WSJ What’s News - Inside the Growing Push to Ban Social Media for Kids

Episode Date: December 7, 2025

Australia is on the cusp of banning social media for children, with countries around the world expected to follow suit. Teenagers and tech companies alike have argued that the ban hurts free speech, but politicians and parents are concerned about the mental-health impacts on young people as more studies show that social media can worsen feelings of anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. WSJ tech reporters Sam Schechner and Georgia Wells discuss the pros and cons of a social-media ban and what it could mean for companies’ bottom line. Caitlin McCabe hosts. Further Reading Australia Adds YouTube to Social-Media Ban for Young Teens Families Battle Tech Giants as Australia Pushes for an Under-16 Social-Media Ban Australia Passes Landmark Social-Media Ban for Under-16s Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Get the yes you've been waiting for at Capital One.ca.ca. slash yes. Terms and conditions apply. Hey, what's news listeners. It's Sunday, December 7th. I'm Caitlin McCabe for the Wall Street Journal, and this is What's News Sunday, the show where we tackled the big questions about the biggest stories in the news by reaching out to our colleagues across the newsroom to help explain what's happening in our world. On the show this week, we're talking about teens and social media, which in some parts of the world is facing a new frontier. This week, Australia will officially ban children under the age of 16 from using a range of social media platforms, including Facebook, TikTok and YouTube, as part of a government effort to protect Australians' mental health and well-being. We know that social media can be a weapon for bullies, a platform for peer pressure, a driver of anxiety, a vehicle for scammers, and worst of all, a tool for online predators. And because it is young Australians who are most engaged with

this technology, it is young Australians who are most at risk. That's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaking a little over a year ago, around the time that Australia became the first country to pass such a ban. In the months since, US states and nations around the world, from Denmark to Malaysia, have also made moves to tighten social media controls. When you talk to the social media platforms today, they would state that they already have some kind of age verification, right? That nobody under the age of 13 are able to access the social media platforms. But for instance, in Denmark, when we look at the numbers, 48% of children below that hasn't turned 10 yet, they have a social media profile. And before they turn 13, the number is almost 100%.

Denmark's digital minister, Caroline Stage Olson, speaking to CNN there, sharing a concern that both politicians and parents have these days, that social media platforms are doing more harm than good. Studies have found that frequent social media use can foster dependency akin to substance addiction, exacerbate anxiety and depression, and in the most severe cases, elevate the risk of suicidal behaviors and ideation. In a sign of just how, how urgent some health officials consider this, the U.S. Surgeon General warned two years ago that social media can pose a profound risk of harm

to children and adolescents, especially because their brains are in a highly sensitive period of development. It shouldn't come as a surprise that big tech and even some teens don't necessarily agree, with companies arguing that bans can be ineffective or risk sending teens to darker corners of the Internet. So what's the right solution here? Today I'm joined by two journal tech reporters, Georgia Wells and Sam Shackner, to help unpack it all.

Georgia and Sam, you were both a part of the journal's award-winning Facebook file series, which dug into Facebook and Instagram's effects on young users. You both also spend a lot of time covering social media now. Georgia, what do we know about the impact of these apps on teens? We know that social media can exacerbate many of the tough situations teenagers find themselves in. So we're talking about eating disorders, anxiety, depression, peer pressure. Social media can also facilitate bullying and it can help predators find and groom children. So when we're looking at the harm columns, there's a lot of ways that researchers believe social media can exacerbate some of the toughest challenges teenagers face.

One thing that I remember from your Facebook file series was a pretty powerful stat from META's own research team, which was that 32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse. What is it about social media that makes teens feel this way? So typically when we're talking about anxiety and depression on social media, we're talking about this concept that stems from negative social comparison. That encapsulates this feeling. when you're scrolling and scrolling social media that your life doesn't stack up to the people in the feed. Basically, it happens when you mix insecurity with a feed that typically comprises like only the most glamorous moments of people's lives. If I could just jump in, I think that what you were saying, Georgia, about amplification

is also a big part of it. TikTok innovated this, but it's since been widely copied across social media, that when you stop on a video, it's going to start serving you more of that type of content. And our feeds now are kind of populated, oftentimes super served with our deepest desires, maybe our deepest fears. And at that age, it can be a lot. It's a lot even for me as an adult, you know, sometimes being bombarded with the things I see.

And so, you know, when I look at my 11-year-old son who is not on social media right now, at least not that I know of, I'm. grateful that he's not having that kind of really supersized exposure and falling into what can sometimes be called a rabbit hole of a certain type of content, whether it's self-harm content or drug content or highly sexualized content. You know, on the other side of the coin, though, I think we hear from some teens and certainly social media companies would say this, that social media can in some cases help provide community and connection. Can both things be true? Yeah, 100%. Like often when we speak with educators, the example they bring up are like a teenager struggling to find community for whatever reason. But perhaps they're gay in a region where there's tremendous prejudice against LGBT individuals. That social media can be a great place for a young person to find community that validates who they are.

Sam, you mentioned you have an 11-year-old son and that he's not on social media that you know of. I think it's always a really. hard struggle for parents to work out when their kids should start using these platforms. And I think all of this raises the question of how this ban will actually work in practice. We all know how crafty teenagers can be. Won't they just find a way to circumvent this ban, too? That's a great question. The actual mechanics of how each company is implementing it in Australia are different. They're given some leeway. They're just responsible for making it effective. Will there be some 14-year-old? who find a way around this law, I mean, the answer is yes, of course. And time will tell how the law gets enforced and how litigation in Australia turns out. Even with these systems that are often at least slightly porous at best, they offer a springboard for conversations to happen between parents and their teenagers. And so some parents will find an easier way to talk to their teenagers about should you be on social media or how are you on social media because of these

new rules. I think a lot of parents feel like they're flying blind here. Coming up, we take a look at how big tech has responded to these social media crackdowns and what the bands might mean for their bottom lines. That's after the break. So before the break, we were talking about whether teens will be able to circumvent these bands. I guess it's worth asking how tech companies can verify whether users are old enough to use their apps. For example, Denmark's new ban will require that entry to apps be linked to their national ID. Is their best practice? These measures are very controversial because an ID, I mean, just naturally, it's going to have a chilling effect, people argue, on people who are old enough to use these services, right?

If I have to give my ID in order to get in, maybe some percentage of people are not going to do that. And, you know, the other types of age verification techniques involve things like facial age estimation. The two worries then are, are these companies going to, you know, maintain a database of your face? And the answer they say is no. But once a picture is taken on the Internet, who knows exactly what will happen, hackers, et cetera. And they're also not that accurate. companies facing up to $32 million in fines in Australia are probably going to set a pretty conservative threshold on those filters blocking some teens who perhaps legally ought to have

access to social media. So, you know, there's no perfect solution to how to do this. And I think that's what makes these questions so thorny. These bans have raised questions about whether there's some sort of middle ground that can be reached if a ban is the most effective way to handle this or if there's other practices that could be put in place. Can you talk a little bit more about that? So one of the things companies have been talking about for some time are time limits. So, you know, you could set some arbitrary limits, say it's one hour, two hours, four hours a day. And when the teenager hits that limit, the app would cut them off.

Teenagers are also very, very savvy and very good at circumventing these types of bands. Some companies have already instituted these types of time limit bans. For these sorts of measures, it kind of depends on how they, they would be implemented. Some apps have tried to implement, like, winds down calming music, meditative-type tracks as it gets closer and closer to bedtime or later. Yeah, I mean, there are definitely some efforts to try to force these sorts of pauses on companies. Some of the rules, for instance, in France, there's a law being proposed that includes things like a curfew. So after a certain time of night, certain social media services

wouldn't be available to teens. And so, you know, those are some of the potential middle grounds that companies and regulators are talking about. It seems like a number of U.S. states have taken a whack at this, too. Nebraska comes to mind. It passed a bill this year that will require parental consent for minors creating social media accounts. Florida also signed a law that prevents children under the age of 14 from opening these kinds of accounts, though that is currently the subject of a legal battle. Do you think we'll ever get to a point where there's some sort of federal action around this in America? That's a great question. I mean, passing tech legislation has proven extremely challenging

at the federal level in the United States. Part of that is simple partisan divides, but even on issues like child welfare, where it's a relatively bipartisan issue, it's still pretty difficult to push through that kind of legislation. And in the U.S., there is obviously a strong historical precedent for protecting the First Amendment. And at the federal level, that's just proven difficult. Of course, if there were an issue on which you could find bipartisan agreement, this might be the one. Speaking of the First Amendment, I think it's worth noting that Australia's highest court has agreed to hear a constitutional challenge by two teenagers along side a digital rights group. They argue that the social media ban robs young Australians of their

freedom of political communication. Obviously, Australia is very different from the states, but what do you make of that? Broadly, we've seen the tech companies kind of very much support the arguments that teenagers have a right to free speech on their platforms. You know, obviously these companies also have an incentive when they're pushing this perspective, but it's a perspective that they have very much supported around the world. What other responses have we seen from tech companies about this issue? Well, so in the U.S., much of the previous efforts at legislating social media have focused more on the addictive features rather than on banning teenagers.

And in those cases, people who wanted to kind of pass legislation were cognizant that teenagers would still have the ability to use these platforms to speech, but some of the addictive features, some of the harmful content could hopefully be reduced. The tech companies didn't like that legislation either. There's been something of a divide also in how to handle it. I mean, you see some companies saying we don't like this, but we're going to comply anyway because, you know, we have to. And there's also between the social media platforms and then the device platforms, there's been a divide. I mean, one of meta's main arguments is we shouldn't be the ones verifying ages. That should be handled by Apple and Google. They're the ones who make the operating system for the phone.

And so some of the lobbying actually is over that issue of at what level of platform should we be making companies responsible for enforcing these rules. So what do we expect the business ramifications will be if these bans continue to gain traction worldwide or potentially talking about millions of social media accounts around the world? Well, in many cases, These companies aren't perhaps currently actively monetizing young teen users. That's sort of one of the concessions that they made in efforts to stave off just this kind of legislation. That being said, we know in part from our Facebook files reporting, that the social media companies look at these young users as their future adult user base. And now is the time when they can help attract users, build habits that will continue to,

to keep their companies with healthy user bases that generate revenue into the future. So, you know, rules like this could conceivably cut off future sources of users or change behavior in unpredictable ways and we'll just have to see what kind of platforms end up becoming popular in the future. That's Wall Street Journal Tech reporters, Georgia Wells, and Sam Shackner. Thanks, Georgia and Sam. Thank you. A pleasure. And that's it for What's News Sunday for December 7th.

Today's show is produced by Daniel Bach with supervising producer Sandra Kilhoff. I'm Caitlin McCabe and we'll be back tomorrow morning with a brand new show. Until then, thanks for listening.