The World Keeps Banning Kids From Social Media. The Evidence Says It Is Not Working.

On Saturday, October 10, Turkiye became the latest country to wall its children off from social media. New regulations bar anyone under 15 from the platforms outright, and require companies to build separate, stripped-down "differentiated" services for 15- to 17-year-olds: private accounts, no contact syncing, no autoplay, no endless scroll, screenshots blocked. Age will be verified through the government's online portal, and existing unverified accounts have until March 31, 2027 to register. The move follows social media legislation passed by the Turkish Parliament in April, and Minister of Family and Social Services Mahinur Ozdemir Goktas framed it as a "new phase" in the country's child safety efforts.

Turkiye is not an outlier. It is the latest recruit in the fastest-spreading policy experiment in tech history. Australia pioneered the under-16 ban in December 2025. Indonesia has since barred under-16s from high-risk platforms. On October 8, the Philippine Senate passed the SMART KIDS Act by 16 votes to 1, banning under-18s from platforms deemed high-risk. The EU has its Kids Act proposal, California has AB 1709, and the United Kingdom, France, Greece, New Zealand, Malaysia, Canada, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan have all introduced or proposed similar restrictions.

The world's first results are in, and they are brutal

Australia gave the world a free trial run of the ban model, and the data is now arriving. In the first weeks, platforms removed or deactivated roughly 4.7 million under-16 accounts, a number that looked impressive until you remembered how easy it is to make a new account. A survey by Australia's eSafety Commissioner, conducted about three months after the ban, found that nearly 86 percent of surveyed children used at least one restricted platform before the law, and more than 81 percent still did afterward. Daily usage barely moved, from roughly 60 percent to 58 percent. A study reported by Reuters in June found 85 percent of 12- to 15-year-olds were still on social media. And a National Bureau of Economic Research survey found only 5 percent of 14- and 15-year-olds were actually complying six months in.

How? The old-fashioned way. Kids simply declared themselves over 16, or submitted selfies that age-verification systems waved through without question. Australia's law penalizes platforms (fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars, with the government now proposing to double that to 99 million), not users, so there was never a real cost to lying. eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has spent months threatening court action against the biggest platforms for failing to take "reasonable steps," which tells you everything about how enforcement is going.

Bans punish the kids. The platforms barely notice.

The Philippine debate produced the sharpest moral argument against the ban model. The Child Rights Network, responding to the Senate's vote for the SMART KIDS Act, said: "This is not protection. It is punishment. Children should not be punished for the failure of adults to keep them safe." Senator Risa Hontiveros, the lone senator to vote no, raised concerns about cutting children off from information and digital opportunities. The network's sharper point: blanket bans let platforms and offenders evade the deeper questions of accountability. If the product is the harm, removing the child is victim-blaming at scale.

The demand for bans is real, but it is not quite what it looks like. A YouGov poll in June 2026 found that 77 percent of British parents support an under-16 ban, yet in the same poll, 82 percent of parents believed social media harms children in general while only 38 percent observed those harms in their own children. Parents want the anxiety managed more than they want the product changed. Bans deliver that politically. They change almost nothing practically.

"Our Kids Act is reversing the burden of proof, it is for platforms to show they are safe by design." Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission President

The half of Turkiye's law that might actually matter

Buried inside Turkiye's announcement is a much more interesting idea than the ban. The "differentiated" services for 15- to 17-year-olds read like product-design regulation: no endless scroll, no autoplay, private accounts by default, no contact syncing, no screenshots. That is not prohibition. That is redesigning the machine so it stops exploiting teenage attention in the first place.

This is where the serious policy is heading. California's AB 1709 would prohibit platforms from serving under-16s the addictive features (personalized feeds, autoplay, infinite scroll) while still letting them keep accounts. The EU Kids Act goes further, putting the burden on platforms to prove their services are safe by design or lose access to minors entirely. "Our Kids Act is reversing the burden of proof," Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said. "It is for platforms to show they are safe by design."

This distinction is the whole ballgame. Bans try to identify and exclude millions of teenagers, a problem Australia's data shows is technically unwinnable. Design obligations regulate the product, which is exactly what companies are built to comply with. You do not need to know a user's birthday to stop infinite scroll.

The verdict

Ten months of Australia's experiment has been the largest child-safety test ever run, and the result is not ambiguous. The ban removed accounts but not children. Researchers at the Cato Institute put it elegantly: an easily circumvented ban works only if adherence crosses a tipping point that makes quitting self-reinforcing. Australia never got near it, so adherence decayed.

None of this means doing nothing. The harms are real, and the next generation of regulation should take them seriously. But the evidence now points away from prohibition and toward design. Strip the addictive machinery out of the product, force companies to prove their services are safe by default, and you get child safety that does not depend on a teenager's honesty about their birthday. The world keeps banning kids from the platforms. It should be fixing the platforms instead.