Australia switched it on in December. Anyone under 16, locked out of their social media accounts, by law. France, Spain, Denmark, Norway, India, Egypt and a lengthening queue of others are now lining up to do much the same, and the prime minister of the UK, once opposed, has said he is open to it too. The pitch behind all of this is simple and confident: pull teenagers off the platforms and their mental health will improve. There is just one awkward problem with that pitch.
Nobody has actually tested it. Not on the kids being banned, anyway.
That is the central, slightly deflating finding from Monika Neff Lind and her colleagues Stephen Schueller and Candice Odgers at the University of California, Irvine, who set out to audit the experimental evidence behind the bans. They gathered every randomized experiment ever run on cutting back social media and measuring what it does to wellbeing, 40 studies in all, and went looking for the teenagers. They could not find any. “Not a single social media restriction experiment has included people under the age of 16,” Lind writes. The youngest participant in the entire pile was 16, and the handful of under-18s who turned up at all were almost certainly university students scooped from campus subject pools.
Which is a bit of a snag, given who the laws are aimed at.
The bans rest on a story that has hardened into common sense: social media is fuelling an adolescent mental health crisis, so taking it away should ease the anxiety and depression. Plenty of politicians treat the science as settled. Emmanuel Macron has said outright, “Banning social media for those under 15: this is what scientists recommend.” The US senator behind the Kids Off Social Media Act, Brian Schatz, has claimed that cutting teens’ exposure for longer than a month delivers mental health benefits. The researchers, having read the actual literature, are unconvinced. As Lind puts it, “As a clinical psychologist and parent, I would be thrilled if this were true, but it is not.”
The Experiments Nobody Ran on Teenagers
So what does the evidence say, once you set the adults’ results next to the policy? Mostly, it shrugs. Across those 40 experiments, the average effect of going cold turkey or cutting back has come out somewhere between small and indistinguishable from zero. Eight studies found no effect at all; eight more found people felt worse, not better, reporting things like increased loneliness or lower life satisfaction. One pair of meta-analysts concluded that “Restriction is likely not the most effective method of improving subjective wellbeing in today’s digital age,” which is about as close to a verdict as this messy field gets.
And here is the part that should give the policymakers pause. These experiments were stacked in favour of finding a benefit. Participants knew which group they were in, they had been told for years that social media is bad for them, and they often signed up half-expecting a digital detox to feel good. Even with all that thumb on the scale, the studies were brief (the average restriction lasted roughly 16 days, half ran for a week or less) and frequently let people keep scrolling up to a daily limit rather than quitting outright. If anything, the design should have flattered the case for switching off. It didn’t, much. There is also a curious twist buried in the meta-analyses: where benefits do show up, they tend to grow with age, which is precisely the wrong direction for a policy targeting the young.
The Bans Might Not Even Work
Then there is the question of whether the bans will even keep teenagers off the platforms in the first place. Early signs from Australia are not encouraging.
Three months after the switch flipped, Australian authorities reported that close to 70 per cent of under-16 accounts were still active. Lind and her co-authors expect that sort of thing. Enforcement leans on age-verification tools, uploading government ID, a selfie, sometimes bank login details, that raise their own privacy worries and tend to misfire most on young faces and people of colour. And teenagers, being teenagers, are good at the workaround: a fake adult account, anonymous lurking, a quiet exit to the murkier corners of the internet where there are no content filters and no parental controls at all. The bans could, perversely, strip away the protections that came with having a proper account in the first place.
None of which means the researchers want to leave kids to fend for themselves online. Their argument is narrower and, in a way, more demanding. We are running an enormous, unplanned experiment on a generation of children, so we had better measure it properly: track whether the bans actually change behaviour, gather data from teens and parents and devices rather than one shaky survey, and where possible randomise the rollout so there is something to compare against. Selected anecdotes and early scare stories, in either direction, won’t settle anything.
Lind’s closing line lands somewhere between a warning and a plea. Big Tech, she notes, built its reputation on “moving fast and breaking things,” and governments now risk repeating the trick with the very children they say they want to protect. “We cannot ban our way out of a youth mental health crisis,” she writes. “Rather than take things away, we should make things better.”
https://doi.org/10.3389/fdpys.2026.1805989
Frequently Asked Questions
Do we actually have proof that banning teens from social media improves their mental health?
No. A 2026 review of all 40 randomized experiments on social media restriction found that not one included anyone under 16, so the populations the bans target have never been studied. The adult evidence that does exist shows small, mixed, or null effects, with several studies finding people felt worse after cutting back.
If social media is so bad for teens, why don’t the experiments show a clear benefit from quitting?
Even studies designed in ways that should favour a positive result, with participants who expected a detox to help, produced effects hovering near zero on average. The restrictions were also short, often a week or less, and frequently allowed limited daily use rather than a full ban. Whether longer, complete bans would do more remains untested.
Will the bans even keep kids off social media?
Possibly not. Three months after Australia’s ban began, roughly 70 per cent of under-16 accounts were reportedly still active. Teens can create fake adult accounts, browse anonymously, or drift to less moderated sites, which can leave them with social media access but none of the content filters or parental controls a real account provides.
What do the researchers want governments to do instead of just banning?
They argue that since the bans are an untested intervention being run on children, governments must fund rigorous evaluation: measuring real behaviour change, drawing on multiple data sources, and where possible randomising the rollout to create comparison groups. The deeper recommendation is to make platforms safer for young people rather than simply taking access away.
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