Against rising adult concern about child sexual abuse content and children’s mental health, recent calls to follow Australia and ban under-16s from accessing social media in the UK are understandable. It reflects genuine parental anxiety about online harms.
These harms are not abstract. Research shows that young people are exposed to violent misogynistic cultures and toxic manospheres online.
But despite being consistently critical of the viral and experiential platform business models driving much of today’s social media harm, as an expert in digital communication, I do not support the ban. This is not because I defend the kind of libertarian politics adopted by Silicon Valley.
It isn’t because I consider social media harmless either. The situation is more nuanced. I oppose the ban because it is based on questionable assumptions about under-16s’ vulnerability to social media and overlooks the broader harms platform business models present to all users.
What’s needed is a hardline regime of regulation and education across all age ranges.
I challenge the pro-ban debate because it too often rests on a crude and narrow adult perception of young online experiences. This often overstates media effects on attention and other brain functions. It also crucially underestimates the significance of learning about wider digital cultures in the everyday social, political, creative and emotional experiences of young people.
More profound issues persist in the business models that structure digital experiences. There is little doubt that doomscrolling has negative psychological effects, as many users discovered during the COVID pandemic.
As an invention of the attention economy, endless feeds are not accidental: they are shaped by design choices that keep users scrolling long past the point of diminishing returns. These systems are purposefully optimised for engagement metrics, not well-being. Platforms do not sell content; they sell scarcity of attention, optimising and farming user experiences for advertisers and data companies.
Where I am more sceptical is in claims that social media rewires young people’s brains or directly destroys attention spans. Such arguments often imply a simple cause-and-effect relationship between screens and declining cognition. Historically, anxieties about distraction long predate social media. Technology scholars point out that forms of shorter, more fragmented attention most probably preceded the deep attention required to read books.
The problem is not that under-16s are uniquely vulnerable to encounters with screens. It is that all users are navigating systems engineered to optimise distraction at scale. Attention is not disappearing. It is being captured and redirected.
Regulation, not prohibition
There is no question that under-16s face particular risks online. But banning social media will not eliminate those risks. Young people are adept at working around restrictions, whether through VPNs, shared logins or burner accounts. When a cultural practice is pushed underground, it does not disappear. It becomes more secretive, less supervised and often more socially risky.
Prohibition also tends to increase desirability. Social media does not become less tempting because it is forbidden. It becomes rebellious, status-laden and harder for parents, educators and researchers to engage with openly. Historically, prohibitionist approaches to alcohol and gambling have driven cultures of harm underground rather than eliminating them.
In the UK context, this matters. While policymakers debate bans, the same global platforms continue to operate with limited accountability, despite legislation such as the Online Safety Act. Silicon Valley companies have become too powerful to self-regulate and increasingly unwilling to act in the public interest. Decades of government-backed deregulation (or re-regulation) driven by digitisation have left platforms with unprecedented reach and minimal responsibility.
This situation is not sustainable.
Social media is a media industry, no different in principle from film, television, radio or newspapers. Yet it has grown with almost no editorial responsibility or enforceable public standards. Leaning on automated filters or AI moderation does not remove harmful content at the source.
The answer is not prohibition, but stringent regulation: clearer rules, enforced transparency, content governance and meaningful oversight of how algorithms function. A ban avoids the hard questions. Regulation forces us to confront them, including how recommendation systems shape experience, and whose interests those systems ultimately serve.
Why media literacy matters
Media studies is often derided as a shallow subject lacking rigour, but digital media literacy is now essential. Understanding how algorithms work is crucial for grasping how attention is farmed, manipulated and sold.
Social media is not only informational but also emotional. Platforms trade heavily in outrage, affirmation, anxiety and belonging. Media literacy must therefore go beyond recognising misinformation, fact-checking or managing screen time. It must involve an “education of the senses”. In this case, learning how to discern between commodified emotional experiences and what constitutes a genuinely flourishing online life.
This is not about teaching young people to simply resist platforms. It is about equipping them with conceptual tools to recognise how digital experiences are designed, how their feelings are being engaged, and how their attention is being steered.
If the UK government is serious about protecting young people online, it needs to regulate social media as the powerful media industry it is. It needs to educate users about how their emotional experiences are extracted and commodified. That approach is slower and more politically demanding. But it addresses the problem at its source.
- is a Reader in Digital Communication, University of Essex
- This article first appeared in The Conversation
