Countries Seek to Curb Social Media Addiction for Kids
Photo by Danik Prihodko
Countries Seek to Curb Social Media Addiction for Kids: IEEE guidelines prioritize children’s safety and privacy
https://spectrum.ieee.org/countries-seek-to-curb-social-media-addiction-for-kids
Excerpt:
Social media plays a significant, multifaceted role in adolescents’ development, influencing how they communicate, learn, socialize, and express themselves.
The benefits, however, are accompanied by risks that can undermine youngsters’ character as well as their cognitive and social development.
The potential problems include excessive screen time, social media addiction, cyberbullying, misinformation, radicalization, privacy violations, exposure to inappropriate content, sextortion, and doomscrolling.
A recent study published in Nature: Human Behaviour found that adolescents who begin using social media at an early age tend to have significantly lower academic performance. A Mashable article highlights additional issues including effects on mental health, self-harm, addiction to social media, compulsive, repetitive checking, and exposure to pornography and violent material.
Protecting minors has largely fallen to parents, schools, and self-regulation by some social media providers.
But that approach has proven ineffective and inadequate, so some governments and policymakers have stepped in and placed responsibility on social media providers.
Cited: “IEEE Senior Member Katina Michael, professor at the University of Sydney business school and founding editor in chief of IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society, shared her perspective: “Social media bans may offer a short-term response to growing concerns, but they are not a long-term solution,” she says. “IEEE 2089.1-2024 advocates for socio-technical systems that are designed to promote human well-being, safety, and flourishing. Rather than relying on prohibition alone, we should focus on better design, building digital platforms that embed ethics, accountability, transparency, and human values from the outset.”"
My stance in general: As countries around the world introduce social media bans for young people, IEEE 2089.2021 reminds us that sustainable solutions lie not in restricting access alone, but in designing socio-technical systems that place human well-being, safety, and flourishing at their core. Bans may provide temporary protection, but they do little to address the underlying platform architectures, algorithms, and engagement models that contribute to harm. The long-term solution is better design—embedding ethics, accountability, transparency, and human values into digital technologies from the outset so that online environments are safe by design rather than safe by prohibition.