Social media plays a significant, multifaceted role in adolescents’ development, influencing how they communicate, learn, socialize, and express themselves.

The benefits, however, are accompanied by risks that can undermine youngsters’ character as well as their cognitive and social development.

The potential problems include excessive screen time, social media addiction, cyberbullying, misinformation, radicalization, privacy violations, exposure to inappropriate content, sextortion, and doomscrolling.

A recent study published in Nature: Human Behaviour found that adolescents who begin using social media at an early age tend to have significantly lower academic performance. A Mashable article highlights additional issues including effects on mental health, self-harm, addiction to social media, compulsive, repetitive checking, and exposure to pornography and violent material.

Protecting minors has largely fallen to parents, schools, and self-regulation by some social media providers.

But that approach has proven ineffective and inadequate, so some governments and policymakers have stepped in and placed responsibility on social media providers.

Australia was the first country to legislate a nationwide social media ban on children younger than 16—which I wrote about in January for Communications of the ACM.

Enacted in December, the ban initially applied to 10 platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X, and YouTube. It excluded messaging, gaming, and nonsocial platforms including Discord, GitHub, Roblox, WhatsApp, YouTube Kids, and educational tools.

The law places the responsibility for enforcement on the platform providers through age-assurance mechanisms, requiring the platforms to take “reasonable steps” to prevent those 15 or younger from creating or holding accounts.

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