United Kingdom

If we agree social media can be harmful, then why is it an age question and not changing it at its source for everyone like removing infinite scroll. All this does is normalise ID checks for social media so that when the kids are old enough to be on it, they don't see an issue with assigning their ID to their online activity. At the same time we have people getting arrested for protesting which is meant to be a human right.

Where is your hard evidence? You don't know what you are talking about and you are going off the vibes of a moral panic to make the choice to attempt to massively censor public discourse... while you are on the fediverse of all places!?

We note three main findings from our review. First, these studies do not include children or adolescents. Across the studies, not one study reported a mean age of participants below 18. Only eight included any participants under 18, and all of these studies recruited from university human subjects pools or university mailing lists, meaning participants likely were college students. The youngest participant reported in any study was 16 years old. This means that we do not have findings from the populations that these bans are targeting.

Second, these studies' brief length of intervention and frequent use of social media reduction instead of restriction may limit the relevance of their findings to long-term, complete bans at the population level. Social media restriction periods ranged from 1 day to 3 months, with half of the studies imposing the restriction for 1 week or less. The mean length of restriction across all studies was 16.3 days. Furthermore, just 21 out of 40 studies implemented full social media restriction in the experimental condition. That means that the other 19 out of 40 studies tested a partial social media reduction, not a full restriction protocol. Participants in partial reduction studies were allowed to use social media every day up to a predetermined limit. The brief length and frequent use of partial reduction further limit the external validity of the findings with respect to informing anticipated impacts of long-term, complete bans.

Third, even if we were to extend these findings downward to adolescents, there is little evidence to date that impacts would be practically meaningful or even positive in direction. In the meta-analyses of these data to date, average effects have been indistinguishable from zero (Ferguson, 2024) or small in size (ḡ = 0.17), leading authors to conclude, “Restriction is likely not the most effective method of improving subjective wellbeing in today's digital age” (Burnell et al., 2025, p. 11). Neither meta-analysis found any evidence that length of restriction or extent of restriction (full vs. partial) moderated the effect sizes (Burnell et al., 2025; Ferguson, 2024). However, both meta-analyses found evidence that older age was associated with greater benefits of social media restriction (Burnell et al., 2025; Ferguson, 2024).

Across the 40 studies identified in our review, while most studies documented a positive impact, eight studies found null results, and eight studies found decreases in wellbeing resulting from social media restriction (see Table 1). The vast majority of the effect sizes were small (for a comprehensive analysis, see Burnell et al., 2025). Notably, participants were not masked to their experimental condition and trials were conducted in a context where people are told that social media is bad for one's wellbeing and that taking a break will lead to improvements. Therefore, it is surprising that the average impacts of the experiments were not more positive due to the fact the study designs were biased toward finding positive impacts.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/developmental-psychology/articles/10.3389/fdpys.2026.1805989/full

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/how-and-why-fight-back-against-social-media-bans

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/internet-age-gates-are-growing-global-threat