(Above is an audio recording of the blog post)
The UK government has recently announced its intention to ban under-16s from using major social media platforms. Many of the details are still pending, but the proposed policy appears to go beyond a straightforward ban on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and the like. It is also likely to include restrictions on some gaming and livestreaming services, particularly those which allow children to communicate with strangers, as well as tighter rules around some AI services, such as ‘romantic companion’ chatbots.
It is not difficult to see why this decision has political appeal. Parents and teachers are worried. Indeed, many young people are worried too, even if they are also anxious about what their imminent exclusion from online spaces might mean for their social lives, education, and leisure time. Many children’s online lives are now marked by a familiar catalogue of harms — bullying, harassment, appearance anxiety, misogyny, grooming, exploitation and compulsive use — and it would be entirely wrongheaded to deny this.
Social media can clearly be harmful. What is less clear is whether those harms justify excluding all under-16s from vast swathes of the online world. I am not convinced that they do.
First, the empirical picture is somewhat less settled than some high-profile commentators suggest. The evidence does not show, at least not in any simple way, that social media (or screen time more broadly) is the primary cause of the recent spike in mental health difficulties among children and young people. For instance, research by Orben and Przybylski (2019) found that the association between digital technology use and adolescent wellbeing was extremely small — no stronger than the association between wellbeing and eating high quantities of potatoes. Moreover, much depends on which children, which platforms, and how those platforms are used. This uncertainty gives us reason to be cautious about treating a blanket ban as if it simply follows from ‘the evidence’.
One way of defending a ban is to say that, beyond exposing children to particular risks, social media damages something distinctively valuable about childhood itself. Philosophers sometimes frame this in terms of ‘childhood goods’ (Brighouse et al., 2018). These are goods that matter for children qua children: they are part of what makes childhood go well rather than something that will help them prepare for adulthood. These goods may include ‘purposeless play, naïve curiosity, unreserved joy and carefreeness’ as well as innocence (which itself includes ‘unawareness of certain horrors such as violent death and mortal illness’) (Brighouse et al,, 2018, pp. 37-38).
Carefreeness has recently been invoked as a particularly powerful idea in the context of social media bans. Luara Ferracioli (2024) defines being carefree as ‘having a mental life whereby an agent is disposed to experience the world without worry’ (p.92). She does not argue that a child with this disposition never experiences stress or concern. That would be both unrealistic and undesirable — amongst other things, dealing with challenges helps us to develop resilience. Rather, a carefree child is one whose life is not dominated by worry. Such children are able to play, become absorbed and take delight in the world, and build positive personal relationships without being consumed or overwhelmed by their anxieties.
This gives us a more philosophical version of the pro-ban argument. If children are entitled to a carefree childhood, and if social media predictably generates the sort of stress and anxiety that undermines that kind of childhood, then perhaps children are entitled to protection from it. The point then is not so much that social media might cause measurable mental health (or other) harms, but that it interferes with children’s ability to enjoy the goods of childhood while they are still children.
There is a clear element of truth to this view. A childhood saturated with social pressure, constant (often unflattering) comparison, fear, and self-surveillance is unlikely to be a good one. But the argument from this alarming picture to a total ban moves far too quickly. It treats social media almost entirely as a source of stress and anxiety when, for many children, it is also (perhaps mostly) a source of pleasure, connection, creativity and, in many cases, forms the basis of their ordinary social lives. Children are not drawn, Hansel- and Gretel-like, to online spaces solely because they have been manipulated by malign corporations to act against their own interests (although they certainly can be manipulated by platform design and by bad-faith actors who occupy online spaces). They are also drawn to them because these are environments where they can share jokes, make things, discuss niche interests, listen to music, watch tutorials, keep up with friends, explore identities, learn about politics, and encounter beauty, absurdity and delight in a myriad of forms. In other words, spaces where they create and participate in a culture that is partly their own.
If carefreeness matters because it enables children to experience things like joy, interest, excitement, and satisfaction, then we must take seriously the possibility that social media often facilitates rather than undermines this good. A group chat may induce stress or upset, but (just like other kinds of social interaction) it may also help to sustain friendships under difficult circumstances. A video platform can serve up harmful content, but it can also help children learn, create, or find community. A ban may protect children from some sources of anxiety, but it may also remove important sources of comfort and enjoyment. In this respect, despite constant comparisons to other age-restricted activities — prior to the announcement of the ban, it was reported that the UK Medical Colleges had claimed that ‘social media is as bad for children as smoking’, with others making similar comparisons to drinking alcohol and driving — social media is infinitely multi-faceted in a way that these narrower sources of harm are not.
The role social media can play in facilitating carefreeness is particularly important for children whose offline lives are not carefree. Some children do not have easy access to supportive peer groups, safe communities, or offline spaces in which they can explore who they are. This may be because they are geographically isolated, disabled, neurodivergent, LGBTQ+, struggling with their mental health, or living in families or communities where important parts of their identity or experience are marginalised. For these children, online spaces may be among the few places where it is possible to find recognition, information and support in an otherwise difficult world.
We should therefore be very careful about assuming that exclusion is the best form of protection. In this respect, the appeal to carefreeness raises a similar worry to one that often rears its head in debates about relationships and sex education (RSE). Here, attempts to preserve children’s innocence can end up withholding uncomfortable knowledge from children who may not urgently need it, while denying children in more difficult or dangerous circumstances the tools they need to understand, name, or resist harm. Although all children are likely to require these tools, since harm can occur in any environment, some need them more, and earlier, than others. The same applies to social media bans. If the price of preserving a certain ideal of childhood is that some children lose access to vital support and information, then we should ask whose childhood is really being protected and at whose expense. A policy that works well for children who already have safe, supportive, resource-rich offline lives may be much less benign for those who do not.
There is also a democratic worry about the introduction of social media bans. As for adults, online spaces are now part of children’s social and cultural worlds. Excluding children entirely means blocking their access to environments where ideas are formed, shared, and contested. Under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), children have the right to express their views, access information, and be heard on matters that affect them. These rights are not absolute, but a blanket ban sits uneasily with the idea that children are developing citizens whose capacities for participation should be supported and nurtured in an age-appropriate manner rather than simply postponed until (near) adulthood.
The better alternative to bans is to regulate in a more targeted manner. If particular platforms are designed in ways that predictably harm children, we need to change the platforms, not simply remove the children. That means stronger duties on companies, with meaningful penalties for non-compliance, restrictions on addictive design, limits on contact with unknown adults, better reporting and redress mechanisms, and, in order to take the idea of graduated participation seriously, digital education that helps children learn to navigate online spaces with support.
The desire to give children their childhood back is understandable. But childhood is not best defended by pretending that the online world is separate from ‘real life’, or by treating children as passive objects of protection rather than developing agents with their own rights and interests. Social media can damage carefreeness. It can also help to cultivate it. A just policy needs to take both possibilities seriously.
References:
Brighouse, H., Ladd, F.H., Loeb, S. and Swift, A. (2018) Educational Goods: Values, Evidence and Decision-Making, Chicago; University of Chicago Press.
Ferracioli, L. (2024) Parenting and the Goods of Childhood, Oxford; Oxford University Press.
Orben, A. and Przybylski, A.K. (2019) ‘The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use’, Nature Human Behaviour 3, 173–182 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0506-1
