GoKawiilA young woman uses her smartphone while waiting for a train.
Bans on teenagers’ social media use are gathering pace worldwide. Their proponents claim that social media bans will improve young people’s mental health, but what evidence supports these claims? In their new Frontiers in Developmental Psychology article, Dr Monika Neff Lind and her co-authors argue that there is no solid scientific evidence behind these bans, and reason to believe they could backfire. In this guest editorial, Neff Lind explains why she and her colleagues doubt that social media bans will work, and how bans should be evaluated to determine whether they have any positive effects.
By Monika Neff Lind, PhD
In December 2025, Australia banned young people under 16 from having social media accounts. France, Greece, Spain, Denmark, Malaysia, Norway, India, Egypt, Canada, Türkiye, and the United Kingdom are hot on their heels. French president Emmanuel Macron said, “Banning social media for those under 15: this is what scientists recommend.” American senator Brian Schatz, author of the Kids Off Social Media Act, said, “Studies have revealed that when children and teens reduce or eliminate exposure to social media for longer than a month, their mental health benefits.” Proponents of youth social media bans claim that we have strong scientific evidence showing that bans will improve teenagers’ wellbeing.
As a clinical psychologist and parent, I would be thrilled if this were true, but it is not. We do not know how social media bans will affect youth because we have never studied that question. Let me explain.
Searching for evidence
When we want to test claims like ‘banning social media improves youth wellbeing’, scientific experiments are one of our most powerful tools to figure out what is causing something to happen. In experiments testing the effects of social media restriction on wellbeing, we randomly assign people to at least two groups: one quits using social media for a period of time and the other is the control or comparison group, which continues to use social media as usual. Given the strength of ban proponents’ claims, my co-authors and I were curious to know how strong the experimental evidence supporting their position was. In our new study, we collected and reviewed all of the experiments that have tested whether social media restriction improves wellbeing, and we were shocked by what we found.
Not a single social media restriction experiment has included people under the age of 16. We do not know how social media bans will affect the young people being targeted by them because we have never tested this with them!
To be fair, sometimes strong evidence in adults warrants making the leap to apply the same conclusions to teenagers. But even that leap is not justified here. The experiments with adults show weak, null, and mixed effects, with 40% of experimental studies showing harmful effects (eg, decreased life satisfaction and increased loneliness) or no effects of social media restriction. So even when adults are told repeatedly that social media is bad for their mental health and that giving it up will help, we find, on average, few to no benefits.
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