Spain Wants To Ban Social Media for Kids. It Won't Work.
Australia’s experience shows what happens when governments play online parent
"Social media is a failed state," proclaimed Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez last week, before announcing plans to ban social media entirely for kids 15 years old and younger. "Today, our children are exposed to a space where they were never meant to navigate alone: a space of addiction, abuse, pornography, manipulation, and violence," Sánchez said at the World Government Summit in Dubai. "We will no longer accept that. We will protect them from the digital Wild West."
The ban still needs parliamentary approval, which could be discussed this week. It's unclear exactly what platforms would be covered by the ban, but in his speech, Sánchez was especially critical of X and TikTok.
If approved, Spain would become the first European nation to ban social media for minors, but it is unlikely to be the last. Greece will soon unveil a ban similar to Spain's, reports Reuters. The idea also has traction with a sizable coalition of the European Union, including France and Denmark, and at the end of last year, the European Parliament passed a nonlegislative report urging the proposal of "a harmonised EU digital minimum age of 16 for access to social media."
Despite the current political consensus that social media harms children, there is no conclusive evidence that this is the case. An Oxford University study of nearly 12,000 children showed no correlation between screen time (including on social media) and mental well-being. Even where the participants had high rates of digital engagement, there was no evidence of impaired function in the brain development of children. Meanwhile, a study published in JAMA Pediatrics last month found that "moderate social media use" in fourth- through 12th-graders "was associated with the best well-being outcomes, while both no use and highest use were associated with poorer well-being."
Not only are bans on social media unlikely to improve teen mental health, but they could put more children in harm's way. In Australia, which implemented the world's first social media ban for minors last year, teens have been able to circumvent the new heavy-handed social media laws. As 14-year-old Sarai Ades told The Guardian earlier this month, she knew "circumventing the ban was going to be possible, but it was so much easier than we could have expected".
After creating an account with a fake birthday, Ades has retained her social media access.
"Now that the platforms think I'm over 18 I have completely unfiltered access to all the content that might have been previously left out of my feed because of content restrictions," she told the paper. "I definitely have more videos coming up on my feed around geopolitical instability and more violent coverage. It was really shocking at first and I wasn't at all prepared. Sometimes I set my own restrictions to avoid sensitive content because it gets a bit much."
The ban has also taken away a critical source of community for Australians in rural areas.
For instance, 15-year-old Breanna Easton, who spends her summer holidays mustering cattle on the family's station in the sparsely populated outback, told the BBC that social media is how she interacts with her friends who live several hours away. "Taking away our socials is just taking away how we talk to each other," she said.
Beyond the negative impacts on teens' mental health, overarching bans raise serious privacy issues. In Australia, the government has said platforms cannot rely on users declaring their own age, or on parents vouching for their children. The legal responsibility for verification means that social media companies are effectively forced to require everyone to prove their identity with government IDs or video selfies. Measures like these have been susceptible to leaks of sensitive information. Last year, Discord revealed that hackers had stolen "at least" 70,000 images of government IDs that the site had used for age verification. In September, Politico reported that "an age verification provider is potentially leaking information about people visiting pornographic websites."
It's not just Europe and Australia that are blaming the youth mental health crisis on social media and Big Tech. Several states in the Union have enacted bans or restrictions on social media sites. Last month, a landmark trial began in California to determine if Meta, Google, and ByteDance had deliberately designed their platforms to lead to addiction in children.
Sánchez says he wants to protect kids "from the digital Wild West." If that's the case, a social media ban is a poor way to achieve this objective.