Politicians Who Couldn't Touch Big Tech Went After the Kids Instead
Social media bans targeting teenagers under 16 have spread to more than 16 countries simultaneously — beginning with Australia's landmark December 2025 legislation — despite a complete absence of peer-reviewed experiments demonstrating their effectiveness for this age group. A study published in Frontiers in Developmental Psychology in May 2026 found not a single controlled trial examining social media restrictions for users under 16, and 40 percent of existing adult-focused studies reported harmful outcomes, including increased loneliness and reduced life satisfaction, from platform restrictions. Australia's six-month enforcement record is strikingly bleak: 78 percent of banned teenagers continue accessing Instagram and TikTok via VPNs, borrowed parental Face IDs, and freshly created accounts. Rather than regulating the addictive platform design — infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic dopamine loops — engineered by Big Tech, these bans expel the very victims of that design from the platforms while leaving the machinery completely intact. This article argues that the synchronized global wave of teen social media legislation is the cheapest form of political self-congratulation available to lawmakers unwilling to confront the trillion-dollar industry actually responsible for the harm.