Recently the legislature in the State of Florida, USA passed a law that requires social media users to be at least 16 years old, with a third-party age verification. For ages 14 and 15, users will require parental consent. Those 13 and under will have to terminate their accounts. The law currently is at the governor’s desk. Once in effect, the law is expected to have far reaching implications.
Even in India, the government and the courts have debated the idea of age-gating or having minimum age requirements for using social media. People are normally wary of the government interfering too much in how people live their lives. For instance, one could argue that it is up to the parents to decide what is good for their children. If mom and dad are okay with their eleven-year-old scrolling reels on Instagram or refreshing feeds on X, who are we to interfere? After all, doesn’t social media have some good aspects to it as well? It helps children gain knowledge about what’s happening the world for instance. Or it helps them connect with friends even when away from them. Or it may help them in their studies, for they can ask each other how to solve that Physics numerical. Yeah, right. Theoretically, many of these good things can come with social media. However, here is the reality. Study after study has shown that social media is harmful for children. The most frequent problems are related to mental health – depression, anxiety, and addiction. Early adolescence is a time of heightened peer comparisons, huge impact of your friend’s opinions and insecurity around one’s identity (we were all like that too). Bombard this difficult time with the chaotic world of social media, where you see perfect bodies, rich and affluent lifestyles, amazing success stories, ultra-polarized opinions, sensationalism, doomsday content, look-at-my-amazing-and-perfect-life content, and all other forms content designed to hook you in. What do you think will happen? Do you really need studies to see that this is bad for a twelve or even fourteen-year-old?
Apart from mental health, there are problems related to sleep, diet, and nutrition. Physical activity tends to reduce (remember those years where children used to play in parks every evening? Now they don’t as much) and arguments with parents tend to rise. Mental focus, attention spans, ability to concentrate, raw creativity – all drop if you are spending hours on social media every day. If you do it in your formative years, it can have a far worse effect on your brain.
And yet, millions of kids and early teens are on social media. I don’t know how Indian parents are regulating their children in general. Just look at the number of Indian toddlers watching phones and tablets in restaurants, there isn’t much hope. The social media companies themselves, do a loose age check, where the user self-certifies their age. Nothing stops a 12-year-old from saying they are 18, and sure enough, an account will be created. After that, we don’t know what that child is doing on the platform. Parents can try to keep it in check, but we all know what happens when parents try to stop pre-teens and teens from doing what they really want to do.
That is why, age regulation for social media might be a rare exception where government intervention is necessary. Social media, it has been well established, is extraordinarily addictive, even for grown-ups. We can still argue that grown-ups have the right to live their lives the way they want. However, to let social media be there unregulated for our kids, despite knowing all the drawbacks, is us not being responsible to our younger generation. It would of course be ideal if this regulation was not required, and parents could do this regulation themselves at home. However, we have now seen that this isn’t possible without regulatory help. Unless a proper age verification system exists, or parental consent mechanism is in place, kids will always find ways to lie about their age and make accounts. Once they make them, yes, some good benefits may well be there. However, the negatives are so many, that it is all right to wait a few more years, let the child’s brain develop further before they enter the social media world (which they can almost never leave later). These pre-teen and early teen years are crucial for children’s proper development, not to mention it is also the time when studies at school become harder. Keeping them away from social media, will be a net positive for them.
The government should not be in the business of running people’s lives, including how to bring up children. However, keeping kids away from social media is extremely difficult without proper regulation. As a society, we must decide whether we would want our kids to be watching reels at age 12-15, or rather they study, read books, and play sports.