These Are All the Countries Considering Social Media Bans for Teens
The landmark social media trial against Meta and YouTube (with TikTok and Snap having settled) kicked off this week in Los Angeles, with lawyers arguing that the platforms intentionally caused addiction and harm to teens.
Other countries, meanwhile — not the U.S. — are skipping the trials, and instead moving toward implementing social media bans for some teens.
While Australia is the only country that has fully implemented such a ban, affecting anyone under 16, many others appear to be headed down the same path.
In Europe, for example, the European Parliament has called for the European Union to set minimum-age requirements — under 16 — for social media and AI chatbots. But doing so will be up to each country.
In France, the French National Assembly approved a bill just last month that will ban social media for kids under 15 if approved by the Senate. And Spain and Greece have proposed similar bans — for those under 16 in Spain and under 15 in Greece.
Turkey, meanwhile, is reportedly looking into such a proposal, as is the Conservative Party of Germany, the UK, and India, which just tightened a law about social media companies taking down unlawful content, now giving them just three hours in which to do so. And in Czechoslovakia, Prime Minister Andrej Babis said he supported the idea of banning social media for anyone under 15.
Also, according to Reuters, Denmark, Norway, and Slovenia said they would implement a social media ban for those under 15, while Malaysia said it would do so for those under 16.
While the U.S. has no federal ban, several states have enacted their own, including Arkansas, Ohio, Florida, and Nebraska, though they face court challenges.
There is a large body of research showing a connection between adolescent social media use and poor mental health outcomes, with the latest, a massive study out of the University of California, released just this week. It showed that the links between problematic screen use — when kids can’t control their usage or feel symptoms of withdrawal why they try to stop — and mental health are much stronger than previously believed.
Social scientist Jonathan Haidt, a loud proponent of getting kids to put down their phones, recently wrote about the “flood of new research” he’s seen on the direct harms of social media on young people, including through Meta’s own internal research. The findings, maintains Haidt, show that social media is not safe for children or adolescents, and calls evidence “abundant, varied, and damning.”