Social media age bans won’t make children safer; requiring social-media platforms to prove the safety of their products will. 

As the European Union considers how to protect and empower young people in a digital world, it must resist the urge to enact a ban on social media for young people. A more effective strategy would be to hold tech companies to product-liability standards that force them to remove addictive features. This happens with most other industries.

When I joined Facebook in 2009, I believed in the mission that founder Mark Zuckerberg espoused: to connect and empower people around the world. We all know how that turned out. Meta, now the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is focused on generating as much engagement as possible, which has led to platforms that addict, enrage, misinform and polarise users.

I worked at Facebook for 15 years before becoming a whistleblower. I was in the rooms where smart people built and marketed the features that encourage compulsive use – infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic feeds. These design choices were made deliberately, with the goal of maximising profit above all else.

Fortunately, the world is waking up to the harms caused by social media, especially to young people. In early July, an independent panel presented its final report on how the European Union can keep children safe online to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, with a legislative proposal expected after the summer.

While several EU countries plan to adopt a blanket age ban, the report advocates banning the toxic design features directly – a strategy that both scientific........

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