Should We Ban Teens from Social Media?
My nine-year-old niece and four-year-old nephew live in New York City. Julia and Alex can't obtain driver’s licenses until they turn sixteen, and they won’t be allowed to legally purchase cigarettes, marijuana, or alcohol until twenty-one candles top their birthday cakes. Gambling in Atlantic City or Las Vegas can’t occur until age twenty-one as well. Because it takes time for the brain to mature and develop, we should—state by state—enact another age restriction: Julia and Alex should be banned from certain social media apps until they turn sixteen.
Although the analogy isn’t without its flaws (social media has many positive qualities and has given teens the ability to instantly connect with others and learn more about the world), Instagram and Facebook remind me of Philip Morris and Lucky Strike. Just as Big Tobacco made money by selling nicotine, social media companies know they are providing an addictive product that causes mental and emotional health problems.
The science is undeniable: social media’s modes of interaction ignite neurons in the principal dopamine-producing areas of the brain. In other words, the brain responds to retweets, likes, and shares as it would to an addictive drug. A few years ago, Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, mused about the addictive nature of Facebook. “God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains,” he said. The company's founding goal, according to Parker, was to "consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible.” Parker acknowledged that, two decades ago, Facebook’s founders foresaw how the “like” button would give users a little dopamine hit.
Social media addiction is a problem for young teens in particular. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, “The teen brain is still developing, [so] teens may respond to stress differently than adults, which could lead to [more instances] of anxiety and depression.” As Zara Abrams writes for the American Psychological Association, “Between the ages of 10 and 12, changes in the brain make social rewards—compliments on a new hairstyle, laughter from a classmate—start to feel a lot more satisfying. Specifically, receptors for the oxytocin and dopamine multiply in a part of the brain called the ventral striatum, making preteens extra sensitive to attention from others.”
This mental health crisis isn’t theoretical. As Jonathan Haidt testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 4, 2022, teen mental health is worsening and social media is a big contributor. The New York Times recently reported of big increases in adolescents having depression. In addition, rates of self-harm, and suicide have risen rapidly for teenagers in recent years. (Visit kidsdata.org to see a graph of the trends.) Meanwhile, a team of scientists in England analyzed a data set of 84,000 individuals and found that social-media use negatively affected life satisfaction and mental health for girls and boys going through puberty, and a team from University of Pittsburgh found a correlation between time spent scrolling through social media apps and a greater risk of young adults developing eating and body image concerns.
Just as tobacco companies knew the dangers of smoking but concealed the findings, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that “for the past three years, Facebook has been conducting studies into how its photo-sharing app affects its millions of young users. The company’s researchers found that Instagram is harmful for a sizable percentage of them, most notably teenage girls.” As problematic, Instagram has made clear its desire to give their addictive drug to even younger children. The Wall Street Journal first published these findings in 2021.
Another way of thinking about the costs of social media use among teens and children comes from a recent essay in National Affairs by Chris Griswold, a policy director at American Compass. He writes, “The information revolution of our own century has produced the most dramatic economic and social transformation since industrialization, precipitating its own set of unanticipated and unacceptable harms to children. As with the fight against child labor, those harms will continue to manifest until policymakers act.” It took a hundred years from the first formal call to institute a minimum age requirement for factory workers in 1836 to the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. Also, Griswold reminds us, federal limits on child labor were called a “violation of parents' rights, a denial of the alleged benefits of labor for children, and flatly unconstitutional.”
Also, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that a social media ban might not work. It’s possible that, as George Mason University’s Adam Thierer writes, it would become “another sad chapter in the history of Big Government prohibitionist efforts that fail miserably.” Perhaps my distaste with social media is just an example of a never-ending inter-generational conflict. I’m reminded of an episode from Downton Abbey in which Lord Grantham derides the “fad” of the “wireless.” Scoffing at the idea of a radio, Grantham says, “I find the whole idea a kind of thief of life. People waste hours huddled around a box listening to someone burbling.”
Even if the social media ban is a good idea, it may be impossible to create a reliable and private method for Americans to identify their age before entering virtual spaces. And even if Silicon Valley’s best and the brightest can build an age-verification system, many parents will help their kids evade restrictions, just as some underage Americans obtain fake IDs today.
Despite the downsides and challenges with enforcement, an age-restriction law will help children, young teens, and their parents. Griswold offers this analogy regarding the status quo: “Parent’s efforts to restrict social media use are roughly as effective a solution as locking the family liquor cabinet while the store down the street is handing out free bottles of alcohol.” It’s time that we make some reforms.