Should Social Media Platforms Have Age Minimums?

The only way to fix a collective action problem is with a collective solution.

Photo by Ryan Plomp on Unsplash

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has called for social media platforms to come with a health warning for people under the age of 18. That’s a good move — and perhaps it’s time to consider formal age restrictions as well.

I’m surprising myself by making this argument. For many years I was an evangelist for the power of social media to connect people across borders, to serve as platforms for activism, and to give the many the ability to push back on the powerful few. But that isn’t where we’ve wound up. Social media seems to fuel isolation more than connection, disinformation and denialism more than effective activism; it is often a tool for the invisible hand of powerful individuals and institutions and governments more than a mechanism to rise up against them.

It is wildly addictive. It is tied to declines in mental health and friendship. And yes, the scope and scale of its impact is contested; it’s clear that social media is far from the only factor influencing our retreat into more isolated lives, or the crisis of adolescent mental health, or the rise of the ultra-right, or polarization and hyper-partisanship. But it seems to be one important factor among many, all of which deserve our attention, and some of which merit targeted solutions. Just because social media isn’t the only cause of all of these ills doesn’t mean that we should shrug its harms off as irrelevant.

And social media is (unsurprisingly) particularly unhelpful for young people, whose brains are not fully developed, who are extremely sensitive to peer-group norms and social acceptance, who tend to process stress poorly, and who lack the adult capacity to regulate desire and fully assess risks and benefits. Emotions are strong, and the ability to regulate them limited; the adolescent brain’s reward system is better-developed than its capacity for rational decision-making and delaying gratification. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing — the extreme sensitivity to social norms and being in the “in” group can be used for pro-social ends if the group dynamic is a positive one — but you can hopefully see how social media might pose particular problems for younger users.

One of those problems is simply the time spent with eyeballs on a screen. The more time young people spend looking at social media, the less they’re socializing in person or moving their bodies, and the worse they feel. Dr. Murthy writes, “Adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms, and the average daily use in this age group, as of the summer of 2023, was 4.8 hours. Additionally, nearly half of adolescents say social media makes them feel worse about their bodies.”

Murthy doesn’t recommend an age minimum for social media use. Instead, he pushes for more transparency from social media companies, age-appropriate restrictions (like an end to infinite scrolling), no phones in schools, and better parental supervision and rule-making. And that all seems right to me. Except that I’m also increasingly in favor of age minimums to have a social media account.