong evidence in adults might lead to the same or similar conclusions in teenagers, the leap necessary is not justified.
She explained: “The experiments with adults show weak, null, and mixed effects, with 40% of experimental studies showing harmful effects (eg, decreased life satisfaction and increased loneliness) or no effects of social media restriction.
“So even when adults are told repeatedly that social media is bad for their mental health and that giving it up will help, we find, on average, few to no benefits.”
Credit: Fotorech, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Unintended consequences?
Neff Lind argued: “There is also good reason to believe that bans may backfire. First, enforcing a youth social media ban raises major ethical concerns.
“Enforcement efforts invade people’s privacy and are likely to hurt marginalised people more. For example, the technology that determines age based on selfie uploads makes more mistakes with young faces and people of colour.
“Banned youth may also miss out on important resources and communications provided via social media, as schools, clubs, and most other youth-serving organisations use social media as a main form of communication.”
She asked: “What happens when enforcement efforts fail? Many young people will circumvent bans by creating fraudulent ‘adult’ accounts or lurking anonymously.
“They will retain access to social media without any of the benefits of parental controls or content filters enabled by youth accounts.
“The vast majority of young people oppose youth social media bans, and teens are well known for their defiance of top-down edicts that disregard their needs. Expect more conflict between teens and caregivers, not less.
“To recap, we don’t know how social media bans will affect teens, and the bans may backfire. Yet the bans are still happening! Like other policies that consume resources, political capital, and time, it is imperative for governments to evaluate these actions by funding comprehensive assessments of the bans’ impacts.”
Image by Vilius Kukanauskas from Pixabay
What next?
Neff Lind said: “The first step in measuring the impact of these bans is to determine if the bans actually change teenagers’ social media habits. Three months in, Australian authorities reported that close to 70% of social media accounts owned by people under 16 remained active.
“Second, we need a careful and well-resourced plan to measure both positive wellbeing and mental health problems from multiple sources, including self-report, caregiver report, and objective behavioural data, to get a full picture of whether and how altered social media use affects youth.
“Third, we need creative approaches to capture the real-world impacts of the bans, since true experiments are not possible and effects may be at the community as well as the individual level.
“For example, we could randomly assign a subset of youth (eg within a certain region) to delayed enactment of the ban.
“Whatever approach is taken, governments must collaborate with diverse stakeholders – including young people – to rigorously and openly evaluate potential impacts. Rushed or improvised assessment will leave room for politicisation and motivated reasoning.”
Neff Lind concluded: “Big Tech has become infamous for ‘moving fast and breaking things’.
“Policymakers rushing to enact these bans risk repeating Big Tech’s mistakes and compounding the problems the bans are trying to solve. We cannot ban our way out of a youth mental health crisis.
“Rather than take things away, we should make things better.”
The research is published in Frontiers in Developmental Psychology.
