The UK government has launched a consultation on introducing an Australian-style ban on social media for under-16s. The proposal is framed as a bold response to rising concerns about young people’s mental health, online abuse and exposure to harmful content.

At first glance, a ban sounds straightforward: keep children away from platforms that can cause harm. But as someone who has spent years researching young people’s digital lives, relationships and wellbeing, I believe that a blanket ban risks misunderstanding both the problem and the solution.

My research with teenagers consistently shows that the harms young people experience online are not separate from the harms they face offline. Bullying, racism, sexism, coercion, exclusion and body image pressures all pre-date social media. Digital platforms can amplify these problems, but they do not create them from scratch.

In focus groups I conducted with teenagers and research I carried out with young people during the pandemic, participants described online life as an extension of school corridors, peer groups and local communities. This is what scholars increasingly call a “post-digital” reality. Young people do not experience online and offline as separate worlds, but as a single, interconnected continuum.

If harms are socially rooted, then technical restrictions alone are unlikely to solve them. A ban treats social media as the problem, rather than asking deeper questions about why certain behaviours – harassment, shaming, misogyny, exploitation – occur in the first place.

We also need to ask why digital........

© The Conversation