On social media bans

Banning social media seems to be trending these days. As someone who works on using social media for good, I'm not so sure it's a good idea.

Will the world be better if social media didn't exist? Perhaps. But now that it does, is banning it the best way out? I don't think so.

I grew up in Jabalpur (try finding it on the map!), went to an all-girls' school, lived a fairly protected life. Social media was what gave me access to ideas, people, and a sense of the world well beyond my cocoon. Of course, social media then was a different beast. I'm not sure I'd be where I am without it, so I don't come to this as someone who thinks social media is all harm. What's changed between then and now is not that under-16s are online. It's how the platforms' design and intentions have changed.

Australia went first, with the under-16 ban coming into force in December 2025. Teens did what I would have done if I were still a teen, and found the gaps: borrowing a parent's face ID, printing mesh masks to fool facial recognition, switching on VPNs.

Bans make the people in charge look like they're in control. But for something like this, history shows us they don't work - they just push a problem underground rather than solving it. Prohibition didn't stop people drinking, it just handed the trade to bootleggers and speakeasies. A social media ban risks the same: it doesn't remove the harm, it just moves it somewhere no one is regulating.

But there's a bigger problem: a ban shifts accountability onto the user, and lets the companies off the hook entirely. In March, a California jury found Meta and YouTube liable on every count in a first-of-its-kind trial: their platforms were negligently designed, the companies knew the design was dangerous, and they failed to warn anyone of the risks. Jurors went further, adding punitive damages after deciding the companies had acted with malice in harming children. Yet a blunt ban does the opposite of holding them to account, it pushes young people off the very platforms that are visible and can be regulated.

I see this from a particular vantage point. Through my work on VaxSocial, I've spent the last couple of years watching how people actually find health information, and increasingly, it starts on social media. It's where a young woman looks first when she has a question about her pregnancy, or her child's vaccines. Done right, social media is one of the best ways we have to reach the next generation of mothers with information they can trust. A ban doesn't change that need, it just pushes people to find answers somewhere less safe.

I'm not arguing social media, in its current form, is harmless for kids. It clearly isn't, and we've seen multiple examples of that over the last few years. But the harder, better route is to regulate the design and the designers. For starters, turn off the features built for excessive use: autoplay, infinite scroll, push notifications, for younger accounts (maybe even for adults?). Other options include defaulting minors to the strongest privacy settings, letting them opt out of algorithmic feeds entirely, enforcing platform safety standards rather than leaving them voluntary, building in proper parental control frameworks, and most importantly, investing in digital literacy and education so under-16s learn to navigate these spaces safely.

Bans are easy. Accountability is hard. We should be asking for the hard thing. Curious what others think, especially those working in this space.