The UAE will introduce a minimum age requirement for social media users next year, as The National reported in June. The country has set the threshold at 15 years old and is the first in the region to do so. This requirement matches similar moves being made elsewhere.
Australia became the first country to restrict social media use for under-16s last year, including Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube.
From September, France will restrict access to 10 major platforms, including TikTok. President Emmanuel Macron has described the online world as a “jungle” for young people to navigate and lawmakers in France say the aim of the policy is to help deliver a “better” society.
The United Kingdom will institute a full social media ban for under-16s next year. In one of his final acts as prime minister, Keir Starmer justified the proposal by saying social media was making young people “unhappy”. He is supported by UK research, which has found that usage restrictions typically lead to decent outcomes for young people, such as less pressure and greater focus at school and at home.
In South-East Asia, Indonesia and Malaysia have brought forward their own age-related restrictions for social media platforms. Several more countries are reported to be considering similar measures.
The intent is clear in each case: to provide protection to younger members of society, where previously there was next to none, even if the scope, areas of oversight and methods are different.
I doubt many of those unaffected by these restrictions would argue against them.
There will be many teenagers and younger people, however, who may quite rightly query whether it is fair to limit their access to social media in such a manner, when adults often don’t abide by such rules. “Do as I say, not as I do” has never been the most productive parenting prescription, after all.
But it is hard to disagree with age restrictions on products deemed harmful to societies – such as alcohol, tobacco and gambling or any other form of addictive activity – while also pointing out that resourceful people have long found ways to circumvent rules. That reality should not stop the implementation of restrictions for social media.
Part of the issue also relates to a form of “if we knew then what we know now” syndrome. Social media has been a feature in our lives for two decades. Self-certified age restrictions have always been a fixture of sign-ups to these platforms, but those guard-rails were always easily disregarded and, crucially, many of us will not have previously fully recognised the algorithmic challenges that have become deeply embedded within those platforms.
Social media was once seen as a relatively benign space where you could view posts from friends and catch up with a few more people you may have fallen out of touch with. These platforms were not seen back then as repositories for harmful content. They were perceived as vast connected communities intersecting in a briefly glorious digital town square. That perception no longer holds in a space where the chief currency is engagement.
Such a partial description of social media also characterises those platforms as places of active consumption, but the compelling combination of smartphones and platform apps has disrupted that notion. We have become passive beings grazing on or doomscrolling through an inexhaustible feast of content in the forever war of the attention economy.
A day spent with a smartphone in hand can easily feel like time with the most empowering tool of the 21st century or a ghost vehicle for the most profound form of procrastination and inaction on the planet. It is a constant tug of war between alerts, notifications, tasks and a rush for engagement in whatever form it arrives.
Machine learning of user preferences has shifted feeds to near parody levels of lived experience, delivering a refracted version of a person’s interests that is too concerned with giving them what they think they want rather than asking why or, indeed, interrogating whether there is anything inherently wrong with that content.
In the past, I have argued for these platforms to further develop their oversight procedures. While acknowledging the trap of the algorithm, I used to believe that self-regulation was the preferred prescription for social media. Ultimately these platforms have proved uneven in their ability to tackle potentially harmful content and to address genuine societal concerns. With countries instituting their own control measures, the era of social media self-regulation is effectively at an end.
When restrictions do come into force, perhaps, they will foster a broader and brutally honest conversation about screen time and smartphones. If prime ministers and presidents view social media as an engine for unhappiness or the digital world as a jungle, then it may be time to tackle that wilderness. The compounding impact of repeated health warnings has worked in other areas of society where wellbeing and safety issues have been highlighted. It is possible they could here, too.
