Teen Social Media Bans Miss the Point

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. 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 determinism is so compelling. It presents a simple story that leads to magical thinking: If we ban social media and cell phones, deep-seated problems such as bullying or depression will disappear. But this kind of logic deflects attention from both teen agency and the real drivers of stress and disconnection in their lives, including climate anxiety, poverty, family instability, social drama, and achievement pressures — many of which are things social media can help them manage. The companion narrative to technological determinism is something I’d call adult saviorism. Adult saviorism is rooted in the belief that teens are, again, passive victims but who need to be rescued by adults. In this narrative, teens lack the media literacy or judgment to save themselves. The conclusion to this line of thinking, when it comes to regulation, is that teens need not be involved, since they themselves are compromised. While adult saviorism is, in many ways, well-intentioned, often coming from a place of concern about child safety, it fails to recognize teens’ expertise and creativity in using technology. Most teens are skeptical that their parents and policymakers know better than they do about the good and bad of the online world, and for good reason. Consider the U.S. congressional hearing held in 2021, in which Facebook’s then global head of safety was asked by Senator Richard Blumenthal, “Will you commit to ending Finsta?” Needless to say, such embarrassing lines of questioning — which neither began nor ended with Blumenthal — should inspire very little confidence. While technology companies like Meta have outsized influence over the design of features and algorithms, we all play a role in shaping the impact technology has on our lives. In technology studies, we call this the social shaping of technology. It’s the recognition that technology reflects the values and interests of the people who build and use it. Impacts are determined by human behavior, cultural norms, and individual vulnerabilities. Rather than stoking intergenerational conflict through bans, young people and adults can shape technology together. This can be as simple as parents and children working through social media privacy settings together, or as ambitious as Autcraft, a Minecraft server run by families with autistic children. Educators can involve students in deciding school technology rules, and tailor technology to support learning and development. For example, a few weeks ago, 98 high school students got together to hash out a national AI policy for schools. We can advocate for features and policies that make platforms better for learning, belonging, and wellbeing. When parents and teens are asked, they want to keep using social media with more ways to flexibly protect their privacy, control recommendation algorithms, and monitor their own technology use. The emphasis on bans has come at the cost of progress on platform policies and features that make the online world better for people of all ages. These include privacy legislation and efforts centered on children’s digital rights and the duty of care. The fact that bans are failing should not be a cue to double down on enforcement. It is evidence of a misdiagnosis. Rather than starting from whether technology is monolithically good or bad, we need to ask how we, as parents, teachers, policymakers, and children, can shape technology together to better fit our needs. Mizuko Ito directs the Connected Learning Lab at the University of California, Irvine, and is a co-editor of “Youth Well-Being by Design,” an open-source version of which is available here.