I taught my children road safety. It seemed preferable to forbidding them from crossing the road. Arguably, the same thought process should be applied to the banning of access to selected social media channels for UK under 16s. Restricting access does not necessarily build resilience.
The Taoiseach has indicated that his preferred approach would be to introduce a social media ban for children at EU level. This follows a move by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to ban social media use for all under-16s. Micheál Martin said the Government is considering a similar measure in Ireland, but added that he would like to see such a ban applied consistently across all EU member states.
Although the instinct to protect young people from harm is a natural one, and there are certainly well-documented examples for social media channels, rather than an outright ban, perhaps a more nuanced approach would have been preferable.
For many young people, social media is not supplementary to their social lives, to all intents and purposes, it is their social lives. Group chats, content-sharing and public profiles are how many adolescents maintain friendships between school hours and even across different schools. Teenagers who are geographically isolated, neurodivergent, LGBTQ+, or those with a minority identity, might find that online communities are able to offer a sense of belonging that simply may not exist locally. It is not hard to imagine that a ban could leave these young people feeling more isolated at the very developmental stage when identity and emotional health are being formed.
Channeling creativity
YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram represent legitimate ways for creative youngsters to find expression. Musicians, filmmakers, comedians, artists and writers, previously unlikely to gain access to an audience until adulthood, have on these platforms, a way to channel their creativity. For some, early access has led to real income, career development, and professional networks built years earlier than previous generations were able to. A selective ban penalises youngsters at a time when their creativity is likely to be richly experimental.
Easily-accessed support
Teenagers routinely use social media channels to access peer support, mental health content, help-resources, and communities built around shared experiences such as grief, chronic illness, anxiety, and family breakdown. Assuming that a young person denied access to Instagram will readily turn to a trusted adult is a flawed assumption. For many, digital support is often the first, and most easily accessed step in the journey to formal help.
The effects of selective social media exclusion could also compound over time. A generation banned from social media in their formative years may become less digitally fluent adults who, in turn, may lose the ability to appreciate the benefits social media access can bring. Furthermore, the skills developed when navigating complex online environments, evaluating sources, managing an online profile, and understanding how algorithms work, are becoming increasingly important in adult life. Delaying that education may mean young people encounter these challenges in later life without having had a structured adolescent experience.
Creating inequalities?
Selective bans can also introduce inequalities. Children from wealthier backgrounds are more likely to experience greater digital literacy in the home, higher levels of parental support, and access to VPNs and other means to bypass the bans. Conversely, children from disadvantaged backgrounds, who might have fewer offline alternatives and lower levels of parental support, may be disproportionately adversely affected. A ban designed to protect the vulnerable may have the unintended consequence of widening existing equality gaps.
Prohibition inhibits dialague
This brings me back to the road safety example. It is arguable that the most robust protection for young people online is digital literacy, emotional education, and a meaningful dialogue around how platforms work, and why they are designed the way they are. Prohibition inhibits dialogue.
I am not for one moment suggesting that social media channels are not without a degree of serious harm, or that children have not suffered terribly as a result of social media interactions. Quite the opposite. I am arguing that by adopting a largely blanket ban, rather than a more nuanced approach, with content moderation playing a more high-profile role, a younger generation could miss very real benefits in areas such as connection, creativity, information, community, and economic awareness. These benefits have real-world and potentially long-term implications. The danger occurs when they are removed without a plan in place, such as greater digital literacy practice in educational and controlled social environments, to replace the good they bring. Without that corollary, a ban risks solving one problem by quietly creating a host of others.
