Tackling the social media ‘monster’

John Thornhill john.thornhill@ft.com · 13 Nov 2025

Like many parents, Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has strong views about the harmful effects of social media on children. “We have released a monster,” she told parliament last month. “Mobile phones and social media steal our children’s childhood.”

To tackle the problem, the Danish government moved last week to ban access to social media for children under 15, although the legislation will take time to enact. According to Frederiksen, 94 per cent of children under 13 in Denmark have social media profiles — even though that is supposedly the minimum age for such services.

Almost every parent worries about what their children may be exposed to online and how it will influence their behaviour. Will their child be a victim — or perpetrator — of online bullying and offline violence as so chillingly depicted in Netflix’s award-winning Adolescence?

Denmark’s initiative reflects the growing frustration and anger among lawmakers around the world that the tech industry is not doing enough to tackle social media addiction. The average US teenager spends 4.8 hours a day on social media, including YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook.

Last year, Australia’s government voted to ban social media use by children under 16; the law will take effect in December. As of April, some 26 laws across 19 jurisdictions had been enacted globally to enforce online safety, according to NYU’s Stern School of Business.

But the tech industry has often resisted such moves, trumpeting the undoubted benefits of social media. Privately, some companies still dismiss the concerns as the cyclical moral panic that accompanies any new technology. They publicly claim they are working hard to address harmful content and behaviours for children, while backtracking on content moderation more broadly.

As my colleague John Burn-Murdoch has noted, there is also some evidence to suggest that we may have passed peak social media — albeit not in North America — as young people find other things to do with their lives.

But the addictive social media vice in which many children remain trapped has been explored in a report this week from the think-tank Demos. The two authors, Shuab Gamote and Peter Hyman, ran workshops with more than 700 children across Britain to find out what they thought.

The authors noted many of the positive uses of social media and smartphones, enabling children to learn, connect, access news and stay safe by using Google Maps or calling home. But they also found that social media was a massive distraction for children and was fuelling pornography, misogyny and online harassment.

One of the biggest challenges for teenagers was knowing how to disconnect. “It’s always on. It’s part of everything,” one teenager told them. “The ‘anxious generation’ is a real thing,” the authors concluded. Both authors were initially sceptical about the value of banning phones in schools. But they concluded that social media should be banned for children under 16 to release them from the “grip of addiction”. It is absurd to expect children, parents or teachers to deal with all online risks by themselves — even if they can do more to respond to children’s cravings for more social connections in the real world.

If it comes to a straight choice between leaving social media as it is today or banning it outright for children, Gamote tells me he would ban it. “I think it is completely immoral for anyone under 16 to have access to TikTok,” he says.

Many young social media users also appear desperate to end their addiction, which is fed by the fear of missing out. One intriguing study of over 1,000 older US college students found they would need to be paid $50 to cut off their TikTok accounts for a month. But they would pay $24 for all students to be disconnected from TikTok for four weeks.

Safety campaigners argue that social media companies are never going to respond to the concerns of parents, children or educators vigorously enough given their high dependence on young users. It is only legislation — or lawsuits — that will force them to improve. Even then, real change depends on insistent enforcement. It has been two years since Britain passed the Online Safety Act, containing child safety provisions. But Baroness Beeban Kidron, one of the most active legislators supporting the act, is unhappy with the results. “Unless we have robust regulators we can pass as many laws as we want and people will not see the difference,” she says.

Her fear now is that legislators will wait too long before responding to the harms being caused to children by artificial intelligence chatbots. Every responsible politician has a moral duty to act quickly today, rather than wait 15 years as they did with social media, she says. Some European politicians may hesitate to pursue tougher action against powerful US tech companies for fear of offending the “free speech” liber- tarians in the Trump administration.

But as Jack Dorsey, the former chief executive of Twitter, told the Oslo Free- dom Forum last year, so much of the talk about free speech is a “complete distraction”. “I think the real debate should be about free will,” he said. Like the Danes, governments should act to protect children’s free will by banning social media for the youngest users. Only concerted action will force the careless people of Silicon Valley to accept they have a duty of care.