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.
There was a pretty good thread on microblogging fedi this week about some of the severe problems with this. A few off the top of my head:
- Not every kid can just “go outside” and “interact with humans” for a whole variety of valid reasons which won’t be addressed by social media bans
- Not all kids live in places where the humans outside to be interacted with are safe, non-hostile, etc.
- Isolation in indifferent, non-nourishing, hostile, or frankly dangerous communities is still a big problem for many millions of kids, and blanket regulations like this directly harm the most marginalized.
Anecdata: I was online by age 10 back in pre-HTML days, and by 13 my access was keeping me alive in the ignorant redneck backwater I was stuck in, because it gave me access to people who respected me and offered a broader perspective than my own. This mental health support was absolutely critical, and temporarily losing access to it twice in my teens correlated with a substantial increase in mixing with a bad crowd and doing bad shit because I felt I had no other options.
I still get critical mental health support online today as an adult, because I’m still stuck in a shitty situation where simplistic thought-terminating cliches like “just go outside and interact with humans” come with a number of problems attached. So I’m pretty passionate about this effort by frankly thoughtless normie fucktards to ban kids from the internet. Plus so-called “age verification” is actually identity verification to engage in speech, and isn’t it funny how such legislation materialized simultaneously in every western “democracy” overnight, right after it became clear that Israel and the calcified US political establishment could not control discourse about Gaza sufficiently to their liking???
I agree, well said, I consider banning youth from social media mass manslaughter.
Well said. We have converted our cities in hostile places for every kind of life that doesn’t require money. Obviously the younger generations are the ones suffering the most, and social media is a big crutch to alleviate that.
The problem is that the internet as we knew it when we were growing up no longer exists.
The thing I find funny about age gating social media and such, is that it never really fixes the issues. There are adults who should not be on social media as they are not ready for it, where as like the article states, children and teens can be ready for it.
Personally education like everything would be the better approach than age gating/banning teens and children.
Banning things doesn’t really work… but if you have to ban something I’d suggest banning social media from teenagers rather than banning teenagers from social media, if you know what I mean.
