Jonathan Haidt: Why the World Is Drawing a Line on Social Media for Kids
Jonathan Haidt has spent the last weeks pressing political leaders to raise the minimum age to 16 for opening or maintaining social media accounts. What was once a slow-moving policy debate has turned fast-moving: several countries have acted or signaled they will, and advocates say a new consensus is forming about how childhood should be protected online.
Haidt’s 16-year proposal and the international tour
Haidt made the case for a 16-year minimum during a 12-day trip that took him to Davos, London and Brussels. He framed the policy as the second of four norms aimed at protecting childhood, drawn from his recent book that argues the digital rewiring of young lives has fueled a mental-health crisis. In private meetings with national and regional leaders, he emphasized delaying unrestricted social access until teenagers are older and more developmentally prepared.
Momentum: a cascading set of policy moves
Momentum has accelerated. Some countries he engaged with have already taken decisive steps; others indicated they are likely to follow. In the weeks immediately preceding and following his travel, several nations announced plans or enacted laws that raise the bar for minors' online registration. One country enacted the world’s first nationwide age limit requiring users to be 16 to open or maintain accounts and placed enforcement responsibility on the services themselves. Additional governments have since signaled similar changes.
Why change is happening so quickly
Haidt and others point to a social tipping-point dynamic: when concerns move from private unease to public consensus, policy shifts can happen rapidly. The psychologist Steven Pinker has described how once everyone recognizes that others also recognize a problem, coordinated action becomes feasible. That explanation helps make sense of how decades of steady social-media adoption can suddenly produce a string of legal changes within weeks.
Policy trade-offs and critiques
Not everyone agrees on the right tools. Some policy experts urge caution, warning that measures meant to protect children can drift into broader controls on speech or sweep up legitimate expression. Past legislative efforts in some countries became entangled with provisions that critics considered risky for civil liberties, generating resistance that delayed reform. Advocates for a narrowly defined child-safety approach argue that a focused law — one that simply raises the minimum age and requires services to enforce it — could avoid those pitfalls and attract broad political support.
Implementation challenges ahead
Even with political will, technical and enforcement questions remain. Age verification at scale is tricky: robust checks can be invasive or unreliable, while lax systems are easy to bypass. Placing enforcement duties on service operators raises legal and logistical issues, and may invite legal challenges or push younger users toward less-regulated corners of the internet. Policymakers must weigh privacy, feasibility and the risk that hard limits could drive teens to alternative, harder-to-monitor channels.
What comes next
Advocates plan to capitalize on recent momentum and press for clear, child-focused laws that set a minimum age of 16 for social accounts. Opponents will continue to flag free-speech and enforcement concerns. The coming months are likely to see more governments debate narrow, targeted bills and pilot enforcement models. For now, the debate has moved from academic to political: an uneasy consensus about the harms social networks can pose for children appears to be turning into concrete policy action.
Whether these measures will reduce harm without creating new problems depends on how they are written and enforced. Haidt and others argue that delaying social-media exposure until later adolescence is a simple, protective baseline. Lawmakers will soon test how that baseline translates into law, technology and everyday practice.
