Social Media Isn't The Problem — The Incentives Are. So, Why Are Kids Paying For It?
- Leah
- Feb 5
- 6 min read
Spain is moving toward banning under-16s from social media. Australia has already taken steps in that direction. Other countries are watching closely, notebooks out, ready to copy the homework.
Judging by the online reaction, many adults are relieved. Finally, someone is doing something. Finally, the kids will be safe from the chaos we’ve spent years complaining about.
It’s an understandable reaction. Social media can feel like digital junk food — engineered for craving, not nourishment. Anyone who has watched the younger generation scroll themselves into a state of perpetual anxiety knows something isn’t quite right.
So the instinct makes sense. But the enthusiasm also reveals something awkward: the cheering adults are standing inside the same environment they’re applauding children being removed from.
A Reasonable Fear — And a Convenient Diagnosis
Social media can be unhealthy. This isn’t controversial.
Platforms optimise for engagement, and engagement is most easily driven by outrage, fear, and tribal validation. Calm disagreement rarely goes viral. Nuance doesn’t trend. Anger does. A lot of teenagers have anxiety spikes every time they go online because that’s how it’s designed to keep them there — clicking and consuming.
Teenagers, whose identities are still forming, are particularly vulnerable to this. No serious person denies that.
So governments propose a solution: keep younger users out. Problem solved. Cue the standing ovation from worried parents and the kind of political thinking that treats ‘the internet’ as a place you can simply lock the doors to.
Except that it doesn’t solve the problem. Not even close.
Because the problem was never simply that young people were using social media. The problem is that the environment itself rewards behaviour we claim to dislike. Banning children from a polluted river doesn’t clean the water. It just delays the moment they eventually jump in.
We’ve all been teenagers. We know what happens when forbidden fruit is dangled in front of us.
Social media is not a temporary inconvenience. It's the reality the next generation will inherit.
The Disease No One Wants to Treat
The toxicity people complain about online isn’t a glitch — it’s built into the system.
Attention is profitable. Emotion captures attention. Conflict generates emotion. And these emotional responses are addictive, designed to keep us coming back for more.
These are algorithmic choices — they’re business models. Teenagers aren’t affected by any single app. They’re responding to environments engineered to maximise engagement — environments that reward emotional reaction over reflection and intensity over understanding. It draws them deeper. Sometimes they fall down a rabbit hole.
Over time, this doesn’t just affect teenagers. It reshapes adult behaviour too. Institutions adapt. Media adapts. Public figures adapt. Everyone gradually becomes, consciously or not, what the algorithm rewards.
The result is an ecosystem where exaggeration outperforms accuracy, certainty outperforms curiosity, and performance often replaces conversation.
And yet when regulation arrives, it rarely addresses these incentives. Instead, it focuses on access.
It's easier to move people out of the room than to fix what the room rewards.
Why This Feels Like Action (And Why It Isn’t)
Restricting access looks decisive. It produces headlines. It signals protection.
It’s also spectacularly impractical, which should concern anyone paying attention. How exactly does one enforce a social media ban? Australia’s plan involves age verification, which sounds reasonable until you think about it for more than thirty seconds. Either platforms verify ages through government IDs — raising obvious privacy concerns — or they rely on biometric systems, or some version of the honour system.
Teenagers are resourceful. They’ve been circumventing parental controls since parental controls were invented. A teenager who wants to be on a platform will find a way. They’ll use VPNs. Borrow older siblings’ accounts. Migrate to platforms based in countries that don’t care about Australian law.
The ban won’t keep kids off social media. It will simply teach them that adults don’t understand their world and that rules are made to be worked around.
Meanwhile, fixing underlying incentives is slower and far less comfortable. It requires confronting business models, cultural habits, and the behaviour of adults who benefit from the current system. It also means confronting the wider ecosystem of digital profiteering that extends far beyond platform owners themselves.
If social media environments are genuinely harmful, the question becomes unavoidable: why are we protecting young people from them while leaving the incentives that shape our behaviours untouched? Why do we accept behaviour online that we would consider unacceptable anywhere else?
The uncomfortable truth is that the current ecosystem rewards behaviour that many participants have learned to rely on. Politicians included.
Changing that would require more than a ban. It would require actual courage.
The Consequences We’re Not Discussing
The abstinence-only approach carries risks of its own.
When you ban teenagers from mainstream, relatively regulated platforms, you don’t eliminate their desire for online connection and consumption. You push them toward less visible, less moderated spaces instead.
We’re telling young people they can’t be trusted with the same communication tools the rest of society uses daily, while simultaneously expecting them to make mature decisions about their choices, and their identities.
There’s also the small matter of digital literacy. One of the most reliable ways to ensure the next generation struggles to navigate online ecosystems critically is to keep them away from those spaces during their formative years — and then suddenly unleash them at sixteen with no preparation.
The Alternative Nobody Talks About
There’s another possibility, though it receives far less attention. Perhaps because the outcome is inconvenient.
Instead of trying to keep young people away from digital ecosystems, we should be preparing them to navigate online intelligently.
During the Covid confinement years, I launched a programme called The Mindset Reset. The goal wasn’t to disconnect people from the internet. It was to help them understand how it works, and use it better so that it didn’t use them.
Something interesting happened. When people saw how algorithms shape attention, how emotional contagion and disinformation spread, how outrage hijacks cognition, they made better decisions. The environment lost much of its power over them. They became harder to manipulate. Less reactive. More selective about what they consumed and shared.
In medical terms, we might call that immunity — not from online spaces themselves, but from being unconsciously shaped by them.
Over the past few years, I’ve become increasingly convinced that this is the direction societies will eventually have to move toward — not shielding people from toxic information environments, but building the cognitive and social immune systems required to live with them.
Immunity scales better than prohibition. We can teach people to recognise manipulation. We can help them develop healthier usage patterns. We can build genuine resilience.
It’s slower than passing a ban. It’s harder. It requires treating young people as capable of understanding their vulnerabilities rather than problems to be solved by keeping them away from the scary internet.
But that means addressing root causes instead of applying band-aids to visible symptoms. It also asks something more demanding of adults too — not just to protect the next generation from unhealthy systems, but to model healthier behaviour inside them.
Resilience, unlike restriction, lasts longer than adolescence.
The Emperor’s New Clothes
These bans risk becoming political theatre — visible action that allows everyone to feel progress is being made while the underlying incentives remain untouched.
Every minute spent debating whether to ban teenagers from social media is a minute not spent asking how to make powerful technological tools less harmful for everyone. Every ounce of political capital spent on unenforceable age restrictions is capital not spent on structural solutions.
The kids will find their workarounds. The platforms will keep profiting. And the adults congratulating themselves for “protecting the children” will return to the same ecosystem they’ve just deemed too dangerous for anyone under sixteen.
The uncomfortable reality is that the environment we’re trying to protect children from is one we’ve already accepted for ourselves.
Social Media Is Here to Stay
None of this means protecting children is wrong. The instinct to protect is healthy and necessary.
But protection that ignores causes rarely builds resilience. Sixteen-year-olds eventually become adults. If the underlying system remains unchanged, the problem simply reappears — only now with people who were never taught how to handle it.
Social media is not disappearing. The question is not whether the next generation will engage online, but how they will learn to engage there.
Strong societies don’t just build fences around difficult environments. They prepare people to move in those environments without losing their judgement, their agency, or themselves.
That means teaching how attention is captured, how manipulation works, how outrage and disinformation spread, and how algorithms shape perception. It means treating young people not as problems to be contained, but as participants capable of understanding the systems around them.
If we actually cared about young people in digital spaces, we would focus less on keeping them away from risk and more on helping them recognise it.
The problem isn’t connection — it’s exploitation. It’s not communication — it’s manipulation. It’s not social media itself — it’s antisocial design.
If the disease cannot be eradicated — and it probably can’t — then the only durable response is immunity.
Resilience scales. Literacy scales. Awareness scales. Bans don’t.
The real choice facing us isn’t whether to keep young people offline. It’s whether we prepare them for the world they’re inheriting — or leave them to figure it out alone in a system designed to exploit them.
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