Opinion: Social media bans are passing around the world. How will we know if they help teens?

In December 2025, amid growing scrutiny of social media's potential impact on youth mental health, Australia became the first country to ban social media for people under 16, with Indonesia quickly following. The European Union took a slightly different approach, banning social media for children under 13 and personal accounts for people under 15 after pressure from several E.U. nations, while big tech companies are also being challenged in courts elsewhere. Meta recently agreed to pay up to $18 billion to resolve U.S. claims that Facebook and Instagram harmed children, and it will introduce 'safety by design' features for young people, such as concealing the number of likes on posts.

Those developments raise unresolved questions: whether such safety features will meaningfully change young people's behavior or experiences online, and whether the bans will have their intended effect. With major changes being introduced worldwide, researchers must seize the opportunity to conduct robust independent evaluations of how social media—and its regulation—affects teenagers' mental health, wellbeing, and social lives. Nearly half of all mental health problems emerge by age 18, making this research crucial.

The author argues the question is not simply whether social media is inherently good or bad, or whether restrictions work or do not work, but whether changing young people's digital environments leads to meaningful changes in mental health and wellbeing. Evidence increasingly suggests there is unlikely to be a single 'social media effect' that impacts all teenagers the same way. Restrictions will likely affect individual young people differently based on age, existing mental health problems, sleep patterns, gender, socioeconomic background, and whether they live in an urban or rural area. Because social media can be an important source of community, restrictions may also affect people from marginalized backgrounds differently, including those who identify as LGBTQ+, and effects will likely depend on how a person uses or previously used a given platform.

If restrictions do bring changes in teenagers' mental health, researchers need to understand the mechanisms behind the change—for example, whether improvements come from meeting up more with friends in real life or from getting more sleep—because answering the why question could shape future policies that support youth mental health. Early findings from Australia suggest that age verification from social media companies is a significant challenge in implementing the ban. An evaluation published in the British Medical Journal found little evidence of substantial reductions in [the excerpt cuts off before naming the measure].