Social Media Endgame? What Banning Social Media is Teaching Us

In his article, Bryan delves into the academic debate behind social media bans and breaks down what lessons we should learn from the youth reaction in Australia.

Picture this. A ban gets announced. Within minutes, a group chat somewhere is already on fire.

"bro they actually did it"

"high cortisol rn istg gonna crash tf out"

"skill issue just use vpn lmao"

Welcome to the social media endgame. Recently, Brazil’s ECA Digital Law came into effect requiring teens (aged 12 to 15) to obtain parental consent for social media usage. Brazil is one of 42 countries worldwide that have either implemented or are actively considering restrictions on teenage social media use, and on this list includes countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Philippines. The wave is only growing, with legislators worldwide including Singapore studying similar approaches.  

The intention behind these bans is not hard to understand. Social media has real harms, from addictive design to online harassment, and governments are responding to real pressure from parents, researchers, and mental health advocates. Many of these laws treat social media as a solely dangerous thing, ignoring the ways it also connects, informs, and gives young people a space to form their understanding of who they are. That flattening of the issue is facing pushback from the youth. Australia's Online Safety (Amendment) came into effect in 2025, and yet 70% of under-16s with social media accounts maintained access anyway. 

Curious on how we ended up here, I turned to learn more from the leading academics in the field. We need to ask whether the evidence actually holds up, figure out what these bans are really solving, and highlight the unintended consequences that are happening.  

“Debunking” the evidence for a social media ban

In his book The Anxious Generation, American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes the youth mental health crisis has been driven by the mass adoption of smartphones, along with the advent of social media and addictive online gaming. He calls it “the Great Rewiring of Childhood”. Looking at Singapore, where nearly one in three young people reported severe or extremely severe symptoms of depression, anxiety, or stress in 2024, it is tempting to think he is onto something.

Haidt's central thesis is that children are over-supervised and under-exposed in the physical world, but are under-supervised and over-exposed in the digital world. Interacting with youths, parents, and educators through YouthTechSG, I find myself nodding along. Personally, after a long day I too gravitate toward a comforting show over stepping outside. The screen is just easier, and I suspect most of us know exactly what that feels like. 

Nonetheless, Haidt goes further, claiming that social media has directly caused the worsening mental health crisis, driving increased rates of anxiety and depression. It is worth noting that Haidt did not conduct original research for this argument. The Anxious Generation is a literature review, a synthesis of existing studies, not a study in itself. That distinction matters, because when you go to the studies he draws from, the picture is far messier than his thesis suggests.

Researchers who have gone and done the empirical work tell a different story. Orben and Przybylski, both from the Oxford Internet Institute, conducted a direct analysis published in Nature Human Behaviour and found that the association between digital technology use and adolescent wellbeing is negative but small, explaining at most 0.4% of the variation in wellbeing. Many other meta-analyses land in the same place: the negative effects of social media are real but modest, and heavily context-dependent. As someone who takes data seriously, the gap between what the studies actually show and what Haidt claims they show is hard to ignore. The framing also risks crowding out the other factors that make young people psychologically vulnerable: economic hardship, academic stress, and socio-structural pressure. Sometimes anxious young people reach for their phones more, rather than phones being the cause of their anxiety.

Haidt's The Anxious Generation raises genuine questions about the effects of social media and online gaming on youth wellbeing, and his call for greater scrutiny of these platforms deserves attention. Nonetheless, his tendency to overstate the causative link between social media use and mental health decline, risks translating shaky premises into rushed policy. In Australia, Haidt's book served as a cornerstone text behind the government's decision to legislate a national social media age restriction for under 16s, a move that triggered similar legislative conversations across the globe.

South Australian Premier in a September 2024 email to Haidt, 3 months before Australia passed the Online Safety (Amendment) Act

When policy borrows its urgency from overstated science, the resulting laws may satisfy the optics of protection while doing little for youth wellbeing. And as we will see, making these bans work in practice is a far messier problem than the legislation lets on. 

Not every country is moving in the same direction. Estonia has publicly stated it does not seek to impose a blanket ban of social media use for teenagers, departing from the consensus within the European Union.

Lessons from the bans 

The problem with a blanket ban is that it treats social media as the source of harm rather than asking why the harm happens in the first place. Blanket bans may sound impactful and enable lawmakers to demonstrate that they are taking decisive action against a perceived threat to society. Yet the devil is in the details. As we draw close to the six month mark since Australia's Online Safety Amendment came into effect, it is worth asking what the evidence actually shows, and what lessons the rest of the world should be drawing before following suit.

What are youth saying?

Efforts to legislate social media for teenagers are largely framed as measures to reduce harm for an easily influenceable segment. Holding platforms accountable is something that governments can do and should do, especially considering the massive amount of soft power they hold. Where the legislative efforts have gone above and beyond is in removing the power to decide from teenagers, who need to learn how to exercise discretion. The youth reactions to the bans make that obvious - a study by Halogen, a Singaporean non-profit focused on empowering youth, heard from the youth that they feel that the bans do not tackle the root cause. What the youth want is more guidance on how to form responsible digital habits and to know how to be digitally literate. We looked through Singaporean Reddit threads to hear what the people were thinking too, and it seems to align. 

Youths were acutely aware of the potential harms that happen on social media platforms but recognised it is reductive to only consider the negative consequences of social media. They highlighted benefits of being on these platforms as potential losses they would face if social media were banned. Some even felt that the manner of implementation should target the features in social media that are bad and/or addictive rather than a blanket ban. 

There are also another group of youths that are prepared for the eventuality of the ban and are prepared to utilise the Virtual Private Network (VPN) to circumvent the ban. 

A good policy is not just about what it is trying to do. It is about whether it actually works when it meets the real world. This is especially true in the digital realm, where alternatives are not just available, but abundant. 

Youths are highly resourceful. When faced with constraints, they do not disengage; they reroute. In Australia, for instance, the introduction of social media restrictions coincided with a surge in downloads of alternative social media sites like Lemon8, a social media platform under ByteDance.

This points to a deeper issue. Policies that focus narrowly on restricting specific platforms risk displacing, rather than resolving, the underlying concerns. In doing so, they may push young users toward less regulated, less understood spaces of the internet where risks are harder to monitor and address.

Implementation burdens 

Every country that has tried to ban minors from social media has hit the same wall: how do you actually enforce it?

On paper, age verification sounds straightforward. Check if a user is under 16 and block access if they are. In practice, it is far messier. The main tools, age assurance systems, ID checks, and biometric verification, all come with the same trade-off: proving your age means giving up personal data. Social media platforms already build detailed profiles of us from how we scroll, what we linger on, and what we skip. Handing them verified age data on top of that gives them one more input to sharpen their algorithms with. The very mechanism designed to keep young people safer is feeding the system that makes the platforms harder to resist in the first place.

Then there is the cost. Australia is estimated to be spending around AUD $50 million over four years to enforce these restrictions. That money goes into checking who gets in, not fixing the algorithmic systems that shape what users see in the first place. Elsewhere, countries like Indonesia face the same challenge with fewer resources, where gaps in enforcement often mean exclusion rather than protection.

Are the harms actually gone? 

Banning youths from platforms does not make the internet safer by itself. It makes them less prepared for it. A teenager who grows up without learning how to navigate online spaces, how to spot manipulation, manage their privacy, or find genuine community, does not become more protected when the ban lifts. They become more vulnerable. You cannot ban someone from swimming their whole childhood and then throw them in the deep end at 16. The harm does not disappear. It gets deferred, and handed to an older, less supported version of the same person.

Platforms have not helped here. If anything, age restrictions gave them an easy exit. Once a user falls below the minimum age threshold, the obligation to provide a safe or age-appropriate experience effectively disappears. This is the tobacco industry playbook: cigarettes are illegal for minors, so the industry never had to answer for what smoking does to a teenager's lungs. The harm to young people was real, but because their access was illegal, it was also invisible. Social media platforms are not cigarette companies, but the logic is the same. Make it illegal for them to be there, and their experience stops being your problem.

What’s next? 

Social media bans are well-intentioned. That much is hard to argue with. But as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

1. Build the evidence base before the policy. The research on social media and youth mental health is far more mixed than the legislation suggests, and countries considering bans should understand what is actually driving the problem before reaching for the bluntest tool available.

2. Target the harm, not the platform. New York City is looking at restricting algorithmic feeds for teen accounts rather than banning access outright. Estonia has declined to legislate at all, choosing instead to invest in digital literacy. Singapore sits at a similar crossroads, and the more honest question is not whether to ban but which specific features are doing the damage.

3. Treat offline time as education, not punishment. Ireland has reimagined its approach to phones and technology as a gradual, supported introduction rather than a hard cutoff. That framing, learning to navigate the digital world rather than being thrown into it at 16, is likely closer to what actually works. 

At the end of the day, it's time to touch some grass. Just maybe on our own terms.