Governments worldwide are moving to legally restrict teenagers' use of social networking services (SNS), but there is no scientific evidence supporting the effectiveness of such measures, according to a new study.
An international research team led by clinical psychologist Dr. Monica Neff Lindh published an analysis directly challenging the effectiveness of teen social media ban laws in the latest issue of the journal Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, the medical community said Friday.
The regulatory trend is steep. After Australia imposed a complete ban on social media account creation for those under 16 last December, countries including France, the United Kingdom, Canada and Spain have been pushing similar legislation one after another.
French President Emmanuel Macron said a ban on social media for those under 15 is "a measure recommended by scientists," while U.S. Senator Brian Schatz, who introduced related legislation, stressed the need for regulation, claiming there is "research showing that quitting social media for more than a month improves teen mental health."
However, when the research team conducted a comprehensive review of existing experimental data on the effects of social media use restrictions on mental health, the results were different. There was not a single experiment directly targeting teenagers under 16. This means there is no data at all verifying what effects the ban laws have on the very people they target.
Studies on adults also did not match politicians' claims. In adult experiments as well, the effects of social media use restrictions were mostly minimal or nonexistent, and in about 40% of all experiments, negative outcomes such as declines in life satisfaction and increased loneliness appeared after stopping social media use, or no changes were observed at all.
The research team warned that a hasty blanket ban could cause unexpected harm. Collecting identity information during the age verification process could lead to privacy infringement controversies, and selfie-based age determination technology has high error rates for younger faces or people of color, potentially causing discrimination against minorities. Because many schools and youth organizations use social media as a key announcement channel, a ban could instead end up blocking access to information.
The problem of circumventing regulation was also pointed out. If teenagers lie about their age to create adult accounts, they are exposed to an even more dangerous environment without any of the harmful content filtering or guardian management features that were applied to existing teen accounts. In Australia, authorities have found that about 70% of accounts owned by those under 16 remained active even three months after the ban law took effect.
The research team suggested that, instead of indiscriminately introducing regulations, control groups should be established by suspending implementation only in certain regions, and that policy effects should be empirically verified by collecting reported data from teenagers themselves and their guardians along with objective behavioral data.
"Big Tech has been criticized for its 'move fast and break things' attitude, and now policymakers are repeating the same mistake with hasty ban laws," Dr. Lindh said. "Simply blocking social media cannot solve teen mental health problems, and we need to move toward designing the digital environment itself to be safer."
