Six months after Australia banned social media for those under 16, the UK became the latest country to tighten online safety for children. On June 15, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that under-16s would be banned from social media by spring 2027.

A statement released by the government said the government UK “plans to use the same model for a social media ban as Australia” and that the crackdown would cover Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X, “user-to-user platforms, whose purpose is to enable social interaction and which allow users to post material, alongside algorithms”. “We do not intend for messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal to be included in the social media ban,” the statement said.

The Indian Express spoke to Ravi Iyer, Managing Director of the University of Southern California’s Marshall Neely Center, and a social psychologist who has worked on the societal impacts of technology and social media. During his earlier stint at Meta (then Facebook), Iyer led data science, research and product teams and worked on issues ranging from algorithms and comment ranking to bullying and harassment on social media.

He collaborated closely with Jonathan Haidt to develop the government policy and collective action sections of the latter’s The Anxious Generation (2024).

While announcing the move, Starmer said “a full ban (on social media for children) is the right choice. What, according to you, is the best approach – a blanket ban, tobacco-style warning labels or design changes on platforms?

I often refer to it as an age limit, not a ban. In Australia, for example, if you want to use YouTube, you still can; just that you can’t create an account (if you are under 16). And if you can’t create an account, you won’t get notifications late at night, you won’t get as personalised an experience, you won’t get messages from strangers, you can’t post your own images and see how people react. But you can still access the content. If there’s an educational video you want to watch, you can still watch it.

You can also send it to your friends to watch. So children are not being prevented from reading or watching whatever they want. It’s a limit on the contractual relationship you had formed with a company that targeted you in ways that may be inappropriate.
I advocate for all the things you mentioned. The warning-label idea is difficult because you are relying on teenagers, who don’t always have a lot of self-control to heed the warning.

I’m not against it; I just don’t know how effective it would be. I do think design changes have a lot of promise. Take privacy settings. When you join a service, should you automatically be recommended to other people as a friend? In India, you have locked profiles, which give people a way to be safer and more private.

Maybe that should be the default for children kids everywhere, rather than something they have to turn on themselves.
Design changes are great, but I also think we should have age limits for children because companies have not responded by making these changes on their own. They have historically done whatever is possible to get as many people, including children, to use these products as much as possible.

One survey noted that 70% of children in Australia are still on social media, but that means that 30% are now off. Many of them are using these platforms without an account. Platforms like Snapchat, where accounts are more essential, have dropped usage more than platforms like YouTube, where the experience of viewing content is largely the same, with or without an account.

We may not get today’s 15-year-olds off these platforms, but norms are changing such that children who are 12 today will feel less pressure to be on these platforms when they are 15.

We have speed limits that people don’t always obey, but they still serve a purpose. We have drinking ages that some teenagers circumvent, but they still serve a purpose. In the offline world, my children can’t simply pretend to be 25. They’re consistently treated as children. Digital services should work the same way.

For far too long, parents have had to deal with this very private guilt that they are not doing enough to take children away from their phones.

Everyone has a role to play in this. A lot of what companies do is rely on what they call network effects. So a child may not want to use a product, but if all your friends are on a product, then it’s not really a choice to not use a product. No child wants to be the one who is not on Snapchat if all the other children are on Snapchat or on Instagram.

And no parent wants to be the one who stops their child from being on these products when every other kid is on it. So there is a real collective action problem. We need to make parents’ jobs a lot easier.

Many tech companies would say that high engagement simply means users are finding value in their products.

If that were true, then companies would not have to use every trick in the book to increase the usage of their products. You can ask any group of adults or kids if they want to be using their phone as much as they are. Most people will say they want to use their phones less. Kids are still developing their self control and their ability to manage themselves.

I don’t let my kids order whenever they want to from a restaurant for a reason. Similarly, we shouldn’t expect kids to have the same self control online and we shouldn’t let companies target them in the same way. It’s somewhat obvious that something’s wrong with our relationship to technology and parents see it every day.

The companies are making these things more tempting, more powerful, more novel through algorithms that are constantly trying to figure out what they can show you. Features like ephemeral content that say, ‘if you don’t see this now, it’ll go away’.

And if you are not thinking about their product, companies develop AI-powered notification systems that predict the notification that will get you to come back. And then they also reduce your ability to exercise your own willpower with features like infinite scroll and autoplay. So there’s this increased temptation through algorithms, combined with all these features that reduce your ability to exercise your own willpower. And so, removing any of these things will help, right?

That’s where I hope that some of these design laws will lead to these features being changed. You can then watch YouTube the way people used to watch videos, which is, they looked for a video or a friend sent them a video, they watched it and moved on with their lives. You don’t have to have an endless scroll of content.

While the association between excessive social media use and rising mental health problems, especially among adolescents, is widely documented, including by Haidt, the counter argument is that by focusing too much on social media, we could be ignoring other, bigger societal stressors.

I’m familiar with those arguments and I disagree with them. I actually think that even those people who make that argument don’t disagree that many children use it too much, way more than they want to, and that it disrupts their sleep. And we all know that sleep is important for kids to be productive at school and for their own mental health.

There is wide agreement on these facts.

It’s hard to do research on the overall effects of social media on mental health because it affects the entire ecosystem. It’s hard to randomly assign a large group of people to the counterfactual. However, even if you disagree on the association between social media and mental health, you would still agree that we need to do something about things like regretted usage or usage that disrupts sleep.

Social media was supposed to give everyone a voice, including children. What will it take to build a more responsible platform?

Giving people a voice was the mission of early social media, but it has changed and we should recognise that most people don’t get any meaningful distribution of what they say online anymore.

As for fixing the problem, I think we need to start by listening to what users actually want — including children. They want to learn new things and connect with their friends. Do they really need to be constantly recommended to strangers?

There’s a certain amount we want to use a product, and then we want to do other things with our lives. Companies are not respecting that boundary. And society is quite rightfully pushing back.