Bans on social media for under-16s are sweeping the world — from Australia to Spain, Malaysia and beyond — but digital theorist Tony D. Sampson argues they don't go far enough. The problem is that prohibition dodges the harder fight: taking on the platform business models built to capture attention through infinite scroll, variable-reward notifications and opaque algorithms. What we need is not to stop short of the platforms but to go straight at them, forcing companies to redesign addictive features and open up their algorithms through consumer law, and making critical digital literacy a core part of every child's education.

My response to the bans may surprise some readers. I’ve authored several theory books critical of digital culture’s emerging toxic politics, social anxieties, and declining user experiences. However, this work needs to be read as an antidote to the raw optimism that greeted the World Wide Web in the late 1990s. Back then, many commentators hailed a democratic digitopia; an online Agora, a virtual public sphere where distance and hierarchy dissolved. As Web 1.0 became 2.0, new platforms like Twitter and Facebook were celebrated as liberation technologies: e-democracy in action that stirred rebellions like the Arab Spring into action. When Daniel Dennett championed a Cambrian explosion of universal transparency, few anticipated the dangerous contagions of conspiracy, misinformation, fake news, or brain-rot that would follow. Ethical debates at the time centered on computer viruses and bugs that threatened network security, while societal anxieties were largely confined to the so-called digital have-nots: those cut off from flourishing flows of information.

Significantly, what we termed the “dark side” of digital culture never claimed information technologies were inherently evil. Its aim was to shed light on problematic promises of transparency and empowerment; promises increasingly displaced by a rampant marketing ideology fixated on algorithmically curated viral growth. A platform economy emerged, compulsively designed to capture, optimize, and monetize user attention. These business models changed everything. Built atop the Internet’s military infrastructure, commercial social networks grew exponentially through the 2000s, as marketing strategies rapidly evolved to realize their enormous economic potential. Today’s social media landscape would scarcely be recognizable to early optimists. The potential of e-democracy has been supplanted by a corporate free-for-all, overseen by billionaire “feudal” lords. Meanwhile, open access to information has become ensnared in a regulatory vacuum, filled with scams, deception, endless scrolling, toxic content, and online harms.

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The school gate, it turns out, is easier to police than Silicon Valley.

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A Post-COVID intensification of screen dependency brought these negative user experiences into sharp relief. A generation of young people who had spent lockdown years mediated almost entirely through screens re-entered a world of rising parental concern and a gathering mental health crisis narrative. The current political mobilization of this anxiety as justification for an era of digital prohibition is perhaps unsurprising, but it poses exclusionary dangers, above all abandoning children to a rudderless digital life. Following Australia’s precedent, the contagious logic of a convenient yet flawed fix has rapidly spread. Indeed, a growing academic community is profoundly concerned that this rushed and largely evidence-free move toward prohibition may actually be harmful to both children and democracy, since depriving young people of guided resilience leaves them unequipped to navigate and change the digital world they inherit as adults.