A Social-Media Ban Really Could Do a Lot of Good

Australia recently decided to try something ambitious. Starting late last year, all children under 16 have been banned from having accounts on social-media sites such as TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. Because no country has attempted such a ban before, knowing the effects in advance is impossible—and they may be hard to assess even years after implementation.

That said, the long experience of governments trying to restrict young people’s access to temptation goods of other kinds—drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, pornography—justifies cautious optimism. The ban might deliver some truly valuable benefits, letting youthful missteps remain local and ephemeral, rather than searing permanent brands onto developing psyches, and giving young people more time to develop the in-person social skills and connections that make life meaningful.  

Before we dive into details, we must address two reflexive, skeptical views of social-media bans. The first is that no matter how cleverly designed or strict a ban is, some kids will figure out ways around it, and thus the ban serves no purpose. By that logic, countries should abandon bans on robbery, toxic dumping, and corporate malfeasance, none of which is ever 100 percent foolproof. Already some Australian teens may have downloaded VPN software to get around the ban—but perfectionism should not be the enemy of progress.

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The second mistake is to think that all prohibitions look like the much-maligned War on Drugs, which many view as responsible for exacerbating incarceration, poverty, and violence. A social-media ban is not like the War on Drugs. Governments ban all sorts of goods and services for youth, adults, or both, and most prohibitions do not create other devastating social problems. Violations of the Australian ban would lead to fines on corporations, not kids being sent to detention centers.

But the core lesson from other bans is that most of them produce the intended effects, reducing the activity they seek to stem. For example, fireworks-related injuries tended to be much lower in states whose fireworks laws were more restrictive, but later rose in the many states that relaxed their laws in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Perhaps the most revealing analogues are the widespread age restrictions for the purchase and consumption of tobacco, alcohol, and cannabis, which are common around the world and have been extensively studied.

Yes, compliance will be imperfect. Data from the CDC show that in the past month, 4 percent of high-school students smoked a cigarette, 17 percent used marijuana, 17 percent vaped, and 22 percent drank alcohol, despite being underage. Thanks to older siblings and friends, permissive parents, fake IDs, and unethical sellers, some young people have always found ways to evade these bans, and similar tactics could work for surmounting a social-media ban as well. Yet all of these behaviors are still far more prevalent among adults, and there is a marked increase in uptake right as young people cross the legal threshold, an indication of the bans’ real impact.

Other studies suggest that even partially effective bans can reduce underage substance use and lead to other positive outcomes. Researchers exploited the staggered rollout of new state laws that increased the drinking age from 18 to 21 over the course of the 1980s to determine that although many people ages 18 to 20 evaded the ban, raising the legal age for drinking reduced alcohol consumption and traffic crashes among that group. A subsequent review was even more decisive, pronouncing the debate over the ban’s effects “closed.” Similar policies raised the minimum legal age for purchasing tobacco to 21 in the late 2010s, and had similar effects.

Adolescence is a time of high neuroplasticity in which many lifelong habits, good and bad, are formed. This is why companies pay a premium to advertise their products on TV shows that attract young viewers, and it is also why social-media companies see Australia’s ban as a long-term economic threat. People are generally far less likely to become addicted to something if they are introduced to it after their brain is fully developed (at about age 25), and every year of adolescence that someone delays using an addictive product, their risk of developing problems with it drops. Researchers have shown that growing up in a state and time after the drinking age was raised predicted decreased binge-drinking episodes in a sample of men as old as 53.

Positive outcomes from raising the minimum legal age for addictive substances do not guarantee success for imposing minimum legal ages on social-media accounts. Consuming alcohol, tobacco, or cannabis requires the acquisition of a physical object. This creates regulatory checkpoints (for instance, mandatory ID checks) that are hard to replicate online. Parents, teachers, and other adults who work with young people may have an easier time detecting these substances (smelling smoke; noticing that someone is drunk) than detecting whether someone is illegally using Instagram.  

However, in other respects, banning access to social media may be easier. Many teens appear to want to be off social media; they see it as detrimental to their own well-being but nevertheless feel they have to be on it to keep up with their peers. Fascinating economic research has shown that many social-media users would pay money to avoid a break from social media while others continue using it, but many of those same users would pay money to have the entire network deactivated for everyone.

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A ban might solve this collective-action problem, just as banning steroids in sporting competitions spares athletes from feeling compelled to damage their bodies just to keep up with competitors who dope. Young people can look at pornography alone (and presumably would generally prefer to), but social media is a lot less enticing if people you know are banned from using it. A ban thus can make using social media less rewarding in a way that is not true of pornography: As your peers reduce or stop their use, your incentive to do the same increases, in a mutually reinforcing cycle.   

A final significant question is whether the ban is politically sustainable. Cannabis prohibition was the law of the land in America until it wasn’t, brought down by an unusual combination of deep-pocketed corporate interests and left-leaning anti-corporate people who objected to punishing users (especially disadvantaged groups) for violating the ban. The social-media ban already has corporate opponents, including some of the world’s most influential companies. But because the ban penalizes corporations, not consumers who break the rules, ban-repeal advocates may have a harder time drawing a coalition of cross-partisan support.

Policies are rarely purely good, and the ban is likely to result in trade-offs. A few years from now, we may learn, for example, that rural Australian youth report feeling more isolated, but reading scores in junior high are rising nationally. Or we may find that participation in youth sports grows but so does compulsive computer gaming. Australia’s voters will have to assess what trade-offs they find reasonable. Regardless of how they choose, they will have done other countries a service by being the first mover as the world contends with how to live with such powerful new technologies.