It’s time for Congress and the White House to get serious about banning social media for kids under 16 — and so empower parents to say, “No, it’s illegal.”
Australia has done it, other countries are looking at it and Lara Trump just told our own Miranda Devine that the president is “taking an interest” in the toxic impact of Instagram, TikTok, etc. on America’s youth.
The reasons are obvious: It’s not just the hours burned (at least 20 a week for the average teen girl) but the mental-health impact exposed by NYU’s Jonathan Haidt: epidemic levels of anxiety and depression.
Beyond that is other dysfunction: an entire generation that’s too easily bored and appalled at the thought of reading entire books.
The Post’s Rickki Schlott has raised alarms for years now, and Haidt’s bestsellers have launched a national movement to do something.
Banning smartphones in school has been a good start, and plenty of parents are now cracking down as they realize kids shouldn’t be on social media at all — but it’s not enough.
Heck, “holding Big Tech accountable” (however widespread the urge) isn’t actually a solution, nor is suing Big Tech enough in lawsuits like the one where Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified last week.
That’s all backward-looking, burning time and energy over damage already done, when it’s far more important to prevent future harm.
The Aussie law ordered Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, Snapchat, Kick, Reddit, Threads, Twitch and YouTube to ID and deactivate accounts of that nation’s under-16s; officials there claim they’ve bounced 4.7 million such users in the first month.
Not bad for a nation whose entire population is just 28 million.
Of course, no ban will be perfect, but “it’s illegal!” gives parents a way out of arguments over how “unfair” they are in limiting screen time.
It’s a virtuous cycle, since the peer pressure goes away when everyone else isn’t doing it.
Big Tech won’t necessarily put up a huge fight: Certainly, many who work in the industry would love to get out of this swamp, and the bigwigs should realize that cooperation can ease the larger resentments still building against their industry.
Indeed, setting up serious age-verification software will be one clearly positive use for all the information they scrape up about every one of us.
Congress already has bipartisan interest in acting, with Sens. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) pushing hard; if the White House gets behind it, this movement could even help start to heal the toxic left-right divide in Washington and nationally.
A discussion where Democrats and Republicans aren’t (yet) at odds, on an issue vital to our children’s future: Sure seems like something the nation should be talking seriously about.
The post Why a US ban on under-16 social media would be a huge gift to parents AND kids appeared first on New York Post.
