The Social Media Ban Problem

A social media ban for kids under 16 sounds like the kind of clean, decisive fix adults crave when they feel frightened and powerless. I get that fear. Parents are worried, schools are exhausted, and clinicians and safeguarding teams are seeing what algorithm-driven platforms expose children to: comparison, sexualization, cruelty, misinformation, addictive design, and relentless social evaluation. Still, I’m not convinced prohibition is the answer, especially when it’s presented as “settled science” without transparent evidence and detailed guidance.

I take a child and adolescent psychotherapy lens to a simple question with huge policy implications: what are kids using social media for? For some, it’s compulsive. For others, it’s avoidance, belonging, identity formation, self-soothing, or a temporary escape from conflict they cannot regulate. Neurodivergent children may find online communication more manageable than in-person connection. When we treat social media use as a behavior to stop, we can miss the underlying distress and the unmet needs that keep pulling young people back.

We also talk about unintended consequences that matter for digital safety and adolescent mental health: secrecy, VPNs, hidden accounts, more family conflict, migration to less regulated spaces, and a drop in disclosure. Safeguarding depends on trust, and trust collapses when kids expect punishment or panic. The alternative is layered policy that targets platform accountability and age-appropriate design: algorithm transparency, limits on addictive features, real enforcement, digital literacy, support for families, and mental health services people can actually access, backed by long-term research that measures wellbeing not just screen time. If this perspective helps, subscribe, share the episode with a parent or educator, and leave a review with your thoughts on what real protection should look like.

Transcript

Welcome And A Detour

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello, this is Kim Lee, child and adolescent psychotherapist. In this episode, I'm going to deviate from the broadcast program, so to speak, and that my work on mentalization and the episodes conducted so far are going to be interrupted by something I want to talk about, which has to do with the social media ban protection panic and what I would call dealing with the problem by using silver bullets. I want to talk about the government's latest proposal to ban social media for children under the age of 16, which they are claiming that they will be implementing in I think January 2027. What I want to say at the outset is that I completely understand the anxiety which sits behind this. I understand why parents are frightened. I understand why schools are exhausted, and I understand why clinicians, safeguarding professionals, and policymakers are deeply concerned about what children are seeing, absorbing, imitating, and becoming habituated to online. I share those concerns. So I want to make that clear first of all because anybody who doesn't share those concerns clearly isn't especially informed. Social media, though, isn't neutral. It's not simply a playground, it's not simply entertainment, it's a commercial, algorithmically driven, psychologically powerful environment in which children

The Proposed Under-16 Ban

SPEAKER_00 1:44

and adolescents are exposed to comparison, sexualization, cruelty, misinformation, addictive design, and relentless social evaluation. So this isn't an argument in defense of the status quo, but neither is it an argument in favour of pretending that a ban is a solution simply because it sounds decisive. So my concern is that this has the feel of a silver bullet, a single dramatic intervention which appears to solve a complex problem by drawing a firm line underneath it. Under sixteen, no social media. Over sex sixteen, permitted but regulated. Now the difficulty is that children don't live in policy categories. They live in families, nervous systems, peer groups, bedrooms, schools, friendships, anxieties, exclusions, neurodevelopmental difficulties, trauma, histories, loneliness, bullying, family conflict, and social pressure. Not to make too fine a point of it. And if we treat social media or its use as though it is merely a behavior to be stopped, we're missing the more important questions. Because what we have to ask is what is the behavior doing? Now for some children, screen use is compulsive and harmful. For others, it's avoidant. For others still, it's about social belonging. And even for others, it's about masking distress. Sometimes, and especially for neurodivergent children, it may be one of the very few places where communication feels manageable. For some children, those living in high conflict homes, online spaces may function as a temporary escape route from emotional pressure that they can't otherwise regulate. It doesn't mean it's therefore safe, and it's not, neither is it ideal, but it and it doesn't mean that adults should simply leave children alone with it. I guess what I'm, if it's not already clear, trying to say is that these may be

Why Social Media Is Not Neutral

SPEAKER_00 3:55

ways in which social media become used and relied upon. In and of themselves, they serve a purpose. And alongside that, significant risks are evident. But if we remove it abruptly, without understanding the psychological function and the societal function, we won't be removing the distress. We're just simply removing a coping mechanism. And that's where I think the policy is it risks becoming naive, because children don't stop needing connection because we ban a platform, they don't stop needing escape because we remove an app. They don't stop feeling anxious, excluded, bullied, dysregulated, or traumatized because a government has decided that TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, or YouTube are no longer available. Now, we we appear to have a major developmental intervention affecting millions of children and families. Yet, where is the detailed expert guidance, the evidence which informs that decision? And admittedly, it may be there, but it's certainly not being open to public scrutiny. So until that evidence is available, we should be cautious about presenting this policy as settled science. You see, what happens is that when we suppress behaviors, they may go underground, they may shift to less regulated platforms. It may be they become more secretive, it may become more conflictual within families, it may become another battleground between parents and children who are already barely or managing their relationships with difficulty. And in those families where there are already serious tensions, parental conflict, separation, neurodevelopmental needs, school refusal, anxiety, trauma, coercion, etc., this kind of intervention could throw something of a hand grenade into the household. Parents may be placed in the role of enforcer. Children who experience the parent not as protective, but as punitive as a consequence. Arguments may escalate, deception may increase, phones may be hidden, accounts may be created elsewhere, VPNs may be used, other siblings or older siblings may become access points. And also maybe people outside of the family home may make it possible for those children to have access by creating false accounts, for example. Children may migrate into digital spaces that are far less visible and potentially more dangerous. And

What Kids Use It For

SPEAKER_00 6:48

there I talk about the dark web. This is one of the oldest lessons in child and adolescent psychiatry and psychotherapy. If you only attack the symptom, the underlying distress often finds another route. So the question isn't simply how do we stop children using social media? The better question is what are children using social media for? And what have we failed to provide elsewhere? Are they using it for belonging? Well, yes, I think that's very definitely the case. For distraction? Yes. Emotional anesthesia? Yes. For identity formation? Very definitely. Escape? Yes. Social status? Yes. Self-soothing? Yes. Contact? Yes. Revenge? Yes. For dissociation? Reassurance? Or for a sense of control? Absolutely, yes. This isn't just about entertainment. So when we ask these kinds of questions, we we we stop making the mistake that the behaviour is the whole problem. Now the Australian model is often referred to as though it's already proved the case, and that is complete nonsense. There is no evidence whatsoever to support the idea that the Australian model is working. That is the headline. But the story beneath that is far from different. It is too early, far too early, to say it's working. And there are some early reports of positive behavioral changes in some children, more face-to-face interaction, greater presence, improved parent-child relationships, and these are important and shouldn't be dismissed, but it should be remembered, they're anecdotal. But there are also reported negative effects. Children moving to alternative or less regulated platforms, reduced online connection, reduced creativity, reduced peer support. At the moment, researchers have also warned that early account removal figures might not tell us how many actual children are being protected,

When Bans Drive Secrecy

SPEAKER_00 9:02

because removed accounts may include inactive or duplicate accounts. And there are also early signs of circumvention, namely people finding ways around it. So, in other words, the evidence doesn't yet allow us to say this works. It shows us this is complicated, and that's a very different thing. Now there's another risk here. When we ban something that's already deeply embedded in adolescent culture, we may unintentionally criminalize normal adolescent behavior. I do not mean criminalize in the formal legal sense, I mean psychologically and socially, we turn the young person into the rule breaker. We make secrecy more likely, we make disclosure harder, we increase shame, we make it less likely that a child will say, I saw something frightening, or someone contacted me, or I have an account I shouldn't have. Because once the child knows that they were not supposed to be there in the first place, the adult relationship becomes more dangerous to them, and that matters. Safeguarding depends on disclosure, and disclosure depends upon trust. Trust depends on children believing that adults can tolerate the truth without immediately becoming punitive, panicked, or controlling. So, yeah, we need regulation, yes, we need age assurance, yes, we need to hold technology companies accountable, and that's a big part of this. And yes, we need to challenge these addictive design infinite scroll algorithmic amplifications and the commercial exploitation of children's attention. It's wrong. But if the burden falls mainly on families and children rather than on the architecture of the platforms themselves, we've missed we've missed the point entirely. The platforms aren't passive. You know, they their their design isn't accidental. Children aren't choosing to become hooked. They're being engaged by systems to capture attention, extend use, and monetize psychological vulnerability. A child's developing brain isn't evenly matched against a machine learning system designed by some of the most powerful companies in the world. So the question shouldn't be how do we keep children away from the machine alone? It should be why has the machine been allowed to operate in ways that are developmentally inappropriate to children? So a mature policy would include several layers, and it would include serious platform accountability, and

Real Safety Means Platform Accountability

SPEAKER_00 11:44

it would include age-appropriate design, it would have algorithmic transparency, and would have restrictions on addictive features, it would include digital literacy in schools, it goes far beyond slogans, and it would include parental support, not parental blame. Another concern here is that what happens if it is discovered that a child has circumnavigated the ban, found ways, and is involved in something, who gets the blame? Parents. And it would include specific consideration of neurodivergent children, traumatized children, isolated and children in real communities, children who are bullied, and who are struggling not only because of their adolescent development, but other factors as well. It would also include mental health services that are actually accessible. It would include family-based support, and it would include research, and that's really important, intelligent research that follows outcomes over years, not headlines over weeks. And it wouldn't ask only whether children are online less, but whether they are actually safer, better connected, less anxious, and so on. A reduction in screen time is not the same thing as an improvement in well-being. Yes, there is a link for some. But a child can be offline and still be profoundly distressed. They can be banned from social media and still be bullied, lonely, ashamed. These things were around long before social media. This is the danger of a behavioral policy when it is not psychologically informed. It makes absence or it makes mistakes and it mistakes absence for recovery. So no phone in the hand does not necessarily mean peace in the mind. And this is where I think we must be very careful. The impulse to protect children is right. The concern about social media is right. The need to act is right. But the belief that prohibition itself will resolve the underlying problem is not supported by what we know about children, families, adolescence, trauma, neurodevelopment, or human behavior. Children need more than restriction. They need adults who understand them. They need relationships that are strong enough, homes where distress can be spoken and tolerated. So there's a lot more to this. I could continue the list with what children need. But I think I cover most of those things in my podcasts. If we make children more secretive, more ashamed, and more distant from the adults who are supposed to protect them, then we may discover that our silver bullet hasn't solved the problem at all. It's driven it underground and has acted not as a silver bullet, but an incendiary device.

Why This Push Happens Now

SPEAKER_00 14:58

Finally, I want to add that when I see these kinds of things being enacted, very often I ask the broader question of why is this being responded to now? Why is it that politicians are standing up and making the right noises? It would be nice to think that it's because they have finally got the message and they're starting to do something. Some people might regard it churlish to suggest that they're doing it for other reasons. But that's for listeners to decide. Thank you for listening.