Social media bans fail Black youth as a long-term solution

On July 21, France became the first country in the European Union to ban social media for children under 15, but the United Kingdom is already a step ahead. When former Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced in June that the U.K. would bar youth under 16 from social media platforms beginning in 2027, he framed it as a chance to “set a new normal for future generations”—a line in the sand, he said, to give kids “their childhood back.” The decision followed a public comment period where more than 90% of public respondents backed the idea.

This is unsurprising as parents are exhausted. Teachers describe classrooms hollowed out by phones, and the data on youth mental health is legitimately concerning. While France, the U.K., and other countries are moving quickly on banning social media use among teens, the United States has yet to institute an outright social media ban, despite several states enacting their own versions of restrictive use. At least 20 U.S. states have enacted laws restricting minors’ social media access and nine have gone as far as proposing outright bans or parental-consent mandates. Courts have blocked laws in Arkansas and Ohio and temporarily halted others in California, Florida, and Georgia—nearly all on First Amendment grounds. Massachusetts lawmakers, who passed an under-14 ban in April, added language specifically to prevent parents from accessing LGBTQ+ teens’ data, an amendment that exists only because organizations warned the original bill would put vulnerable kids at greater risk.

Communities are understandably looking to elected officials to regulate, but the instinct to move toward hyper-restrictions may be misguided, especially in the case of marginalized youth. The bans in the U.K. and France, and the roughly two dozen similar proposals moving through U.S. state legislatures, treat access as the disease rather than a symptom of platforms built to maximize engagement at any cost. That diagnosis influences lawmakers to act without confronting the design features and business models of social media platforms, as well as how different groups of young people experience technology in distinct ways. For a meaningful share of teenagers, public policies that are not well thought out on their cultural implications could significantly weaken their connections to primary information infrastructure, including news, community, and identity-building. Black youth, in fact, are positioned to lose the most when lawmakers write broad policies without considering the diversity among youth.

Black teens and social media

Amnesty International’s U.K. office put the critique on social media bans succinctly: The ban is the “right diagnosis but the wrong prescription.” The organization’s research has documented how platforms’ own recommendation systems attract young users into harmful content loops. Most of the recent global wave, from Australia to Indonesia to France and the U.K., has converged in the same place: restricting access by age. However, two efforts point toward a more nuanced alternative. Efforts to engage in age verification, meanwhile, come with their own well-documented risks. To verify a user’s age, platforms typically require a government-issued ID or biometric data. This approach risks exposing sensitive information in breaches and raises a real question of whether it protects children at all, since critics note it can be circumvented with a VPN—a tool that masks a user’s location and identity online—to appear as an adult or as someone accessing a platform from a different country, bypassing age restrictions.

Screens and social media do carry demonstrated risk to youth, especially for younger children. Pew Research Center’s newest data on teens confirms that more than a third of teenage TikTok users say the platform hurts their sleep, and nearly as many say it hurts their productivity. But the same body of research complicates the case for a blanket ban, particularly for Black teens, who use these platforms in distinct ways and, by some measures, benefit from them differently than other youth.

For example, Black teens are more likely than their white and Hispanic peers to use TikTok, and they consistently stand out across TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat in one respect: turning to these platforms for news and other public information more often than their peers do. Roughly 60% of Black teen TikTok users rely on the platform for information about what’s happening in the world. This pattern does not hold nearly as strongly for white teens. Pew’s research has also found that Black teens are considerably more likely than their peers to say social media makes them feel accepted and supported through hard times. Twenty-six percent say platforms make them feel “a lot more accepted,” compared with 10% of white teens.

These findings should bring new light to more mainstream discussions around young people and screens, especially the diversity that exists among teens more generally. Young people, whose communities and interests are underserved by traditional local news outlets, perceive social media as an information outlet. Social media also serves as a refuge for Black and other marginalized teens for whom “third spaces,” such as community centers, libraries, and after-school programs, have been thinned out by years of budget cuts. Digital platforms have functioned as a primary source of news, a documented source of social support, and one of the few remaining low-cost avenues for community connection available to them.  

Proponents of bans often argue that removing social media access will free young people from harmful content, restore their attention, and return them to in-person connection. For some youth, that may be true, but for a meaningful number of Black youths, research consistently shows higher rates of social media use and a reliance on it for purposes different from others, making the impacts of wholesale policies more complicated for them. Removing access without replacing what these spaces provide may deepen existing inequities in how young people access information, support, and connection.

What youth-centered, equity-oriented policy should include

While Black teens’ use of social media might paint a different picture than mainstream perceptions suggest, it should also inform the approaches of policymakers seeking to address deepening concerns about the effects of technology. First, platform design should be the focus of regulation. Amnesty International has called for enforceable restrictions on specific technical features that its research links to harm: hyper-personalized recommendation systems, autoplay, infinite scroll, and profiling-by-default. This approach targets the mechanisms the evidence actually implicates. California’s Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act moves in a similar direction, regulating algorithmic “addictive feeds” for minors rather than barring accounts outright and offering an early model worth watching as it works through litigation.

Second, a serious long-term plan also requires investment in the physical alternatives that bans assume already exist. The unspoken premise behind banning youth from social media is that teens have somewhere else to go or another low-friction way to find people who share their interests. In much of the U.S., that premise doesn’t always hold true for Black youth. In spring and summer 2026, so-called “teen takeovers”—large groups of Black and brown youth converging on malls and parks after organizing over social media—have prompted curfews and arrests in cities including Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Orlando. At a D.C. city council hearing on the issue, youth advocate organizations argued that such punitive responses criminalize ordinary teenage sociability rather than address its root cause: a shortage of safe, funded spaces for young people to gather. Sustained investment in that infrastructure must be central to any long-term policy plan for youth development.

Finally, governments need to build digital and AI literacies before the next moral panic arrives. The 2026 Common Sense Media census finds that just over a third of kids can correctly identify that AI cannot distinguish true information from false, and that nearly half of families have never had a basic conversation about AI safety at home. Twelve percent of teens say they would consult an AI chatbot before a trusted adult on a question regarding their health or body, a figure that rises to 27% among daily users. Given how deeply Black youth in particular rely on these tools for schoolwork, information, and social support, literacy and regulatory safeguards are critical.

Young people must be central to solutions

Ultimately, this is an argument for embracing the concerns of young people, rather than excluding their experiences in policymaking. A human-centered technology ecosystem should be designed with young people in mind instead of penalizing them for the intentional actions of Big Tech companies. No country has yet built that ecosystem in full. The European Union’s forthcoming Digital Fairness Act is expected to regulate addictive design patterns, personalization practices, and manipulative interface choices directly, rather than restricting who may use a platform at all. In the U.S., Vermont’s Age-Appropriate Design Code goes further than most other states: It bars surveillance-driven personalized feeds and compulsive-use design for minors without blocking access outright, a model that asserts that protection and access are not in tension. Sonia Livingstone, who directs the London School of Economics’ Digital Futures for Children centre, put the underlying failure plainly: A ban, she has argued, is “an admission of failure that we cannot regulate companies, so we can only restrict children.” Neither the EU’s proposal nor Vermont’s law has been fully tested yet, and both will likely face the same legal and enforcement pressures.

However, design regulation alone will not build the necessary ecosystem. The structural forces that shape a young person’s digital life rarely stop at the screen, and the online and offline environments youth move through are interconnected policy domains. These environments are experienced continuously, and a young person underserved in online environments is typically underserved in the infrastructure of offline environments.

To ensure that young people will be protected from the harms of excessive social media use, a long-term plan must adhere two tenets: Regulate the technical mechanisms that make platforms exploitative while also rebuilding physical infrastructure, from community centers to school-based support, that help young people thrive. Bans generate headlines because they look like decisive action. However, action aimed at the wrong lever redistributes the cost onto teens who have the least say and even fewer alternatives for constructive activities. For Black youth, this is increasingly important and should be central to this policy conversation.