Previously, on the Social Media Ban for Kids. Part 1: How Europe Reached This Point

On 12 May 2026, addressing the European Summit on Artificial Intelligence and Children, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen announced that “we must consider a social media delay” for children and that, depending on the findings of the Commission’s expert panel, “we could come with a legal proposal this summer.” The phrasing was deliberately mild, delay, not ban, but the political signal was unmistakable. A bloc that for years had relied on platform self-regulation, codes of conduct and the broad provisions of the digital services act was now openly discussing a European age threshold for access to Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, X and YouTube (Euronews).

To citizens following the debate from a distance, the announcement may look sudden. It is not. The proposal of May 2026 is the latest episode of a story that has been building for at least a decade and has reached its present momentum through three converging streams: a sustained academic argument about adolescent worsening mental health, a rapid succession of national legislative announcements, and a quieter but more consequential process of technical and regulatory work inside the European institutions. This article retraces those streams, maps the evidence base as it currently stands, and outlines the policy options that European decision-makers will have to evaluate before any formal proposal lands on the table.

A timeline of the last decade

A handful of dates set the scene.

2017	Jean Twenge published iGen, arguing that the generation born after 1995 is more depressed, more anxious and less socially active than previous cohorts, and attributes the change to smartphones.
2019	Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski published the first of several papers questioning the strength of the harm of social media on adolescents’ mental health thesis.
2022	The digital services act (DSA) was adopted in the European Union. Article 28 imposes a general duty on online platforms to ensure “a high level of privacy, safety and security of minors.”
2023	In May, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory on social media and youth mental health. France adopts its “digital majority” law (promulgated 7 July 2023) requiring parental consent for under-15s – a law never applied due to the absence of implementing decrees. In December, the U.S. National Academies released the consensus report Social Media and Adolescent Health.
2024	Jonathan Haidt published The Anxious Generation (March). In October, more than 140 academics and organisations warned the Australian government (that was preparing a legislation) that a ban is “too blunt an instrument”. In November, Australia passed the online safety amendment (social media minimum age) act regardless.
14 Jul 2025	The Commission published the DSA Guidelines on the Protection of Minors and released the first version of the European age verification blueprint (an enhanced second version follows on 10 October).
10 Sep 2025	In her State of the Union address, President von der Leyen announced an expert panel on child online safety.
10 Oct 2025	At an informal Council meeting in Horsens (Denmark) under the Danish presidency of the Council of the European Union, 25 of the 27 European member states, joined by Norway and Iceland, signed The Jutland Declaration: Shaping a Safe Online World for Minors. Only Estonia and Belgium did not sign (see Part III, §3).
7 Nov 2025	Denmark separately announced a cross-party national agreement to restrict social-media access to those under 15, anchored to the MitID, the national e-ID.
26 Nov 2025	The European Parliament adopted, by 483 votes to 92, a non-legislative resolution calling for a European-wide minimum age of 16.
10 Dec 2025	Australia’s ban enters into force.
3 Feb 2026	Spain announced it is joining a “Coalition of the Digital Willing”, a smaller, more activist subset of the Jutland signatories, comprising Spain, France, Denmark, Greece, Austria and Portugal, to press the European Commission for a European-wide age threshold and coordinated enforcement.
Mar 2026	The European Commission’s expert panel on child online safety began work.
15 Apr 2026	President Von der Leyen presented the finished European age-verification app,  modelled on the European Digital COVID certificate infrastructure, as ready for rollout, urging member states to adopt it.
12 May 2026	President Von der Leyen stated that a legal proposal by the summer is possible.
15 Jun 2026	UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced a ban on social media for under-16s (Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X), as well as blocking livestreaming and artificial intelligence-based intimate relationships and contact with strangers for under-18s.
16 Jun 2026	The Special Panel on child online safety held its third and final meeting. A new Eurobarometer survey on social media use by adolescents is released.
10 Jul 2026	The European Commission is expected to react to France’s notified social media law for under-15s.
13 Jul 2026	The Special Panel’s Co-chairs, Dr Maria Melchior and Professor Jörg M. Fegert, will present recommendations to President Ursula von der Leyen on how to further strengthen protection for children online.
31 Dec 2026	The European Commission has recommended that Member States implement changes to age verification technologies by the end of the year.

The pattern that emerges is one of accelerating convergence. What began as an academic controversy in the late 2010s has become, in the span of less than three years, a coordinated regulatory question across the globe.

The harm thesis and its critics

Public debate on children and social media has been framed, in much of the English-speaking world, by what one may call the harm thesis. Its most visible advocates are the social psychologists Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt, supported by the public-health interventions of Vivek Murthy, U.S. Surgeon General until early 2025.

In The Anxious Generation (Penguin Press, March 2024), Haidt argues that smartphones and algorithmically curated social media have produced a “great rewiring of childhood,” coinciding with sharp increases in adolescent depression, anxiety and self-harm beginning around 2012. He proposes four norms: no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16, no phones in schools, and a return to “real-world” play. (Haidt — The Anxious Generation) Twenge’s earlier work (iGen, 2017; Generations, 2023) is the empirical backbone of much of this thesis.

In a June 2024 New York Times op-ed, Surgeon General Murthy gave the argument its highest-profile institutional endorsement, calling for a warning label on social-media platforms comparable to those introduced on cigarettes in the 1960s. (After Babel — Surgeon General Warning)

The harm thesis is not, however, the scientific consensus. A parallel body of research, led principally by Amy Orben (Cambridge) and Andrew Przybylski (Oxford Internet Institute), has consistently found that the effects of digital-technology engagement on adolescent well-being, when present, are small, inconsistent across studies and sensitive to analytic choices. In a paper published in Clinical Psychological Science in 2021, Vuorre, Orben and Przybylski concluded that there was no evidence that associations between adolescents’ digital-technology engagement and mental-health problems had increased over time. (SAGE — Vuorre, Orben, Przybylski 2021)

This more cautious position received its most authoritative institutional voice in December 2023, when the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published Social Media and Adolescent Health. The consensus committee found that the relationship between social media and youth mental health is “complex”: some features of platforms harm some young people, others provide community and learning opportunities, and the science does not yet support a single, generalised causal claim (National Academies — Social Media and Adolescent Health, 2024).

In a 2024 editorial in Science, the journal’s editor-in-chief H. Holden Thorp summarised the picture as “unsettled” (Science — Unsettled science on social media); reviewing Haidt’s book in Nature, Candice Odgers reached a similar conclusion (Nature — The great rewiring, March 2024). The point is not that there is no harm, there is documented harm on specific features (algorithmic amplification of self-harm content, exposure to bullying, sleep disruption) for specific groups of users. The point is that the body of evidence does not, at the time of writing, allow one to attribute the post-2012 deterioration in adolescent mental-health indicators primarily to social media. As more than 140 academics and civil-society organisations wrote in an open letter to the Australian government before the ban was passed, age-based exclusion is “too blunt an instrument” given the evidence available (Open letter to the Australian Government, October 2024).

This is the evidence gap that Caroline De Cock, writing on this Evidence Hub in April 2026, described as “central” to the debate: jurisdictions are moving at legislative speed while the underlying science remains contested (Evidence Hub — The Evidence Gap at the Heart of the Ban Debate).

The Australian precedent

The online safety amendment (social media minimum age) act 2024, adopted by the Federal Parliament in late 2024, requires designated platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X and YouTube,  to take “reasonable steps” to prevent Australians under sixteen from holding accounts. Penalties for systemic non-compliance can reach A$49.5 million. The act entered into force on 10 December 2025 (eSafety — Social media age restrictions).

Read more about the Australian case in the two blogposts written by Professor Amanda Third, Professorial Research Fellow and Co-Director of the Young and Resilient Research Centre in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University and Faculty Associate in the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, Beyond the Ban. Part 1: What Australia’s Social Media Age Restrictions Can Teach European Policymakers and Beyond the Ban. Part 2: A Child-Centred Approach to Online Protection Regulation.

The first six months of implementation are, from a European perspective, the most useful empirical evidence currently available. Three findings deserve to be considered together.

First, the platforms made their move. According to the eSafety Commissioner, by mid-January 2026, the in-scope platforms had removed approximately 4.7 million accounts held by users under sixteen, a figure that passed five million by March (Euronews — Australia under-16 social media ban: one month later). Enforcement has not been frictionless on the platform side either: in late March 2026, the Australian government warned of “major gaps” in compliance and opened inquiries into Meta, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube (Euronews — Australia warns social media platforms of major gaps, 31 March 2026).

Second, large proportions of young people continued to use social media regardless. Research conducted by YouthInsight for the Molly Rose Foundation, published in April 2026, found that 61% of Australian children aged 12–15 who had social-media accounts before the ban still had access to one or more accounts, and that roughly seven in ten of those who were still using restricted platforms described the bypass as “easy” (Molly Rose Foundation, April 2026). In the separate YouGov survey analysed by the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (below), migration to alternative or less-regulated platforms was reported by approximately a quarter of parents.

Third, parental perceptions were nonetheless cautiously positive. A YouGov survey co-analysed by the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute found that 61% of parents of under-sixteens reported between two and four positive effects after the introduction of the ban, most commonly more in-person social interactions (43%) and children being more present and engaged during interactions (38%) (Murdoch Children’s Research Institute — Early wins for the social-media ban).

The academic reception has been measured. Writing in The Lancet Digital Health (April 2025) and in The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific (2026), Australian and international scholars have pointed out that the empirical effects of media, online-gaming curfews and bans, where studied (China, South Korea, France), have been “largely ineffective” due to widespread circumvention. Self-reported age is unreliable, with 84% of Australians aged 8–12 reportedly using social media before the ban despite a then-standing minimum age of 13, and the strongest counterfactual analyses to date are based on cross-sectional, not causal, data (The Lancet Digital Health — Potential effects of the social-media age ban in Australia, 2025).

In short, the Australian ban has succeeded as an act of will and as a forcing mechanism on platforms. Its medium-term effects on adolescent mental health remain to be demonstrated. Both the Connected Minds Study (Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and Deakin University) and the eSafety Commissioner’s own regulatory reporting will be the data sources to watch over the coming twelve to twenty-four months.

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Sources and further reading

Institutional sources – European Commission — Guidelines on the protection of minors under the DSA, 14 July 2025 – European Commission — Age verification blueprint, enhanced second version, October 2025 – European Commission — Final meeting of the Special Panel on child safety online: EU survey confirms link between social media use and wellbeing, 16 June 2026 – European Parliament — Children should be at least 16 to access social media, 26 November 2025 – Australian eSafety Commissioner — Social media age restrictions – U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine — Social Media and Adolescent Health, December 2023 – UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology — Social media to be banned for under-16s, 15 June 2026.

Academic literature – The Lancet Digital Health — Potential effects of the social-media age ban in Australia for children younger than 16 years, 2025 – The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific — Beyond the debate: toward pragmatic evaluation of Australia’s social media age restrictions, 2026 – Vuorre, Orben & Przybylski — There is no evidence that associations between adolescents’ digital-technology engagement and mental-health problems have increased, Clinical Psychological Science, 2021 – Science — Unsettled science on social media (editorial, H. Holden Thorp), 2024 – Candice Odgers — The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?, Nature, March 2024 – Open letter to the Australian Government from over 140 experts and organisations, October 2024 – Joint Research Centre — Social media usage and adolescents’ mental health in the EU, 2025 (charts 41–47 on the Evidence Hub).

Empirical findings on the Australian ban – Molly Rose Foundation — More than 60 % of Australian children still using social media despite ban, April 2026 – Murdoch Children’s Research Institute — Early wins for the social-media ban, new survey claims, 2026 – Euronews — Australia under-16 social media ban: how is it going one month later?, 15 January 2026 – Euronews — Australia warns social media platforms of “major gaps” in under-16 ban enforcement, 31 March 2026.

From the Evidence Hub on Social Media Ban for Kids – Caroline De Cock — The Evidence Gap at the Heart of the Ban Debate, 14 April 2026 – Amanda Third — Beyond the Ban. Part 1: What Australia’s Social Media Age Restrictions Can Teach European Policymakers, 2 March 2026 – Elizabeth Gosme — Social media bans won’t protect our children. It’s time for a paradigm shift, 29 April 2026 – Gabriele Battimelli — Don’t Ban Young People from Social Media. Fix It., 18 March 2026.