Some jurisdictions in the Western world have—and closer ones are considering—banned social media for children. It's a popular scapegoat for mental health crises and violence with much deeper roots, like videogames were around the time of Columbine. I was a teenager then. I wasn't considered part of the demographics considered vulnerable to negative influences that could make me plan a massacre on school grounds. I was a Canadian, and not a boy, and I didn't wear trenchcoats. I had my own problems with mental illness and social rejection, but I had more positive ways of dealing with it—in large part by socializing on the internet.
The internet in the 90s was different. Web 1.0 didn't have as many users. It wasn't yet a fundamental utility in every household the way phones (landlines, that is) were. But there were still some sites to chat on and make friends, and instant messenger apps like ICQ to build up lists of contacts and spend hours talking to people like never before. (Eh Oh!)
When I was fourteen I found a low-tech chat site some random guy made for Nirvana fans, and I met some people there who had an impact on me at the time. Most of them were also teenagers, including a girl in Regina, with whom I met up at a shopping mall excursion on a school band trip. She was able to make online girlfriends, also teenagers from places like California, giving her a chance to explore being gay without the risk of getting caught in public when it wasn't safe. She was the first of dozens of people I've met in person after meeting online, and arranging this helped me develop a sense of what was safe and wise in doing so, both in logistics and elements present in the social relationship that make a person trustworthy.
One of the other people I got to know on that site was a guy from North Carolina. He was 19, a few years older than me. I considered him like a brother to admire. He was an ironic Spice Girls fan and had dolls of them. He was also in a band, and developing a schtick of performing in boxer shorts with duct tape on his nipples. This was before digital photography was an attainable consumer choice, and personal scanners were scarce, so when I said I wanted to see pictures he had to send them in the mail. He said he would, but also had a serious conversation with me: while this interaction was benign and photos he was sending were appropriate enough to be accepted on network TV, in a general sense I should be careful; the age difference between us was a red flag, and I generally shouldn't trust men who are actively offering me things like this. Men are shit, he told me, and I deserve a safer environment and experience online, so I should be cautious and slow to trust people who seem too enthusiastic about the prospect of access to me socially. Our interactions were about the substance of getting to know each other for no further reason but to have someone to chat with. We developed enough trust to talk on the phone, using prepaid long distance cards I could buy to make US calls that didn't show up on my parents' monthly bill. It was an exciting experience to get to know actual human beings that far away that I could find by my own exploration, and he helped shape a sense of what my responsibilities would be towards younger users in the future: there will be creeps, but they still have me.
Fast forward to the internet today, quite a different place from its wilderness era but still a space of social infrastructure that young people will want to explore. I don't actively look for online environments geared towards younger people. I'm online for myself and my own (extremely dated, apparently) elder millennial interests. But I also don't put "Minors DNI" or the 🔞 emoji on my profiles like some people do. What I post isn't usually sexually explicit, and what I do talk about is usually in the abstract and things that young people would benefit from being aware of in case their sex ed exposure has terribly failed. I promote fat acceptance, trans rights, personal exploration, and other things I did or would have benefitted from at that age, and, perhaps of understated importance, I do that on non-corporate social media that does not prey upon users' data for profitable marketing with no moral values, like the lo-fi Nirvana fan chat room I joined in 1997.
That is the more dangerous factor. Social media sites with profit at the core make users develop bad habits on purpose, looking at harmful content with no end so they can be advertised to and buy questionable things. Harassment is only an afterthought issue—after a kid has died by suicide or one of many in a mass shooting—because it's not what it's being used for that matters to the corporation that owns the app or site. That is what we've let the internet become, and it's unhealthy for everyone, not just kids.
The better solution, then, is to make the internet better. The Nirvana fan chat room didn't require accounts to log in with personal information to harvest. It was a hobby site set up with good intentions, for people to find as a process of discovering the internet as they discovered themselves. At scale this may be a challenge, but a social internet experience safe for minors is more important than no social internet experience at all. We just need enough people to look after them—to teach them, look out for them, care about them—and social media that's not about profit. Applying a ban on who can use it but letting those online environments thrive and grow as a business anyway does not solve anything; it just shifts the blame without any regard for onto whom. Young people will get around these bans; they're clever creatures, and there are always some who find a way to get past age restrictions if only for the thrill of breaking the rules. Having a half-assed law written down without regard for broader problems is just a cop-out to say the kids are the problem, and not the society that's supposed to help them grow and learn. What are we preparing kids for with this approach? It's an excuse to carry on with a world where nobody really cares about each other, or if they want to care then they risk legal consequences. For online spaces to be safe for kids, they need to be safe for adults to set a good example. Banning use will not create that environment, and important lessons may not be taught for a lasting impact on a positive life for people who may learn better in a digital way. This approach isn't only ineffective; it's giving up on future generations.