Why Social Media Bans & Restrictions Won’t Keep Your Child Safe

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Laws to regulate social media use by kids are popping up everywhere. Unlikely to achieve their stated goals, they may even cause harm by leaving our kids less prepared for their digital world. If legislators really wanted to help kids, they would fund digital literacy programs that teach critical thinking and strategies for healthy media use.

Key Points

• Proposed legal bans on social media for kids are based on moral panics, not research
• The preoccupation with social media use ignores the needed skills to safely navigate the digital world
• Not only will the laws be difficult to enforce but verification proposals raise serious privacy issues for sensitive information
• Lawmakers could help kids more by funding digital literacy programs

Politicians can’t get their pens out fast enough to draft laws to regulate social media use by kids. Advertised as “child protection” laws, the proposed bans show how little politicians understand about social media, kids, and interpreting research. The proposals, however, are getting lots of media coverage as politicians make frightening, exaggerated, and often unsubstantiated claims about the negative effects of social media on mental health. There are legitimate concerns…