Banning young people from social media is easy. Making the ban work is far less so

The European Commission has presented the EU Kids’ Act. Children will be able to set up their own accounts from the age of fifteen, and have shared accounts with their parents at thirteen and fourteen, whilst services for children under thirteen would remain under adult supervision. Social media, video platforms, games and chatbots fall within the scope of the legislation, although the exact scope of the restrictions is not yet clear. The final outcome will also depend on Parliament. Australia remains the only democratic country with a comprehensive national law already in force; Indonesia and Malaysia have introduced restrictions via regulations.

In Europe, the most significant case is that of France. Emmanuel Macron has recently returned to the issue, with the intention of making the separation of teenagers from their mobile phones one of the defining features of the final phase of his presidency. On 24 August, Law 2026-813 extended the mobile phone ban – in force since 2018 in primary and lower secondary schools – to upper secondary schools, giving schools just seven days’ notice before the new term began. Headteachers and trade unions immediately stated that they would not be able to comply, and not because of resistance from the pupils. Taking away pupils’ individual screens means creating a collective one, made up of noticeboards, monitors, badges and administrative staff; and it is not enough to tell them to check everything the night before, because some of the information changes during the day. Since the law allows school regulations to authorise necessary uses – in the library or canteen – every school has adopted pragmatic solutions, tailored to its own physical and educational structure, and none of them envisage the complete elimination of smartphones. A ban riddled with exceptions soon ceases to be a ban, and indeed, no impact on learning has been recorded.

In Italy, the ban applies up to the third year of middle school from the 2024–25 academic year onwards and, following the Valditara circular of June 2025, has been extended to secondary schools, covering the entire school day and even for educational purposes. For twenty years, policymakers have equated innovation with the purchase of equipment. In Italy, the 2015 National Digital Schools Plan allocated around 1.1 billion for broadband, tablets and electronic registers; the pandemic funded smart classrooms and the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) funded interactive screens. The state was buying hardware. Schools, however, have become adept at communicating thanks to electronic registers, platforms, notifications and class groups – that is, thanks to a device that no local authority had to purchase or maintain, as it was already in the pupil’s pocket and paid for by the family. A patchy digitalisation, as distance learning has shown, achieved by shifting the burden of devices, data usage and part of the organisational responsibility onto families. The ban undermines this. It would be harder to say ‘let’s ban mobile phones’ if the phrase were translated into what it actually means, namely ‘let’s de-digitalise the school’. Personal devices are the channel through which pupils receive messages whilst the teacher is speaking, and they are also the channel for information about what is happening at school. As always, benefits and costs play a game of hide-and-seek: if you close that channel, you have to open another one that is just as visible.

The minister speaks of consensus and of schools that have been ‘excellent’ at managing the situation. Why haven’t we seen the same kind of chaos as in France? Perhaps because the electronic register is mainly consulted by parents. Perhaps because schools have quietly set up alternative channels, at a cost that nobody has monitored. Perhaps because its implementation depends on the discretion of individual teachers.

In Australia, the initial findings of the eSafety Commissioner’s assessment, published on 31 July and covering a three-month period, are modest. The proportion of under-16s with an account has fallen from 52.4 per cent to 42.1 per cent, but the proportion of those who still use the platforms has only fallen from 85.9 per cent to 81.5 per cent, and daily use from 61 per cent to 58 per cent. Well-being, sleep and offline activities remain unchanged; messaging and gaming are on the rise; the proportion of unaware parents has fallen from one in four to one in three. Half of the young people who remained online say they have never been subject to an age verification check. To put pressure on the platforms, the government has doubled the fines and expanded the regulator’s powers of inspection, which looks more like an attempt to make the ban work than proof that it is working. The assessment, which includes surveys, interviews and voluntary smartphone tracking, is well designed, but it is not randomised and relies on self-reported data and a self-selected sample. Three months are not enough: subsequent surveys will be decisive.

Studies on the harm caused, moreover, are reminiscent of the Dodo’s verdict in Alice in Wonderland: ‘Everyone has won and everyone deserves a prize’. This is not a matter of reticence: the causal picture is truly mixed. There are real risks, concentrated in certain types of content, certain functions and among vulnerable individuals, but it has not been proven that smartphones and social media are the main cause of this generation’s psychological crisis. There are few randomised trials: the best-known, published in the American Economic Review in 2020, showed that deactivating Facebook for a month improved well-being to a real but small extent. Small average effects, greater effects in certain minority groups, and possible benefits for others. The most justified measures concern the platforms themselves: no night-time notifications, no autoplay or infinite scrolling, no profiling of minors, private accounts, limits on the recommendation of self-harming content, and data made available to researchers. Age restrictions, on the other hand, are broad in scope, of uncertain effectiveness, and carry risks of users going underground and reduced parental control. Policy-makers are opting for the tobacco model, whilst the evidence points to risks that are distributed very unevenly.

Adults, of course, like the idea of taking away young people’s mobile phones: we didn’t have them at their age, and that must be why they seem more distracted to us – just as every generation has thought of the next, ever since Homer’s Nestor lamented the men of old. Yet the equation of mobile phones with distraction applies just as much to them as it does to us: we get distracted checking WhatsApp on the underground, and we’ve come to expect the odd missed stop. If distraction were the only thing smartphones did, we’d see far fewer of them about.

Banning is not free. Age verification, checks and, above all, reconstructing what the banned tool was doing all incur costs. Only the publicity is free.