Will social media’s week of reckoning finally wake up Silicon Valley?

The reaction was mixed. Many teenagers are angry that they have been banned from using their favorite apps. Social media companies have introduced artificial intelligence, facial scanning and even required photo ID to verify or remove users who do not meet the new threshold. However, some have managed to stay onlineeither by lying about their age, making up pseudonyms, or finding other ways to circumvent repression. Two cases were brought to the High Court: the first by two teenagers who said the ban violated their human rights; the second is from Reddit, one of the ten tech companies affected.

Thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean, the ban exploded like a bomb in Silicon Valley, not because of the potential financial consequences, but because social media was portrayed as a public menace that, like cigarettes or guns, should be kept out of the hands of young people.

Last week, Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama's former chief of staff and potential Democratic presidential candidate in 2028, called on America to follow Australia's lead. “When it comes to our teenagers, it’s either adults or algorithms,” he said. “One of them will be raising children, and I think we need to help the parents.”

“Instagram is a drug. We're mostly pushers

Britain's Internet Safety Act, which came into force in July, forced companies to introduce age verification and new content moderation standards under the threat of fines of up to 10 percent of global revenue if they did not comply. The law has caused a record surge in downloads of virtual private networks (VPNs), which mask a device's location and let people bend the rules.

In California, more than 2,000 lawsuits against social media giants from schools, parents and state attorneys general have been consolidated into a huge multidistrict lawsuit in federal court in Oakland. Four defendants—Meta, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube—failed to get it removed.

The underlying argument is simple: social media giants have deliberately created addictive products to attract children, with disastrous results. So they should fundamentally change their products and pay for the damage they cause.

In messages published as part of the case, one Meta researcher wrote: “Oh hell yeah! [sic] ISIS [Instagram] It's a drug.” Another replied: “We're essentially pushers.”

Meta conducted a “deactivation study” in 2019, according to the now-disclosed 5,800-page documentation. The study found that after a week, people who stopped using Facebook and Instagram “reported less feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison.”

• Some elementary school students 'can swipe but can't speak'

The lawsuit alleged: “The company never publicly disclosed the results of its deactivation research. Instead, Meta lied to Congress about what it knew.” A company spokesman rejected this accusation, saying instead that the result was due to the “expectancy effect” – the idea that if someone believes something is bad for them, they will feel better if they stop doing it.

What the Research Says

Meta and the rest of the industry have long argued that there is no conclusive scientific evidence linking social media use to increases in depression, anxiety or attention problems among youth, but there is a growing catalog of studies on the “disorders” caused by excessive social media use.

For example, in a study of cognitive brain development in adolescents, about 12,000 American children were followed for three years between the ages of nine and ten. Increased social media use was found to be “associated with increased depressive symptoms one year later.” This and other studies are ongoing, heeding the call of America's Surgeon General, who issued an urgent public request in 2023 for research into “the serious risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”

Meta has been doing this kind of work internally for many years. Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager turned whistleblower, went public in 2021, armed with thousands of pages of internal documents that she claimed proved Meta (then called Facebook) knew its products were harming young people. One 2020 internal presentation stated that 32 percent of teenage girls said that when they feel bad about their bodies, Instagram makes them feel worse.

A year later, another internal study found that nearly half of teens (49.2%) who reported being bullied felt “unsupported” by Instagram. One in eight children aged 13 to 15 received an unwanted advance on an app in the previous seven days. This was reported by another whistleblower, Arturo Behar, a former senior executive and security consultant.

Lobbying machine

There is something of a script that Meta follows when accusations like these are made; the methodology is rejected as flawed or misleading. Lawsuits alleging that it is a “breeding ground for predators who prey on children for human trafficking purposes” face challenges to the “cherry-picked” evidence.

Instead, Meta will point to the many dozens of tools they've implemented in recent years to make it easier for people to control their experiences and for parents to set limits. Last year it introduced mechanisms to allow parents to manage settings and see who their children are messaging, and made teens' accounts “private” by default to prevent others from contacting them. The main question was why weren't they private by default from the start? In the real world, age restrictions apply to everything from drinking alcohol to watching pornography to driving. The Internet, however, is different. This is the only place where an eight year old is treated a little differently than a 28 year old.

And the social media industry and its lobbyists have (mostly) successfully maintained this position. Meta spent a record $24 million on lobbying last year, placing it among the top 10 largest influence corporations in Washington. Those efforts have focused on defending a law known as Section 230, a 29-year-old law intended for a different Internet that protects website publishers from liability arising from what others may publish on their sites. Despite at least 25 hearings on online safety, Section 230 remains untouched.

Chris McKenna, founder of Protect Young Eyes, testified at the first of these 25 hearings in 2019. He said: “The failure of Congress to do anything meaningful, to put reasonable barriers between our children and harm, is so maddening. So what do you have? You have other countries trying to compensate for our inaction.”

Australia's measures seem extreme, but others are following suit. Malaysia plans to raise the minimum age for opening a social media account from 13 to 16 next year and is also considering banning social media for children under 16.

Baroness Kidron, founder of campaign group 5Rights, which spearheaded the adoption of the UK's age-appropriate design code, is not surprised. “These companies are addicting kids, they're making things that grab their attention and they're commodifying their childhood,” she said. “At a certain point Australia says, 'Listen, either do better or get out of our children's lives.'

However, the struggle to curb social media is a bit like climate change. Smaller countries can impose tough rules, but without the participation of the country at the root of the problem, they are fighting an uphill battle.

In the US there is some movement at the state level; In September, the New York City public school system became the largest in America to ban smartphones in schools. But at the federal level, progress remains slow. For frustrated parents, one hope comes from the Children's Online Safety Act, which gained traction in Washington last year, winning overwhelmingly in the Senate before stalling in the House. The main purpose of the bill is to impose a “duty of care” on tech companies.

This would make tech companies legally liable in the same way that, say, a drug or car seat maker is liable for faulty or damaged products. It's far from certain that the muscular version of this security bill will make it to President Trump's desk intact. House Republicans have already tried to tone it down. And the president's public and newfound affection for Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow technologists is causing that hope to wane.

A Meta spokesperson said: “We strongly disagree with these allegations and are confident that the evidence will show our long-standing commitment to supporting young people. For over a decade, we have listened to parents, worked with experts and law enforcement, and conducted in-depth research to understand the issues that matter most. We are using these insights to make meaningful changes, such as introducing teen accounts with built-in security and giving parents tools to manage their teens' experiences. We are proud of the progress we have made and are always working to do better.”