Extraordinary censorship requires extraordinary evidence

Back in my day social media was limited to the screen the neighborhood kids shared in one of our living rooms. Logging on was always exciting because it meant that in-person connection came first before any digital interaction. And logging off was as easy as biking back home. Fast forward one generation, the living room screen follows the kids wherever they go and no amount of peddling will save them.

Gen Z, weary of their role as the first generation of digital natives, increasingly seek out nineties trends, not just in fashion but in technology and hands-on, low-tech hobbies too, and gen Alpha is apparently so fundamentally over it that they view everything cheap and shoddy, no matter how analogue, through the lens of AI exhaustion. In some polls, nearly half of young people say they wish they’d grown up before social media became prevalent. Yet ninety percent of American youth use social media, and half of those youth use it for more than four hours a day. Given that the youth can’t seem to figure out what they want, it’s perhaps not surprising to see adults leaping in to try to save the day – by taking away the choice entirely.

More than two dozen countries have proposed social media bans for minors so far. Canada’s own Online Harms bill would ban social media entirely for under-16s with the eventual goal of granting some companies exceptions if they make yet-to-be-defined improvements to protect children’s mental health. This approach is less drastic than some, but would still inevitably lead to a period in which young people’s Charter right to free expression is constrained by the state. Social media bans increase surveillance of young people and prevent them from accessing tools of self- and political advocacy; This suppression of free expression disproportionately impacts marginalized youth, including 2SLGBTQ+ teens seeking community support and indigenous children seeking culturally appropriate mental health resources. And young people have seldom been invited to the table to address social media harms, in violation of their right to provide their opinions on issues that affect them.

Given these consequences, such an unprecedented curtailing of rights would surely require extraordinary evidence to support it. Yet research has not reliably shown that social media inherently causes children’s mental health and well-being to deteriorate. Observed declines in youth mental health may have many causes, and while internal analysis from Meta does suggest teens blame Instagram for increased anxiety and depression, they are not necessarily correct about the direction of that relationship. In fact, research suggests that poor mental health in teens may lead to increased unhealthy social media use, rather than the other way around. Many studies do not show a link between mental health and social media use at all, or show benefits of moderate use over both excessive use and non-use. Interestingly, some of the oft-cited research that does show harm is focused on young adults, not minors, suggesting that the most harmful features of social media (addictive design, radicalizing algorithms, and extractive data practices) are harmful to people in general rather than specifically to children.

Worse still, even if we were to accept that the harms outweigh the benefits sufficiently to justify blanket bans, there is very little evidence that bans work – let alone achieve what they set out to achieve. Bans are often ineffective and unenforceable, pushing teens to either lie about their use or to use less well regulated platforms that present even more potential dangers. Fewer than one in twenty teens, for example, were compliant with Australia’s blanket ban just a year after it passed. This shouldn’t be terribly surprising to anyone who has ever been a teenager; bans that position them as passive victims of the scourge of social media are more likely to raise their ire – and rebellion – than their spirits. Doubly so in a world that has increasingly taken physical social spaces away from minors, leaving social media as their only available source of peer interaction.

None of this is to say that we should ignore the harms young people themselves are telling us they experience on social media. But solutions should be realistic and grounded in an understanding of the reasons teenagers will flock to tiktok in joyful disregard of every ban and even their own misgivings.

• Regulate social media companies away from harmful deliberate design choices like endless scrolling, invasive push notifications, highly targeted advertising, data mining, and radicalizing algorithms, putting the onus of care back on tech companies. 

• Champion platform interoperability so that all of us can leave platforms we perceive as harmful without losing our entire social networks. 

• Build digital literacy and emotional regulation, so that people are better equipped to make good choices about their social media use, and invest in third spaces and community programs so that people have genuine alternatives. 

All of these actions would better prevent harm, not just for young people, but for all Canadians. What’s more, they are broadly supported by teenagers – who, as it turns out, might know a thing or two more than us about the digital world they’ve grown up in.

Two-thirds of UK youth, when surveyed, wanted to see thoughtful social media restrictions for young people, but not blanket bans. Canadian teens likewise offered nuanced views, reflecting both on the harms they had experienced and the significant opportunities social media offered them. It is the youth, after all, who see no contradiction in wanting a rich offline life and a social media presence, who use apps to learn how to bird-watch and who get inspired to start in-person hobbies by the influencers they follow. Instead of imagining ourselves as heroes rescuing our helpless kids, we ought to empower them. We may have fond memories of a time when logging off was as easy as biking home, but that doesn't mean we have all the answers for a generation growing up in a very different world.

Written By:

Carolyn Dallimore, Policy Strategist, Engage