Social media age bans are a half-measure, writes Nick Couldry. Only by banning toxic business models that seek to exploit and steer social attention can we create a healthier digital space.
Two decades ago, societies made a huge mistake. They delegated to businesses the design of the main spaces where people are social: we call these “social media”. Only now are the full costs of that historic error being grasped.
It took a decade for the problems with social media to emerge, as the business models of commercial platforms matured and converged. It took a further decade to uncover the full scale of the problem, through multiple scandals and alarming research, particularly on the psychic costs from social media to young people. Important regulatory action was taken in some jurisdictions, but the problems didn’t stop.
Social media age bans
By 2024, two decades after Facebook was founded, calls for drastic action, in particular age bans on social media for children and younger teenagers, began to surface in multiple countries. Early in 2026, no European government can afford to ignore the issue.
But age-related bans on social media are unlikely to work. The reason is not that radical action against the risks to social life the media we call “social” cause is not needed. The reason is that age-related bans on social media don’t address the core problem head on. It is as if societies were looking at themselves in the mirror, realising their sickness, but being distracted by one important symptom, and ignoring the wider disease.
What then is the root problem with today’s social media? It is platform business models that seek to exploit and steer social attention: models that leverage data about platform users as the means to generate advertising income, either directly or by more complex means.
To point to those business models is of course not new. What’s needed, and so far missing, is to admit a difficult truth: that only by banning those business models, as an exploitative cancer in everyone’s social life, will we begin to address the problems with social media that now seem unavoidable.
There are no circumstances in which we can allow those business models to continue and expect a healthy social domain for children or adults. The question is what we do about this, once we confront the ugly truth in the mirror.
Tackling the root cause
Step one is to realise that all regulatory measures proposed so far, including age-related bans, are half-measures. Let’s start with age-related bans, because they are highly topical right now. They will fail for at least three reasons.
First, while they seem radical, they address only half the problem: for toxic social media business models drive polarisation for adults too, poison their politics and undermine their sources of trusted facts.
Second, age-related bans work by punishing young people in a discriminating way, risking alienating many young people who absolutely want the problem of toxic platforms to be confronted.
Third, such bans target specific platforms only, leaving space for obvious work-arounds, even if a genuinely secure age verification process could be achieved. For all those reasons, age-related bans are a costly distraction from the core issues.
Meanwhile earlier regulatory moves – for example, the increasingly tough enforcement of Europe’s GDPR to restrict trading in users’ data without consent, the Digital Services Act and its regulation of very large platforms, and the UK’s Online Safety Act’s rules to ban some pornographic and self-harm-promoting content – are throwing sand in the engine of commercial social media. But they have not, and never will, resolve the wider problems caused by commercial social media.
Why not? Because they chase specific symptoms rather than tackling the root case: the continued operation of business models whose basic drive is to exploit attention by shaping which content flows fastest across platforms. Unless we ban those business models, new platforms will keep emerging, and regulators will always be playing catch-up.
Reluctance to change
Step two is to acknowledge directly the reasons why, as societies, we find it so hard to confront head on the problem of toxic social media business models. One reason is governments’ fear of reprisals from businesses that have more users than they have citizens.
Another is the fact that almost all of us are users of these platforms, and get some benefits from them, for the simple reason that social connection is a good thing in principle, and still can be good at an individual level, in spite of increasingly clear societal risks. So the attempted shift to a healthier social media system is going to be difficult, even if it can no longer be postponed.
Rebuilding social media
Step three is to realise that, because all of us have a stake in social media, solutions cannot be just about regulatory bans, essential though they are. They must also be about social reconstruction: reconstructing and rebuilding the space of social media for the better. Which means not just regulatory restrictions but governments generating funds that, at arm’s length, can support those not-for-profit social media that already exist, or at least those not based on the standard toxic business models.
At the moment those alternative social media – the platforms like Mastodon on the so-called Fediverse – have no chance of thriving. They lack funds (crowdsourcing will never be enough), and they lack user numbers, because we are not free to transfer our contacts and data across to those platforms from the commercial platforms that have captured us.
As Cory Doctorow argued a few years back, regulators could change that overnight by forcing all social media platforms to make users’ contacts, conversations and uploaded media transferable.
A better space of the world
Step four is to acknowledge openly that if societies do decide to take the problem of social media head on, there will be challenges. Yes, there will be casualties amongst those who have worked hard to live within the toxic social media economy: radical reform won’t be good, at least initially, for influencers.
Yes, this transformation will require some idealism in politics at a time when this appears to be in short supply. But young people are crying out for idealism here. Consider the Ctrl+Alt+Reclaim movement across Europe and recall that two-thirds of UK 16-24 year-olds said in a survey last year that social media did more harm than good.
And no: a serious attempt to redress humanity’s catastrophic error in how it built social media cannot be the work of one country alone – in part, because it’s a global problem, so demands multinational solutions, but above all because the source of the problem lies in two very powerful countries, the United States and China.
Since China, historically, has shown more willingness to regulate its digital platforms seriously than the United States, and its Chinese-language platforms have limited global coverage, the main difficulty lies in confronting US Big Tech. Could social media be the wicked problem on which what Canadian PM Mark Carney recently called the “middle powers” finally coalesce into action? Quite possibly.
The scale of the challenge and the potential opportunity could not be clearer. Healthier spaces of social connection – or, as I recently put it, a better “space of the world” – will benefit our societies, our politics and our young people long after today’s politicians are forgotten. But if they fail to take the chance to build those healthier spaces, today’s politicians may never be forgiven.
For more information, see the author’s recent book The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What if it Can’t? (Polity, 2024).
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE European Politics or the London School of Economics.
Image credit: Trzykropy provided by Shutterstock.
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