Why I Changed My Mind About Age-Gating and Social Media Bans

Last week I spoke with Amelia Gentleman at The Guardian about the growing movement to ban young people under the age of 16 from social media platforms. The interview featured a provocative headline and opened with an attention-grabbing quote where I said the quiet part out loud. But beyond the opener, the piece goes into depth on the factors at play with kids and tech. I’m grateful for the opportunity because the conversation provided the chance to broaden the conversation about how these proposed bans could impact young people.

The Guardian’s headline refers to me as a “social media ban skeptic.” Fair enough, I guess. But that made me reflect on how I got here, because this is not where I started.

In fact, when I first began studying how digital technologies shape adolescent development nearly two decades ago, I probably would have supported age-based restrictions.

What I used to believe

When I entered this field in 2008, I knew a lot about child and adolescent mental health. I knew much less about the technology industry, internet governance, privacy law, or the regulatory systems that shape our online lives.

Back then, the solution seemed obvious.

If technology companies can build algorithms capable of predicting what we will buy, who we know, and what we might click next, surely they can direct this energy and technological expertise to accurately determine a user’s age and ensure that children are only exposed to age-appropriate content.

But as I began spending more time listening to experts in online privacy, internet governance, child safety, civil liberties, and digital rights, the less obvious this solution became and the more worried I was that these kinds of restrictions might make things worse.

Why I changed my mind

Eventually, I came to believe that mandatory age verification and blanket social media bans are likely to create a new set of problems, while failing to address the issues they are trying to solve.

Hear me out.

• Age verification forces all of us to hand over our sensitive data to companies who have repeatedly shown that they are unwilling or unable to protect it. Experts like Mike Masnik have warned for years that age-gating will not solve the problems we think it will, and ultimately would make things worse for all of us.

  Building systems capable of verifying everyone’s age inevitably creates new databases, new surveillance capabilities, and new opportunities for privacy breaches. Those systems don’t only affect children; they impact every internet user.

• Young people are telling us that they can and will likely get around the bans. The latest evidence in Australia shows they are probably right, with over 80% of teens still on social media platforms despite nationwide bans. Maybe this shouldn’t surprise us. History is full of examples showing that teenagers are particularly motivated to work around rules that feel arbitrary or unfair. Even if we did want to keep young people off of these platforms, top-down, authoritative bans wouldn’t be the most effective way to change their behavior.

• I worry that bans may even make things worse by pushing teens into less regulated and less safe spaces online. The more we make these spaces forbidden, the less likely they are to tell us what’s happening in those spaces, the less likely they will be to report harms, and the less likely we will be to help them.

• Social media bans are incredibly popular among adults and, with bipartisan support, are an easy political win at a time when politicians need wins. The risk is that policies that are light on details and heavy on rhetoric will be proposed and quickly passed, scoring a “victory” for adults without actually helping young people. There is a significant opportunity cost to declaring victory without making meaningful progress on the problem.

I understand the urgency of the arguments and the need to protect children from online harms. But even as social media bans move forward largely unchallenged, it is becoming less clear that they can deliver on their promises or provide the remedy that advocates envision.

Tough questions and conversations lead to better solutions

Since the release of my TED talk I have been asked to defend my position on social media bans and related impacts on adolescent mental health in lengthy interviews with three brilliant female journalists: Amelia Gentleman, Taylor Lorenz and Manoush Zomoradi, each of whom were unwilling to accept a simple answer to the complex problems facing us and our children. They asked tough questions because these are incredibly tough issues that will not be solved with a singular or simple solution.

In each conversation, I have continued to learn what a broadly relevant issue social media age bans and restrictions are and how the cooperation of many diverse stakeholders is going to be required to get this right. Pushback on my position, from smart people like tech journalist Casey Newton, have also provided me with opportunities to pause, check my assumptions against data, and carefully consider criticism from those with a different vantage point than the one I hold.

I am grateful for the continued conversation and more convinced than ever that instead of “camps” debating these issues, we need a broad and big-tent conversation about the best way forward. That kind of honest and open conversation is the only way we will arrive at solutions that will actually work to protect our children from online harms while preparing them to thrive in an increasingly digital world.

Let’s keep talking, and listening, to each other so that we can finally get this right.

-Candice