Globally, governments are tightening restrictions around children online
safety. In December last year, Australia became the first country to ban the
use of social media by anybody under the age of 16. The UK government has said
that it will embrace the Australian model. Similar
prohibitions are now being implemented by the governments of Indonesia, France, Malaysia, Denmark,
Indonesia, Norway, Spain, Portugal and Canada.
Lo and behold, in typical copy and paste fashion, an overzealous citizen has petitioned the Kenyan Parliament for the enactment of a Child Online Protection and Digital Responsibility Act, citing the need to protect children from harmful online influences and promote responsible use of digital platforms; its net effect is that children under the age of 16 may be barred from independently accessing social media platforms.
Most of these bans apply to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube, Reddit, certain streaming platforms and AI chatbots designed to simulate romantic relationships while excluding messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal. As a result, technology companies will risk harsh penalties if they fail to take reasonable precautions to prevent youngsters from opening accounts.
The concept of banning children from social media is contentious. The legislation's potential advantages include protecting children from online threats to their health and well-being, such as social comparison and body image issues, cyberbullying, advertising of harmful products and exposure to sexualised and or misogynistic content.
The ban may also offer broader benefits, such as reclaiming time for other positive activities such as sleep, physical activity and face‐to‐face interactions with peers and family. The prohibition has been largely welcomed by parents, many of whom find it difficult to supervise their children's social media use but its effectiveness remains uncertain
However, the ban has several drawbacks. Children nowadays are 'digital natives', and they will most likely discover methods to avoid the ban. The suggested age verification mechanisms are not fool proof and concerns have been expressed about technologies such as virtual private networks being used to get past it.
There is also concern that the ban covers some, but not all social media platforms, and adolescents will be pushed into less well‐regulated areas where exposure to harmful content could be equally, if not more, concerning.
Emerging research also suggests that social media has the potential to have a constructive role in supporting good mental health in children, such as destigmatising mental health and providing access to resources. Remember that social media, in its most basic form, is a forum for people from all over the world to connect and discuss common interests and problems. For children who don't have peers or in-person support, social media may be a lifeline. Providing children with communication tools allows them to access individuals in other regions of the nation or the globe who embrace them, which is beneficial to their mental health and well-being.
Additionally, the ban does not provide young people with the necessary skills to navigate online places securely and ethically, which is critical in today's digital world. And, there are concerns about what young people lose when they are removed from mainstream platforms.
That said, imposing a social media ban is ineffective in protecting children online. It also doesn't address the basis of the problem. Many of the harms that children face online are caused by technology firms' manipulative and abusive design methods.
It’s true, today's children spend a significant amount of time online, frequently more than they or their parents would want. This is by design. Mounting evidence suggests that the major technology entities fine-tune their systems to extract as much time and data from users as possible, because more time spent and data gathered equates to more advertising revenue. Popular online product features such as limitless scrolling, auto-play, push notifications and algorithmic feeds that behaviourally profile individuals are not intended to provide customers with what they want, but rather to keep them glued to their devices while firms harvest their data and attention. These products are not intended for you to use, but rather to utilise you.
From the foregoing, social media entities construct their algorithmic feeds to monitor user behaviour, profile the user and then forecast and offer material that will keep the user on the site, with little concern for what the content expresses. For a teen with body image issues, content that feeds their insecurities about their body may keep them watching, clicking and scrolling, so the algorithm repeatedly surfaces such content for them, resulting in a compulsion to keep scrolling, even if continued use leads to spiralling self-criticism. For another youngster, a need to keep scrolling might come from a stream of harmless information, such as absurdist memes, which can also produce anxiety, sadness and other consequential injury, despite the lack of harm inherent in the underlying content.
Thus, many of the harms that are attributed to the content on social media actually stem from tech companies’ decisions to design their products to maximise extraction and the answer lies in prohibiting behavioural profiling aimed at maximising children time online.
Auxiliary, digital rights campaigners have also expressed privacy concerns; social media bans weaponise parents' fears about their children's safety to justify greater surveillance and control. Many children do not have access to standard identification documents; therefore platforms will require age verification methods that are both accessible and proportional. This means we might witness the implementation of a system requiring millions of users to verify their identities for child protection purposes.
And this will mean either platforms collect new forms of our most sensitive and immutable data or unleash their AI and algorithms on our existing behavioural data to make creepy guesses about who we are to access services that were previously open to everybody. And this raises concerns about data retention, surveillance and erosion of online anonymity.
Thus,
these bans violate children rights, jeopardise our privacy and substitute
parental decision making with governmental power. Consequently, to decrease
digital harms, it is essential to empower
parents to better understand social media and its potential advantages and
concerns.
Drawing on analogies between the prohibition and bootlegging eras, prohibition alone is unlikely to be successful. We should not jump to the conclusion that social media is so harmful that it should be outlawed for the most vulnerable. Instead, we should promote harm minimisation by teaching children digital literacy, resilience and how to seek help. Children should not have to give up their privacy in order to participate in modern digital life. And this is in the best interests of the child!
The writer is a privacy practitioner
