OPINION | The great social media reckoning

social media

In March 2024, when social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published The Anxious Generation, he proposed something so scandalous that it briefly qualified as a dinner-table joke in Silicon Valley: keep children off social media until the age of 16 and make tech companies responsible for enforcing it.

The response was predictable. The tech industry reacted the way a teenager reacts when asked to surrender their phone: with disbelief, mild outrage, and several carefully worded blog posts about “digital empowerment”. Libertarian critics called it paternalistic. Others argued the evidence was not strong enough. And somewhere amid the noise, policymakers nodded politely while quietly filing the idea under “politically radioactive”.

Barely two years later, Haidt’s supposedly radical suggestion has marched straight into the global policy mainstream. Political scientists would describe this as a spectacular shift in the Overton Window, the range of ideas considered politically acceptable at any given time.

Ideas outside the window are usually treated like a distant cousin at a wedding: acknowledged politely but never invited to the main table. But when conditions change, the window can slide rapidly, dragging yesterday’s “unthinkable” proposal into today’s legislative agenda.

That is precisely what has happened with children and social media.

The Global Policy Floodgates Have Opened

Australia led the charge by banning social media for children under 16 in late 2025, placing enforcement responsibility squarely on platforms rather than parents.

In France, legislation now bans social media for children under 15. Denmark has secured cross-party backing for a similar measure expected to become law soon. Spain, Germany, Malaysia, Slovenia, Italy and Greece are all experimenting with the idea.

In the United States, Virginia has already limited social media use for those under 16 to one hour per day unless parents opt in.

Governments now appear to be arguing mainly about exactly how strict the guardrails should be.

Several forces collided to produce this unusually rapid policy reversal. The proof is also visible in India, where two forward-looking states—Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka—are considering banning social media for those under 16.

When Data Became Hard to Ignore

First, the data became difficult to ignore.

Haidt and others highlighted a disturbing pattern: since the early 2010s—precisely when smartphones and social media became ubiquitous—rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide among teenagers have risen sharply across developed countries.

Different cultures, different school systems, different diets… yet the same mental-health trend.

Haidt’s memorable summary was devastatingly simple: society over-protected children in the physical world and under-protected them in the digital one.

Stories That Shift Policy

Second, statistics were joined by stories.

Australia’s legislation reportedly gained momentum after a grieving mother wrote to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese describing the suicide of her 12-year-old daughter following relentless social media bullying.

At the United Nations General Assembly in 2025, another parent’s speech about “death by bullying enabled by social media” resonated globally.

Policymakers claim to love data, but in truth they fear narratives.

The Collective-Action Problem

Third, the collective-action trap finally became obvious.

Parents everywhere discovered the same uncomfortable truth: trying to keep your child off social media while every other child remains online is roughly equivalent to banning sugar at home while the neighbourhood opens a chocolate factory.

Haidt’s solution—shift enforcement responsibility to platforms—breaks that trap. When companies must verify age and enforce limits, individual parents are no longer fighting a trillion-dollar algorithmic army alone.

Fourth, early experiments produced encouraging signals. A phone-free school initiative in Arkansas reported dramatic reductions in aggression and disciplinary incidents within a year.

Politicians, like investors, love “pilot results” that make bold policy feel slightly less terrifying.

What This Means for India

Which brings us, inevitably, to India, a nation that can regulate onions, cricket leagues and drone photography with remarkable enthusiasm but largely treats the digital lives of children as a kind of technological wilderness.

India has over 250 million school-age children and one of the world’s fastest-growing smartphone populations.

If the global evidence is even partially correct, the country may be quietly incubating the largest youth mental-health experiment in human history… without ethics approval.

A few strategic lessons emerge from the global shift:

1. Treat the issue as infrastructure, not morality. Debating whether teenagers “should” use social media misses the point. Platforms are engineered systems optimised for engagement. Policymaking must focus on architecture—age verification, algorithmic design and platform accountability.

2. Shift enforcement to companies.

Expecting Indian parents to police addictive global platforms is unrealistic. Regulation must target firms such as Meta Platforms (Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp), ByteDance and Snap rather than individual households.

3. Pilot aggressively.

India excels at policy pilots—from digital payments to vaccine logistics. Phone-free school experiments across a few states could generate local evidence and political momentum.

4. Anticipate the Overton shift.

Today the idea may sound politically inconvenient. Tomorrow it may become inevitable. Governments that move early will shape the rules; those that move late will merely inherit them.

The Burden of Proof Has Flipped

Perhaps the most fascinating change is where the burden of proof now lies.

Two years ago, critics demanded that reformers prove social media was harmful. Today the question has flipped: tech companies must explain why children should continue to have unrestricted access to systems deliberately designed to maximise attention and engagement.

That reversal is the clearest sign that the Overton Window has moved.

Haidt did not create this movement alone. Millions of anxious parents, teachers and clinicians supplied the urgency. But he gave the problem a language—and a set of practical proposals.

And now politicians are discovering a basic truth that parents already understood instinctively: when you hand children’s attention, identity and self-worth to engagement-optimising algorithms, you should not be surprised if the results look less like education and more like addiction.

The real policy question is whether governments will build safety protocols before an entire generation grows up inside the algorithmic playground.

(Rita McGrath is professor at Columbia Business School and founder of Valize, and M Muneer is Fortune-500 advisor, startup investor and Co-Founder of the non-profit Medici Institute for Innovation. X: @MuneerMuh.)

Views are personal, and do not represent the stance of this publication.