The next morning at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno starts with our panel on the social media bans of young people in Australia and beyond, and our first speaker is the fabulous Sonia Livingstone, who focusses on the question of children’s rights. Bans of children from social media platforms are ultimately against children’s rights: they ban children rather than banning technologies (and in fact the UK government has now proposed a nightly curfew for children, too).
Such bans started with the one in Australia, but similar initiatives are also away across many European nations, as well as countries around the world; they respond to the sense that ‘something must be done’, political opportunism, grassroots parents’ movements, the concerns of a body of children’s and public health researchers, but also act against the collective expertise of researchers investigating children’s uses of technologies. This is a painful moment, which extends previous debates around children’s screentime and also follows largely failed platform self-regulation experiments – as well as the heightened screentime moment of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Child rights are well established at the international level: the UN has its Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been ratified by all countries except the United States. Social media bans fail to uphold these rights; Prime Ministers and Presidents have railed against social media platforms without paying any attention to the experts, while the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and other human rights bodies have spoken out against this infringement on children’s rights.
Instead, what is necessary is to consult children in developing any policies and actions around use of social media by children and young people; this was not done ahead of most ban initiatives, but projects such as EU Kids Online have done so extensively and found that bans are wholly inappropriate.
What are the alternatives, then? The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has called for states to act in children’s best interests, and this can inform transformations and legal challenges which will push for age-appropriate regulation of platforms so they are redesigned to reduce problematic aspects without banning children from them; and which will sue major platforms in order to force them to redesign their services in more age-appropriate ways.
What is necessary is this: define the scope of the impact assessment; gather the required information and expertise from all stakeholders, including children; assess actual and potential impacts on children’s rights and appropriate actions to mitigate adverse impacts; and communicate the results publicly, in child-friendly language, and ensure regular monitoring and evaluation.
