On Social Media Bans for Minors

Count me as a skeptic

Dara Macdonald writes,

Platforms like Substack fall within the black‑letter law, but not within its spirit. The purpose of the ban was to reduce brain rot, bullying, and anti‑social behaviour—not to discourage the reading and sharing of longform essays. I don’t believe it should fall to Substack to challenge the breadth of this legislation, but the fact that platforms of this kind are caught by the scheme only strengthens my opposition to the law.

The law she refers to is Australia’s ban on social media platforms allowing use by anyone under 16. But she writes,

Most parents don’t need academic research and essays to tell them that social media fuels loneliness, depression, anxiety, and bullying; they see it daily.

Daily? All parents? I’ll bet not.

Also, I have a lot of doubts about the “studies” showing the harms of social media. Not many are randomized controlled trials. And this is a topic that is ripe for p-hacking. You study twenty possible deleterious effects, and one of them turns out to be “statistically significant,” so you make a big deal out of that. Do any of the studies compare benefits with costs, or do they just look for adverse impacts of social media?

Has anyone considered interventions other than an outright ban? Training or education programs? Constructive ways to help young people cope with psychological difficulties that could come from anywhere, not just social media?

Eli Stark-Elster writes,

Imagine allowing your child to enter any system that would make them 12-18% more likely to kill themselves. That would be insane. You wouldn’t let your kid anywhere near that system, and the public would protest until it was eliminated once for all.

Great. So let’s get rid of school.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I suspect that the studies showing harms to mental health from school show larger effect sizes and are more robust than studies showing harms to mental health from social media. Even so, defenders of schooling would argue that schooling has clear benefits that outweigh the costs.

Stark-Elster suggests (cautiously) that one could blame the decline in teen mental health over the last decade not on social media but on the Common Core standards introduced in 2012.

One consequence of Common Core was that children had to spend much more time doing homework and much less time socializing with their friends.

I hope that we see a lot of “natural experiments” with social media bans for minors tried in different places. Will we see breaks in the mental-health trend lines in places that enforced such bans that we do not see in places that do not enact or enforce such bans?¹ I would bet against it.

I would like to see a ban on people confidently pronouncing that young people must be kept away from social media. Or from AI. I prefer to see intellectual humility on such topics.

1. I know that there is anecdata where young people report being happy about not being allowed on social media. I want to see evidence in statistics on suicide, mental health episodes in hospitals, or other hard data.