PUBLISHED ON 10TH FEBRUARY 2026
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
To ban or not to ban social media for children? That is the question many countries are considering worldwide, starting with Australia which, in December 2025 became the first to pass a law that excludes under-16s from some social media. The next month, the UK Government announced a consultation on the issue. There are ongoing discussions around an EU digital minimum age for access to social media. And the debate continues to gain momentum in more and more countries, from Denmark, France and Spain to several US states, India, Malaysia and Indonesia.
Proponents for bans emphasise the need to safeguard children’s psychological and emotional well-being, promote healthy development, mitigate the exploitation of children’s personal data, and empower parents to better guide their children’s online activities. Opponents of the bans, a group that perhaps counter-intuitively includes many children’s and online safety organisations, argue that they limit children’s ability to exercise the full range of their rights, including the ability to develop, share and look for ideas, connect with others, organise themselves politically, explore and shape their identities, and learn, play and more.
These arguments in favour and against social media bans illustrate an ongoing binary approach to children’s place in the digital world, and it is difficult to talk about the issue without reinforcing the divide in the debate. This alone points to the need for a more nuanced and deliberative approach, one which critically examines things. What if “to ban or not to ban” is the wrong question? And if it is, then where should we start instead?
One question always seems to run through the debates on children and the digital world: should the approach focus on protecting children online or on empowering them to freely explore the world around them?
The problem with this question - which CRIN has visited previously - is that it frames the issue as either/or. But this is a false dilemma: should children not be able to access digital spaces and be safe while doing so? These two things are not incompatible. Yet what we are seeing is that, with a rising number of countries considering bans as the apparent solution to the problems children face on social media, mainstream approaches are prioritising protection over access and connection.It is uncritically assumed that bans are the best way to achieve protection. We have seen this prohibitionist argument before: it is regrettably often made about children. But bans bypass the whole conversation about what effective protection looks like.
Ban-solutionism - the belief that banning something is the same as solving it - promises us safety but sidesteps the complicated reality of what children face and fails to define the problem. To help us unpack this, we should be looking at the full range of children’s rights, which covers the protection and empowerment of children, in all their complexity.
Examining the impact of social media bans on children requires an appreciation of the full range of their human rights, with none existing in isolation or being more important than others. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) shows us the breadth of human rights that children have both online and offline, among which we find children’s rights to protection from violence and protection from information and material “injurious to their well-being”, as well as the rights to non-discrimination, freedom of expression and information, free association and peaceful assembly, privacy, health, education and development, culture, leisure and play. And what is fundamental about these rights is that they are universal (they apply to all children), indivisible (no right is more important than another), and interdependent (the realisation of one right depends on the fulfilment of the others).
Considering this broad range of rights, the impact of social media bans is complex. This is consistent with available evidence, which does not support “simple or universal claims that social media use is inherently harmful”. Some social media is indeed toxic and it can be a tool for committing the most serious crimes against children, but there is nothing about the concept of social media itself that makes it so.
Take protection from violence. The assumption is that banning children from social media could shelter them from contact with perpetrators of online child sexual abuse or protect them from the mental violence caused by financial sexual extortion.
In reality, bans could also prevent children who are already facing violence from finding advice and understanding from peers and professionals in online support groups accessed via social media. Such children could feel increased shame and isolation, which might stop them from seeking help altogether, thereby leaving them vulnerable to continued violence. There are ways to circumvent bans by keeping users’ circumstances (location or age) private. But the assumption will be that most children will not use social media following a ban, which removes the incentive to make platforms safe for children in general. Younger children who will manage to access social media somehow will find themselves in even lower-quality environments than now. Some might even be driven to the dark web.
But even supposing the majority do respect the prohibition, bans create a “cliff edge” when children turn the age required to join social media. Birthdays are not magic moments of sudden wisdom and resilience: having only known a low-tech, rudimentary, sanitised digital space, children will gain immediate access to high-risk social media - but without having gradually developed the skills to navigate it safely and, as per the CRC, in a manner consistent with their evolving capacities. Welcome to the jungle.
Next, take mental health. Social media can make children compare themselves to others, increase their fear of missing out, keep them in echo chambers, put them under pressure to reply and keep up to date, feed them overwhelming or triggering content and cause sleep problems. Some social media even contains misinformation about mental health. Based on this, it would seem that banning social media could be beneficial to children's mental health.
But social media can also have positive impacts on children’s mental health by helping them build community, see themselves represented in different experiences, get creative, find inspiration for activities, support causes they care about, or find education and work experiences. Plus, bans would negatively impact the mental well-being of those from disadvantaged or marginalised communities in particular, like LGBT+ children or children with disabilities, by preventing them from accessing spaces where they feel safe to be themselves.
Now take privacy. The claim is that bans could address concerns around the exploitation of children's data by limiting the amount of personal data about children collected by companies.
In fact, bans are extremely intrusive because of the need to identify who is a child, potentially by checking every user’s age - adults as well as children. Bans could increase the processing of personal data, raising questions about how age-checking could be done effectively and what the impact would be on privacy.
And crucially, take children’s right to be heard. It is true that some children think that social media bans could encourage them to socialise more in person, exercise more, engage more in hobbies, and break free from addiction and exposure to unrealistic standards.
But children, just like adults, hold a variety of opinions. Surveys already show that many under-18s are either clearly opposed to or have very mixed feelings about bans, feeling that the drawbacks of social media are not significant enough to justify a ban. It does not seem like these views are being seriously and carefully considered by policymakers. Meaningful consultation with children in matters which affect them is an absolute must; it is their right, not an afterthought, as seems to have been the case in Australia.
All this considered, can we really say bans are a compelling answer to the legitimate concerns around children and social media? Under human rights law, some children’s rights (such as free expression and privacy) can be restricted by measures aimed at respecting other rights (such as protecting children from violence). However, these measures must be both necessary and proportionate. This forces us to ask if the measures proposed will be effective in achieving their aim and if there is a way of achieving that aim that is less restrictive on the rights that the measures limit.
As we have seen above, the necessity and proportionality of bans are extremely doubtful because they can leave children vulnerable to violence, stifle children’s positive digital experiences and further isolate those who are disadvantaged and marginalised. This is happening because children’s rights in their entirety have not been the priority in policy debates, even though rights are fundamental in helping us think about what good policy-making looks like.
“To ban or not to ban” is the wrong question - we need to start asking the right questions instead. Rather than ban-solutionism, the starting point in developing a rights-respecting, effective response to the impact of social media on children could be to ask:
In the coming weeks, we will be exploring all of this in more depth, through articles and explainers focused on how to understand the current landscape, how we respond to the challenges of social media with nuance and how we build the digital world we want for and with children.
This piece is co-published with Defend Digital Me.
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Related content: Issues - Digital rights and Exploring children’s rights in the digital environment
