Charged Affairs

By Saul Levene | June 29, 2026 | Photo Credit: Philipp Katzenberger

Protecting society from addictive tech requires more courage than banning under-16s.

If you want to understand why social media will remain addictive and exploitative despite Britain’s newly proposed ban for under-16s, look no further than ‘Digital Minimalism’, a Reddit forum dedicated to sharing stories about people fighting their social media addictions. Over 168K visit each week.

You will see “detox” kits composed of dumb-phones, scrubbed of social media; handheld gaming devices; notepads, and believe it or not, real analogue books. There are stories about people overcoming “doom-scrolling”, spending time with their families and working on their goals. The understanding that these technologies have harmed more than enriched modern life is ubiquitous.

This is bizarre. No group was ever dedicated to people resisting the type-writer, or smashing the influence of Microsoft Excel. Thousands of adults are voluntarily spending time, energy and money trying to escape what they see as the harmful influence of devices they already own. People label themselves as ‘addicts’ and exchange advice for living in an ‘older’ world as well as how to balance relationships with their decision to abstain from tech. Some even measure success by time away from social media.

Although Digital Minimalism attracts a particular kind of user, the existence of communities such as this suggests that social media’s harms are not confined to adolescents. Many adults increasingly describe themselves as trapped by products designed to capture attention at any cost. If that is true, then an under-16s ban addresses only the symptom rather than the disease. 

Age bans focus on consumers rather than reforming the platforms themselves. If policymakers genuinely believe that social media is an addictive and harmful influence on childhood, then more should be done than simply banning users until they are deemed to be old enough. If millions of adults struggle to regulate their own use, the problem cannot simply be one of childhood immaturity. It is a product-design problem. 

Supporters of a ban would be right to say that children have reduced capacity to resist addictive features and therefore deserve additional protection. It is now common knowledge that tech companies target children in order to create users that remain on their platforms for longer.  However, if we acknowledge that this technology is genuinely addictive, then an age ban merely pushes off problems that really affect everyone. Comparisons to cigarettes and alcohol are not perfect analogies (nicotine is probably more addictive than scrolling, although there are alarming similarities), but not many people would argue against health warnings for drinking, or about widespread education about the ill-effects of smoking. Similar health warnings could be provided on digital platforms, or schools could teach about how addictive starting that TikTok account can be.

Importantly, although banning under-16s seems to land a blow to social media companies by impacting their user-base, Britain is proposing handing them more power and responsibility to handle the identity documents necessary to verify age. Do we want a world where messaging an old school friend requires a scan of a passport, or facial recognition? Do we want all our identity documents handled by Meta, TikTok and the like, with all the vulnerabilities and invasion of privacy that entails? Yet, this discussion entirely leaves the problem of social media’s addictive features completely untouched.

As a start, policymakers should legislate to remove addictive features like the infinite scroll, push notifications, autoplay, and usage streaks. Government-funded research should be conducted into how we can make social media less harmful to users. Good ideas already abound. For those concerned about what social media ‘echo chambers’ are doing to democracy, there is the suggestion of introducing misinformation warning labels, or introducing ‘opposing views’ into users’ social media for the sake of media balance. 

In general, policymakers should focus on regulating addictive design features rather than regulating users. Age bans miss the point, and could just delay the inevitable reckoning that every adult with a smartphone knows as well as the members of ‘Digital Minimalism’. Much like parents who ban their children from eating sweet treats, age bans could simply increase the psychological salience of social media as a ‘forbidden fruit’. A generation of children without any prior knowledge of how to keep themselves safe online could prove especially vulnerable to scammers, or find themselves just as addicted at the age of 16, rather than a year earlier. 

Children will not be spared the realities of social media forever. They will eventually learn what the rest of us already have: this is not a phase to grow out of. It is a system we all now have to live with.