Every country should set 16 as the minimum age for social media accounts

The YouTube situation is the biggest self-own in Australia's implementation. Previously kids under 16 could have an account under a parent's Family, and there are full parental controls and monitoring. Now kids can't have these accounts, so they can only access youtube without signing in. Meaning zero parental controls and monitoring. Oh and have you seen what youtube looks like when you're not logged in!?

Give parents control over parenting.

In my 40s now, I can recall dozens of "we should..." statements from myself and others. Typically, these statements were driven by some personal mishap, and the statement is basically forgotten (because it was never a big deal to begin with). But occasionally, some well-read/educated (often with a philosophical bias) will allow a small complaint to consume them, forcing them to write extensively about it, while the world continues to change at increasing speed.

But there's a huge market for this kind of writing: it's all the other people that have similar thoughts but not the time to actually write it.

> What about Steam games? What about any games?

I wouldn't mind restricting access for children to certain types of games such as those with gambling (surprise) mechanics. It's a clear example of harmful media that is at least in some cases exclusively engineered and marketed towards children.

The preponderance of evidence, much of it from Meta's own internal communications, indicates that social media harms teens, and especially girls, in ways ranging from sleep deprivation to eating disorders to anxiety to depression to sexual grooming to suicide. Many of us adults see it as a moral duty to try to stop this, though YMMV (your morals may vary). Kids did homework before YouTube; and yes it is reasonable to propose that a teen can babysit outside their home yet not be exposed to hardcore porn on X, etc.

Your argument seems to be a false choice between "either kids play in the woods or they play online in toxic social media hellscapes". Yes it is tragic that some components of a great childhood are impossible now for so many children. But this doesn't imply we must now let them play with guns and matches and razorblades.

I have a friend who works with lots of young people whom she routinely tries to get to come to organized events but they often can't make it because they're attending the funerals of friends who've committed suicide. It's almost unbelievable how bad it is. This genie absolutely must be put back in the bottle by any means possible, and society is trying to figure out how.

[Edit: removed reference to whataboutism]

> Some kids start working at 14 or 15: they can be trusted to work somewhere outside of home, but not online?

It’s not just the kids, but stalkers and criminals. There’s a reason full driving and drinking age is 18.

Wait, did I misread and the article is suggesting banning the whole internet for under-16?

> What's next, an Internet license?

That’s exactly my concern here. Trying to solve a problem with good intent by proposing solutions that hurt the overall environment.

It's a great pity all your woods have been bulldozed.

However the world of woods, wide open spaces, kids with power tools, kids walking for hours with friends and dogs circuiting the beach, caves, forrests and fields very much still exists in many places across the globe.

Kids working for themselves down in the shed making things they can sell for money at a swap meet or market happens here all the time and is a controlled risk - they wear PPE, have knowledge of readily apparent risks and aren't being stalked and crept up on by a netwok of bot assisted groomers.

>I think stuff like this, is trying to recreate a world that doesn't exist anymore

And that's fine. We should build the world as we want it to be, not accept whatever shit our era gives us.

This includes changes to some things to how they were in the past (if they were better) and changes to other things to how we envision the future.

That's something I hadn't thought about actually, if YouTube is being included, that was utterly invaluable for me for my school exams (before and after 16). I thought I wouldn't really have been missing anything with a ban on social media under 16 as I never really used it much anyway, but I had always excluded YouTube from "social media" in my head due to the sheer value of it for education.

My life would've been significantly worse and more importantly I would know a lot less about a lot of topics if I didn't have access to YouTube from age 13+.

Yes yes yes yes yes?

It’s weird that something completely normal like 20 years ago is “weird” today.

I might even make it 18 when you’re old enough to sign a EULA. When did something completely normal become weird?

“What’s next, an internet license?”

Oh please god, yes.

You’re own argument about kids not being allowed to play in the woods in the more seems to play into this idea we should just accept a dystopian world.

I don't think it's about recreating a world that doesn't exist anymore. It's about limiting exposure of stuff to minds that simply aren't ready for it. The implementation falls short in a number of ways but I kinda get it and I think it's something we as a society will have to take seriously in coming years.

For example, Australia blocks Youtube (like you say) but doesn't block Roblox. That's wild.

For Youtube in particular, I think it'd be sufficient to have child accounts under their parents (as they did and still have elsewhere) that limited certain videos but also, disallowing commenting and probably even reading comments.

A big thing we need to do is shut down Internet gambling and, more importantly, the precursors to gambling, which is anything that promotes the same addictive behavior. That includes all those "free" gotcha games that aren't really games. They're daily chores with random rewards and paid boosts to induce addictive behavior.

Apps like Stake need to be completely removed from the App stores.

I also think Fanduel and DraftKings should be illegal. I'm even leery on young people playing fantasy draft games, even for no money, because it's a gambling pipeline.

Oh and putting your children on the Internet as like a Youtube family? That should be illegal.

Algorithmic feeds in general I think are bad but particularly for young people. Because they're designed to induce addiction and "engagement".

I think phones will soon be good enough (if they're not already) to do background age verifications to make sure the user is of appropriate age via the camera and processed locally (to avoid uploading pictures of minors). At some point I think we'll see that integrated into major platforms.

The point of restrictions isn't to be perfect. It's to create a barrier that makes things more difficult. In years past we did this by, say, only showing more adult content on TV after certain times. Could kids stay up late to watch it? Or tape it once VCRs became coomon? Of course. But it helped.

Just like gambling. Requiring someone to physically go to a casino reduced harm compared to just opening their phone wherever they are. It's a bit like having to go to the store to get ice cream or alcohol or whatever your vice vs just having it in your house or even getting it delivered.

I think we as a society need more barriers.

Put it this way: is it good for a child to spend an appreciable fraction of their day browsing social media? Did children previously just have free hours at hand to burn on this? The answer is of course no, there are not more hours in the day after the creation of social media, so its usage comes at the cost of something else in that child's life, usually their precious little downtime where they might plan and think about their own life. Or maybe at the cost of other activities that might be more engaging physically or mentally.

> uploading sensitive identity documents to multiple sites and hope

Go to local liquor store. Present ID. Purchase $1 anonymous age verification card. Problem solved. (Card implementation left to reader.)

> kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe. How is that not worse?

We used to have to visit a separate forum per community/topic/whatever. There was no realtime feed shoving posts in your face. No algorithm optimizing for engagement. How was that not better?

Social media being bad for mental health in childhood is one of the most robust theories I've ever seen for these kind of society-wide problems. You can peruse the After Babel Substack for the evidence if you're not convinced, but Jonathan Haidt has consistently done incredible work here.

Evidence is often contradictory, especially in the social sciences--that is not a terribly damning charge in this case. Additionally, there is evidence that relationship between social media use and anxiety/depression is not just an association, see Meta's own internal research from 2019: https://metasinternalresearch.org/#block-2e15def2e67a803a83e....

"Meta’s own researchers found — in an experiment they believed was better designed than any external study done thus far — that reducing time on their platforms improved mental health and well-being, specifically depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison."

Similarly surprised to see this seemingly presented positively on HN.

This is just a means to force logins and identity verification on every site.

Do you think there is a more compelling explanation for the mental health decline in teenage girls?

> evidence is low-quality and contradictory. For example, high social media use is associated with anxiety and depression, but which direction does that relationship run?

The evidence from device bans is pretty damn compelling.

I am less familiar with the social-media literature. But I believe we have decent efforts at disentangling causation, and to my knowledge all research not coming out of Meta and TikTok points one way.

> kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe

If they do this isn’t great policy. If they don’t, it is. Let’s let this natural experiment play out.

> kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe. How is that not worse?

Some will. But I bet a lot of kids "have to be" on Instagram/TikTok/etc because everyone else is. I don't think they all gonna flock to 4chan because they got locked out of the big platforms.

>Meanwhile there are documented benefits especially for youth who are members of marginalized groups (e.g. LGBTQ).

This is a thin veiled propaganda that the likes of Zuckerberg quote all the time but is misattributed. Those marginalized group of people had benefits in finding like-minded people online, mostly through forums etc. (side point: same benefit exist for marginalized group such as white supremacist)

But that's social NETWORK, and not social MEDIA. Almost all benefit people that defend social media spout is simply a social NETWORK benefit. The only advantage social MEDIA have is personalized ad, for people that like that. Everything else you get by reimplementing old, boring social network without "the algorithm".

This is not surprising at all. HN’s perspective seems to generally go further with banning under 18 year olds from having smartphones in general.

> kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe. How is that not worse?

I actually disagree with you. This was the internet when I was a kid, and part of the point was you had more agency. This may seem counter-intuitive, but I might prefer my kid hang out on 4chan than tik tok all day long, because at least the former feels like they’re making an intentional choice, and there’s not a multi billion dollar algorithm getting them addicted.

This is part of the point. Kids need more unregulated spaces. Your youthTM brought to you by Mark Zuckerberg is dystopian.

> But OK let's assume social media is always bad for kids and also that someone invents a perfect age gate... kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe.

Straw man argument, much? Might as well argue "We can't make any changes, ever, just in case something else happens!

We'll address the next issue when/if it happens, same as always.

I’ve seen children be groomed to produce child pornography on Snapchat. The offender wouldn’t have access to these random children if he couldn’t simply look them up. And more importantly, his access is anonymous, so it’s much harder to stop.

People likely need a fairly large shared set of beliefs to operate without constant friction. Hence national identities. Either let people freely associate into these communities or force algorithms to be "shared" in a sense between couples or families.

I think couples' X could be interesting. But I'd prefer free association (possibly VR?)

> But setting that aside, the practical implications of age gate laws are terrible. The options are basically to have an LLM guess your age based on your face, or uploading sensitive identity documents to multiple sites and hope they are stored and processed securely and not reused for other purposes.

Those aren't the only options. See the comments on almost any of the many other discussions of age verification on HN for details of ways to do it that do not involve giving any sensitive information to sites (other than what you explicitly trying to give to them, like your age being above their threshold) and do not involve guessing your age via LLM or any other means.

As you say 'social media' is not a good category, we should specify exactly the things that are concerning. Here are the ones where I'm concerned about their effect on young people:

1. a user is shown new content based on extensive profiling and a secret algorithm that the user does not control

2. a users activity can be discovered and tracked by people that intend to take advantage of the user

3. the operation of the site is optimised for addiction (or more euphemistically "attention")

I absolutely don't think that a book club or a kids own website comments or person to person chat systems should be included in the rules.

Note - I'm not saying these things should be banned, just that I think it's reasonable to restrict their use to adults.

The simple answer is that children should not have access to a cell phone at their leisure, or unmonitored access to a computer or tablet. Access should be limited, purposeful, and monitored when possible.

Discord is 100% social media. Just like WhatsApp. MSN definitely was, remember MSN Groups? MSN Chat (the IRC knock off), and a bunch of other things. As someone who has consumed social media and chat platforms, I will note that most chat platforms are social media in their own regard. Habbo Hotel is another example of social media. :)

[dead]

> They'll hit 16 and be given full access to the entire range of platforms, and they'll overdo it and binge on it, with all the harms that happen because of that.

"Full access" meaning deanonymized, with a hostile government watching over their shoulders to control online sentiment:

First, we are told, the relevant secretary of state (Michelle Donelan) expressed “concern” that the legislation might whack sites such as Amazon instead of Pornhub. In response, officials explained that the regulation in question was “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but was about regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”, a phrase that rather gives away the political thinking behind the act. - https://archive.md/2025.08.13-190800/https://www.thetimes.co...

Why for those under 16 in particular? It has no value for anybody at any age, and has apparently driven tons of adults insane.

But the right answer is still to ban advertising. And I don't mean just to those under 16.

I don't think it should be banned, but I'm all for encouraging alternatives that use simple reverse-chronological and don't have the same tendency to create FOMO, a desire to check repeatedly, etc.

>I absolutely agree that gamified, algorithm-driven social media should be banned for those under 16.

I agree. It's purposely addictive and harmful to peoples' mental health.

The current situation is akin to having absolutely no regulations on cigarettes.

Personally, I'd take it a step further and ban targeting algorithms for all ages and pair that with strict data privacy laws that make the entire user data industry collapse.

Its not only gamified and algorithm driven. People are also monetarily incentivized for socially harmful behaviors. Irrespective of political affiliation. Political content is highly engaging and also highly toxic.

> I have a hard time telling a teenager that they cannot socialize with people just because it is via electronic means

There are still other means to chat with other individuals or groups that don't involve social media.

It's the social media, not the digital communication.

AIM/ICQ didn't rot our brains or attention spans.

> I also do not like teenagers identities manipulated for commercial ends.

This. If western “liberal” “democracies” are concerned about children’s privacy then we should push back on surveillance capitalism, not force people to submit government id in order to express their opinion online.

it makes sense in terms of grooming. Most parents want to deny their children agency until they're no longer minors and giving them the internet massively undermines that idea. You're plugging your child into a stream of information that is mostly a sewer of misinformation.

>they cannot socialize with people

they can socialize online perfectly fine. Excluded from the ban in Australia are among others, WhatsApp, Discord, Steam and Facebook Messenger. TikTok, Twitter or Instagram are not and never have been platforms in which people form social communities with their peers.

>Also shouldn't we ban MTV and rock and roll music in general?

No, because there was never any evidence that rock has harmed the youth. Jonathan Haidt, author of this piece, has conducted extensive research to show that social media does.

No at all, this is my actual problem with the proposal.

We're 6 months away from the news report about "the new thing kids are using on the Internet" but the open propaganda and AI forgeries on Twitter and Facebook will continue to do their work on everyone else.

its better than the alternative. I think generally in terms of grooming the internet is an insane thing to give to minors.

The necessity we have for infinite unsustainable growth will always result in unsafe social media. Safe social media requires altruistic and benevolent intentions.

One study tested whether using TikTok/Reels/Shorts in the typical way, skipping videos any time the user wants has a short-term impact on prospective memory. The result was that there is a significant negative impact immediately after a ten minute session.

That's cause for concern given that people regularly use these apps on short breaks throughout their days, and especially problematic if they're using the apps as their main source of news.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/09658211.2025.252107...

>if for instance the algorithm was 'dumb' and just showed friend feeds and feeds specifically selected to follow?

That is how it used to work on facebook But social media was still toxic to teens even back then from the pressures they'd put on eachother, expectations for posting, etc.

> when D&D and rock music was supposedly ruining the lives of young people and causing them to worship Satan?

And then the evidence didn’t pan out. Social media and device use looks like cigarettes the more we study them.

I actually am convinced that it does make Satan worshipping more popular or at least normalized. See: Tumblr. You can say whatever about whether it's good or bad or ironic, but it did happen.

Neither were algorithmically designed to cause addiction.

TBH cigarettes were chemically designed to cause addiction, most music stars smoked cigarettes, then kids did follow them and also smoked. Will not even mention alcohol.

Yeah as an Australian I thought this would be the case and I'd have to stop using Facebook etc (because there's no way I'm uploading ID or whatever to keep using it). Turns out because I created my account over 16 years ago they're happy to assume that I'm at least 16 years old. Which makes sense but I didn't anticipate it going that way.

We shouldn't ban social media we should ban algorithmically curated feeds that push any specific type of content. Outrage sells and so platform curated feeds have curated outrage and extreme content.

In practice I haven't seen much useful political discourse by the average person, but as long as we don't selectively amplify voices through machine signals and they NATURALLY accrue followings then whatever I guess.

So you say, but I don't think social media companies are benign or have the best interest of visitors at heart. If anything they make it far easier to identify users who are susceptible to propaganda and feed it to them in bulk.

> the first is to end the historically unprecedented era of free and anonymous political speech by ordinary people. The second is to prevent anti-imperialist arguments and perspectives from reaching the eyes and ears of young western people. Young people will only hear the perspectives taught in government school and on corporate media. No choosing a different perspective early in life.

Yet my motherland, the nation with arguably the most liberal social media in the world and the least functional school system among "western regimes", is the most socially polarized, has voted in an insecure bully on a platform of hate and prejudice, and is about to plunge into imperialistic conquest, possibly against our allies for 70 years. I can't see how age-gating social media can do any more harm.

> The second is to prevent anti-imperialist arguments and perspectives from reaching the eyes and ears of young western people.

Sounds like you're complaining that these measures will make it hard for authoritarian governments to astroturf young western people so that they radicalize and hate each other more.

I don't think that social media has had that effect in practice.

We're all scrolling through algorithmic feeds on walled gardens owned by some of the greatest capitalists in history. Domestic and foreign disinformation campaigns are not uncommon, and have affected election results and fomented atrocities (as in Myanmar). The US, which birthed most of these technologies, has grown more imperialistic and conservative since their adoption.

EDIT: I saw your edit. I agree that enforcing an industry-wide standard for parental controls, preferable one that can be set per-device and must be respected by all social media services, is the right way to do this. Internet ID laws are dystopian insanity.

Or, you know, they actually want to protect the mental health of people.

You may argue that the approach is bad (I would agree) but it's not because of some evil mastermind plot.

There are a lot of problems with age verification schemes, but you are doing your position a disservice by suggesting that anybody that doesn't want their kid to be bullied on Snapchat is actually just a puppet of fascist regimes trying to stifle political speech.

You should learn to appreciate the nuance of opinions that differ from your own if you actually want to, you know, convince anyone of anything.

What makes you think this anonymous 13 year old is going to get good advice from anonymous strangers on the internet?

And your suggestion is that they go to 4chan or reddit, over, say Googling for advice? Or even talking to the librarian?

Hi! You have been selected as a perfect candidate for an Institutional Relationships Manager position at Meta. You will join fellow internal and contract lobbyists in an exciting journey to manipulate our government into infinite compliance.

We particularly appreciated the following skills, as highlighted by your insightful commentary:

- great use of false dichotomy

- creative ideation of rare and improbable use cases for our products

- immediate deflection from the large corpus of scientific data pointing at the negative effects of social media on teenagers (don’t worry, won’t happen again, we fired those responsible for that)

- invocation of free expression as the supreme unbridled right even for teenagers who wouldn’t even understand what you’re talking about

- disregard for the societal institutions and support systems that, besides the family, are currently still available for the average teenager

- lack of any figure in appealing to edge cases. We particularly like this one, because it’s been proven to effectively exaggerate the biased edge cases and make it effective against our opponents’ use of hard data.

What a fine, fine candidate! Please send your CV to us. A representative will be in touch shortly!

Sure there are disadvantages with almost any policy but as a parent of teens I’ll take those any day in exchange for a ban. Even in your scenario it doesn’t prevent them from researching online. And the sad reality is that they’re more likely to ask GPT for advice than on some forum.

no solution will ever be perfect but social media is infinitely more net-negative for kids, period. just as your example paint a picture of someone in dire need of help outside of friends / family they get easily get wrong help and suffer severe consequences (“drink bleach and you won’t get pregnant”)

> Would IRC count? And considering it's not entirely difficult to set up an IRCd server (you can literally run it on a spare computer or inside a VM), would the state be branding teenagers as criminals for doing so?

That's the idea: the government wants to set up laws to punish people who set up communication infrastructures that are not officially approved by the government.

Or we could stagger the introduction to adult society, like we do today.

Drinking beer at 16, drinking liquor at 18 for example.

Lots of photos on 1990s internet. Everything has a camera these days.

> I think banning is the wrong method, since it keeps the incentive to target teens: They are a very profitable consumer group.

This does not fit my experience:

As a teenager (and as a university student), you barely have any money available. The value in targeting these users rather lies in forming their long-term values and long-time preferences (which rather few companies keep in mind: they are just looking for the next quarter).

On the other hand, grown-up nerds who are intellectually under-stimulated or frustrated in their jobs are quite a profitable consumer group. :-)

16 does not define "kids".

I recall going to a Subway in TX some years ago and making some slightly risque remarks - we are Brits (ooh er missus). We were mildly scolded that "minors are present". The minor in question was 20 years old, we were told.

So today but at least kids get spared? Jokes aside, we do need moderation of digital platforms but it feels like in the US political landscape at least, that would do more harm that good.

>All of which are anti phone-ban/anti-regulation/pro-liberal/freemarketeering masquerading as a product of independent thought.

I have categorised my opponents, defeating them forever.

No wait hang on.

> If a teenager's friends all have social media, he is going to be left out!

The problem rather is that children with parents of very different value systems are forcibly put together in a daily jail (compulsory schooling).

> Does it worry anyone else that this is all actually a government attack on anonymity? [...] Is this just stealth digital ID cards?

Of course this is the intention, or did anybody seriously believe that politicians deeply care about protecting the children? "But you have to think of the children ..." is just the argument silence the critics of these to-be surveillance laws.

Amen to that.

I don't think Europe and the US share enough values to do it on a lot of fronts, so perhaps that will shield me as an American.

But it seems like a lot of that coming down the hatch for most of Europe.

You notice that now? Remember 2020-2022?

It’s governments with similar cultures and practices, all tackling a relatively new phenomenon.

Coming up with similar laws could just be convergent evolution rather than coordination.

You also can’t discount that once one country has tried it others that we’re considering similar legislation are much more likely to take the plunge if the outcomes in the first country aren’t negative

something sinister in the masses of misinformation, especially political/social that takes place in those spaces too.

Sounds like you'll have problems sourcing NATO national IDs in St. Petersburg to create fake accounts.

No, ban the ad-based monetization model.

That's the most important perverse incentive. Others can be dealt with later.

Is HN social media?

Blaming a company that allowed bots to hold "sensual" conversations with children? An outrage!

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/15/meta-ai-c...

That’s not going to happen

You just expressed that opinion on social media. There's no reasonable definition of social media that wouldn't include Hacker News.

Children shouldn't be business owners.