Is a (Social Media) Ban a Plan? We Built a Repository to Find Out.
The question has been ricocheting around European policy corridors for over a year. Australia banned social media for under-16s. France, Austria, Spain, Denmark, and Norway are moving in the same direction. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has declared that “parents, not algorithms, should be raising our children.” And in Brussels, the word “ban” has acquired the quality of a policy position in itself: something that sounds decisive even when the evidence for it is genuinely contested.
At information labs, we have been tracking this debate closely. In January, we wrote about the leather-wrapped village and why social media bans miss the point. In February, after attending the Lisbon Council’s high-level working lunch on kids and social media, we published “Of Potatoes and Walls”, examining how a single book became a legislative blueprint across multiple jurisdictions, and why the evidence base for that journey is far thinner than the political momentum suggests. More recently, we took a deep dive in TechPolicy.press into what happened in Australia and the influence of media in the debate.
But writing about contested evidence is only useful if people can see the evidence. So we built a place to put it.
The Repository
The information labs Social Media Ban Repository is a living collection of expert voices, data snapshots, and real-world evidence organised around one central question: is a ban actually a plan?
The page is structured around four interlocking sections.
The first is an Expert Voices section featuring short video statements from researchers, legal scholars, and child rights advocates recorded in their own words, unfiltered. Leanda Barrington-Leach of 5Rights is the first to appear. More will follow. Every two weeks, we will publish a new video capsule from an expert working on these questions. The goal is to make expert opinion accessible beyond the conference room, and to build a searchable archive of practitioner perspectives over time.
The second section is an Evidence Snapshot. This presents six dimensions of the debate: usage, harms, literacy, fundamental rights, circumvention, and mental health impact. Each is anchored by a specific data point. Ninety-six percent of 15-year-olds in the EU were active on social media on a typical weekday in 2022, according to the Joint Research Centre. An international coalition of 438 scientists from 32 countries has called for a pause on age-verification policies, citing the risk of backfire. Seventy-four percent of European teenagers use social media for learning. These numbers do not resolve the debate. They are the starting point for having it honestly.
The third section is Expert Evidence, organised by theme. The six themes are: age-gating as a surveillance trap, the illusion of protection, fundamental rights and privacy, regulating platforms rather than children, the absence of scientific consensus, and the question of whether young people have any voice in decisions that directly affect them. Each theme draws on statements from academics, civil society organisations, and legal scholars across Europe, Australia, Ireland, Germany, Spain, and the United States.
The fourth section is a Case Study on Australia, the world’s first jurisdiction to implement a blanket under-16 social media ban, which took effect on 10 December 2025. Three months in, the numbers are instructive. Around 4.7 million accounts were deactivated. Free VPN downloads surged 300 percent overnight. Alternative app downloads increased 488 percent. Seven in ten children whose accounts were removed before the ban reported still having one on a major platform two months later. One in ten young people contacting Headspace, Australia’s national youth mental health service, cited the ban itself as a contributing factor for seeking support. No fines have been applied. The technology the ban depends on for age assurance has higher error rates precisely for the children closest to the 16-year threshold.
This is not a verdict on whether Australia made the wrong choice. It is evidence about what happened when the choice was made. European policymakers considering equivalent measures should be able to see it, clearly and in one place.
What the Repository Shows
The expert community is broadly sceptical of blanket age-based bans, and the repository reflects that. Every source included takes children’s online safety seriously. That is precisely why so many of them oppose bans as the primary tool.
The question worth asking is not whether children need protection online. It is whether a blunt instrument like a blanket age restriction delivers that protection effectively, proportionately, and without producing harms of its own.
The evidence collected so far points in one direction. We will keep adding to it.
Follow Along
The repository will be updated regularly with new expert video capsules published every two weeks, alongside new data, research, and policy developments as the debate continues in Brussels, Paris, Dublin, and beyond. Visit the repository and subscribe to our LinkedIn newsletter to receive updates as new voices are added.
Written by Caroline De Cock, LL.M., Head of Research
