Kids’ social media bans are now ‘unstoppable’

The 1990s was not a good decade for the tobacco industry. In 1992 the US Congress passed the Synar Amendment which required states and territories to enforce laws prohibiting the sale of tobacco to minors. Evidence was coming forth that demonstrated not only that cigarettes were particularly addictive to children, but that the tobacco industries were aware of this and deliberately targeted their products to the underage.  

The law initially backfired. To many lawmakers and parent’s horror, smoking amongst young people increased in the years after the ban. In 1992, 17% of those under 18 said they smoked daily. Five years later that figure climbed to almost 25%. The increase gave the tobacco lobby the opportunity to argue that bans don’t work. Instead of prohibiting children from smoking, the lobby argued that legislation should focus on teaching young people the risks of nicotine so they can be empowered to make their own decisions. 

The tobacco lobby overlooked a critical factor: the ban wasn’t universally enforced. In some places all a young person had to do was lie about their age or use an obvious fake ID to buy a pack of cigarettes. In other places young people walked into shops alongside a friend who was slightly older who bought the cigarettes for them. As time went by, states got better at enforcement to the point that no vendor today would risk their license to sell to anyone without a valid ID. The ban also accompanied a cultural shift over the last thirty years that has changed cigarettes from a symbol of cool into a taboo. Today less than 2% of American children report smoking tobacco cigarettes daily.  

The lessons from the Synar Amendment extend beyond cigarettes. In December, Australia passed a social media ban for the under 16. The law is one of the first of its kinds to address the rising evidence that social media platforms are purposefully designed to target children and build digital addictions.  

The Australian legislation is well intentioned but comes with so many loopholes that most children with basic online literacy are circumnavigating the ban. The legislation includes all platforms with the “sole or significant purpose” to enable online interaction. Facebook, Snapchat, X, and Instagram are included, but not Roblox or YouTube Kids. Children have since been found to move their conversations onto gaming platforms not included in the ban. One of the biggest problems according to a recent compliance report update is that age assurance technology has not caught up with the social media platforms. This is the digital equivalent of a cashier accepting a fake ID. One study found that 61% of Australian young people reported the ban had no impact on their social media use.  

On Wednesday night, film director Baroness Beeban Kidron spoke at The Conduit about her recent book, Users: How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back. Her talk was perfectly timed with the Prime Minister’s announcement a day earlier of a similar social media ban in the UK. Kidron expressed delight that her work has been quoted on both sides of the debate – for and against the legislation. Like the tobacco lobbyists of the 1990s, Big Tech is pointing to the recent evidence from Australia to argue that bans are not the answer to children’s diminishing attention spans. Baroness Kidron was quick to point out that whatever the faults of this as-yet unexplained UK legislation may be, it is clear that the legislation is moving in an unstoppable direction towards holding social media platforms accountable for the harm they are causing children.  

“We are not banning children from the internet; we are banning companies from accessing our children unless they meet our conditions,” she said 

One of the problems with the debate around social media bans is that it focuses on what sort of content children are receiving rather than the platforms on which they are seeing it. Most people can agree that young people should not be exposed to images of sex or violence, but Kidron explained that even if they are watching educational videos, the medium itself is the problem. It is no accident, she said, that Big Tech companies employ 50% of all behavioural psychologists.  They do this so they can engineer platforms that are addictive to children’s developing minds.  

“The three dots when somebody is replying, those are there for a reason,” Kidron explains. “You don’t stop looking at your phone and carry on with your day. You wait for the response.”  

One of the biggest obstacles to keeping children off their phones is the outsized influence of the tech lobby. To illustrate her point, Kidron spoke about an interview she gave with a senior official of the Biden administration who had become so disenchanted with democracy that she commissioned research into why Congress had become dysfunctional. Her research found that up until the mid- 1980s, Congressmen’s votes aligned with the politics of their constituents. Today, however, federal legislators vote for the agenda of the wealthiest 10%.  

“When you look at how much it costs to become a politician, and when you see every single Senator that has a place on a committee for tech has tech money in their campaign, they go into the job conflicted,” Kidron explained. “Unless we deal with the lobbying, we will never get our democracy back.”  

One solution to winning back children’s attention is through the courts. In March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google, owner of YouTube, guilty of deliberately building addictive platforms that harmed the mental health of a now 20-year-old woman. Although the damages were only $6 million, the lawsuit has opened the floodgates for other parent and campaign groups seeking tighter restrictions on social media platforms. Since the settlement, 1,200 school districts from across the U.S. have jointly sued YouTube, Meta, TikTok, and Snap for allegedly fuelling a mental health crisis in young people.  

Kidron’s top solution is stronger, more robust democracy. “We need to demand new laws,” she said. “We the people need to be the lobby.” A common misperception about social media platforms is that they serve as an open democratic “commons” for airing and sorting ideas. But according to Kidron, this overly romantic view disguises a disquieting truth that these platforms are owned by giant corporations with the sole ambition of making profit. “This public square is not our freedom; it is actually the tech companies’ freedom.”  

Her final recommendation to combatting Big Tech was more personal: turn off the notifications on your phone. Social media platforms feed off our attention. The best way to deny them money and power is to reclaim our minds.