<
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/08/24/even-some-of-the-loudest-kids-online-safety-advocates-are-now-warning-against-social-media-bans/>
"We’ve been talking for a while now about how the rush (much of it driven by
politicians’ obsession with Jonathan Haidt’s mostly debunked book) to ban kids
from social media is dangerously stupid. It misdiagnoses the problem and
creates a solution that both does not work and makes actual problems worse.
Previous reporting has already shown that a massive number of kids easily get
around the bans, and among those who haven’t were those who actually relied on
these services for community. Given the obvious failures and the clear damage
already done in Australia, it’s bizarre that so many other countries are still
rushing to copy it.
But with France’s Constitutional Council recently blocking Emmanuel Macron’s
version (shoved into law almost immediately after he sat down with Haidt), some
sense is finally creeping into the conversation, with a growing number of
experts speaking out against blanket blocks:
The rash of new laws and the subsequent backlash is prompting people to ask
if social media bans are going too far, too fast — and whether there may be
a smarter way to protect kids online than forcing them off.
Lorena Giuberti Coutinho, an online safety commissioner for Brazil’s
independent data protection authority, told POLITICO that social media bans
increasingly appear “quite hard to impose,” and questioned whether global
momentum for that approach would persist.
“The incentives for teenagers to continue on social media are quite strong
because this is where they communicate,” said Coutinho.
This matters, because for the last year or so it’s felt almost inevitable that
social media bans would become the global default — despite the science not
supporting them, and despite nobody having any real evidence about what the
bans themselves would do to kids. Indeed, for all the people running around
screaming about how this needs to be done to stop companies from “experimenting
on children,” cutting kids off from their communities online is, itself, an
experiment on the mental health and psyche of children without any
understanding of what it might do.
It’s especially notable that this skepticism is coming from Brazil’s online
safety commissioner, because, as we discussed recently on
Ctrl-Alt-Speech,
Brazil has been going through yet another social media moral panic, one that
has forced Discord to disable livestreaming, after a horrific case in which a
13-year-old girl was allegedly coerced by other users into taking her own life
(Discord disputes that the death itself was broadcast live). Everything about
that story is horrifying. But blaming it on the existence of livestreaming on
one particular platform — when the exact same tech exists on nearly every other
platform — mostly guarantees that the next tragedy happens somewhere the
regulators aren’t looking."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
