Stop Trying to Ban Teens from the Internet

Author: Tyler Cowen

Cowen, Tyler. Stop Trying to Ban Teens from the Internet. https://www.thefp.com/p/stop-trying-to-ban-teens-from-the. Accessed 10 Dec. 2025.

You are being sold a bill of goods. A social panic has set in over how smartphones and social media are destroying us and ruining our children. In Australia this week, the hysteria reached its zenith, with a ban on all social media for kids under the age of 16.

These claims are especially difficult to defuse, because there are some pretty clear costs to these technologies. The thing is, after much rigorous investigation, the harms are relatively small. Yet in headlines they are reported as major negative effects.

Let’s consider one recent study of video watching. This study did show some costs, as the core result was that for each daily hour of video watching, a child experiences (on average) a reduction of non-cognitive skills of 0.091 standard deviations on average.

But is the effect “large”? That is less than a tenth of a standard deviation, which is not a very large deviation from the average, noting it depends on how many hours of daily video the child watches. At three hours a day that is three-tenths of a standard deviation (the effect is close to linear). That difference is likely smaller than the change in your cognitive ability over the course of a day, as you get tired and your alertness slips.

That’s a real change, but a modest one. Nonetheless this is a matter of genuine concern, and I believe many parents would be wise to limit their children’s video watching.

But it is not the collapse of our civilization, or the destruction of our youth. When Jonathan Haidt, while discussing video, posts about “. . . the global destruction of the human ability to pay attention. . . ”, that is an exaggeration. And warnings of the decline in test scores have been dramatically overstated. In the U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress, for instance, eighth grade reading and math scores dipped insignificantly from 2012 to 2020, falling only with Covid. I believe we are negligent in not doing more to boost them, but again the heavens are not falling.

In the video study, by the way, watching actually showed a positive effect on math scores, and a positive but statistically insignificant effect on cognitive skills in general. The overall picture here is complex, and I know plenty of young people who have taught themselves math, science, chess, and many other topics with online video. It is far from obvious that all those people are worse off for this self-instruction, and I suspect many of them will go on to become our elite. Studies that focus on short-run averages will miss what might be considerable gains over time. Do you want the next Albert Einstein to be watching YouTube science videos, or perhaps even making them, as a young teen? I do.

You can look at many more studies, covering a range of particular topics. A cell phone ban in Norwegian middle schools, for instance, brought improvements in grades of 0.08 standard deviations for girls, again a small effect. The chance that the girls are diagnosed or identified as having psychological problems does not change. The most significant change is a decline in bullying, which of course is a good thing. A cell phone ban starting in the 2023 to 2024 school year in Florida schools led to very small effects. It is also the case that two years after this ban, Florida test scores fell to their lowest level in 20 years, showing such bans, even if mildly useful, are not going to set things right.

If I were running a middle school, I would prefer a cell phone ban, at least provided the parents would support it. But I would not expect it, or indeed any other set of policies, to be a game-changer. If there is one general lesson we can take from social science, it is that “treatment effects”—the attempt to elevate or improve people by treating them differently—are very tough to pull off with any kind of significant magnitude.

Note that U.S. college student anxiety and depression have been declining over the last three years, even though smartphone use remains robust. That is further evidence that smartphones are only a modest-size cause of the problems we have. Teen suicide rates have been relatively high, but they were very high in the 1980s too. Furthermore, most of the mental health trends supposedly attributed to smartphones—a ubiquitous product around the globe—are strongest in the Anglosphere and Scandinavia. Maybe culture is more at fault than the phones.

Now enter Australia. The country just banned social media accounts for children until the age of 16. The ban covers Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X, and YouTube, but it does not attempt to limit gaming or messaging, nor does it prevent below-16s from watching videos without signing up for an account. Enforcement is in the hands of the companies, based on data on the users (e.g., how long has the person been online?), rather than requiring the presentation of a government-issued ID, which is ruled out on privacy grounds.

YouTube in particular, and sometimes X, are among the very best ways to learn about the world. To the extent that the law is effectively enforced, targeting YouTube will have a terrible effect on youth science, and the ability of young scientists and founders to get their projects off the ground will take a huge and possibly fatal hit. If you are only allowed to learn from the internet at age 16, you are probably not ready for marvelous achievements at age 18 or perhaps not even at 20. The country may become more mediocre.

The more serious concern is that this represents a major expansion of government control over tech services and also speech. Over time the government has to decide which are the approved tech companies and services and which are not. That becomes a politicized decision, as any chosen lines will be arbitrary, especially as online services evolve in their functionality. For instance, if excess video usage is what is problematic, it is possible for videos to be embedded more seamlessly into some future version of WhatsApp, an exempt service. Or Australian youth, even under the new law, will be able to access video on a laptop, simply by viewing it and not signing into their accounts.

The companies also are judged on the basis of their age-verification procedures, which requires yet further intrusion into the lives and data of the youngsters. But that same snooping—with some degree of accountability to the government about how the information is used—will have to be applied to many older people as well, at least if compliance is to be verified. Do we really preserve the right of anonymous communication in this world? The Australian government will always be trying to guess who we are.

I predict that either this law stops being effectively enforced, or the controls on companies and users have to become much, much tighter and more oppressive. In a large poll of Australian 9 to 16-year-olds, only 6 percent of them thought the new ban was going to work.

That is true for yet another reason. With gaming and messaging exempt from the ban, we can expect old-style “social media” to move into those areas. It already was the case that Fortnite and other gaming services served as social media networks, and that trend will be accelerated. Discord, for instance, is exempt from the ban, a glaring hole, and in a fast-changing market there probably will be some significant loopholes most of the time. For the ban to continue to work, it will have to spread. It is hard to think of an area of internet services that could not, in principle, serve social media–like functions, or produce the harms being attributed to online life. Regulation of artificial intelligence services is perhaps the next logical albeit misguided move here.

Who is in charge of the family anyway? If I have decided that my 15-year-old should be free to follow Magnus Carlsen on X and YouTube, should we have the boot of the state tell me this is forbidden? This is a big move in the direction of what Socrates advocated in The Republic, namely that the state takes priority over the family in deciding which stories can be told to the youth.

Over time, I expect this ban, again assuming it is kept and enforced, to become one of the biggest free speech restrictions on the internet. It is the incentive of government agencies to boost their budgets, spread their mandates, and enforce their dictates. What starts with a nation’s youth rarely ends there.

You might think that Australia’s regulatory guardians can be trusted to uphold free speech ideals, but has that been the case to date? Under Australian law, it is permissible to restrict free speech for reasons of public order, national security, and protection from harm. That includes limits on “hate speech,” prompting Elon Musk to exaggerate and call the country fascist. Nonetheless the country does not have anything comparable to America’s First Amendment free speech protections.

So why should we empower Australian regulators and restrict free speech further?

It is very defensible to worry that your kid is on his or her phone too much. Furthermore, school bans or limits on smartphone usage are likely to bring some measurable but small gains.

But if you think a massive expansion of state authority over online content is the answer, you ought to know that the associated gains from that decision will at best be modest. You will not be saving civilization or our youth; rather you will be joining the ever-growing parade against free speech.

Tyler Cowen is Holbert L. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University and also faculty director of the Mercatus Center. He received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1987. His book The Great Stagnation: How America Ate the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better was a New York Times bestseller. He was named in an Economist poll as one of the most influential economists of the last decade and Bloomberg Businessweek dubbed him “America's Hottest Economist.” Foreign Policy magazine named him as one of its “Top 100 Global Thinkers” of 2011. He co-writes the blog Marginal Revolution, hosts the podcast Conversations with Tyler, and is co-founder of an online economics education project, MRU.org. He is also director of the philanthropic project Emergent Ventures.

DMU Timestamp: December 04, 2025 22:31

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