Of Potatoes and Walls: A Generation Muted by Good Intentions
Last week, I found myself sitting around a table at the Lisbon Council, surrounded by policymakers, platform executives, children’s rights advocates and researchers, all wrestling with one question that has become the rallying cry of European digital policy: should we ban children from social media? It is a question that sounds decisive. Even bold. But as the conversation unfolded, a familiar album kept playing in my head.
The event, a High-Level Working Lunch titled ‘To Ban or Not To Ban: What Scientific Evidence and Practice Teach Us on Kids and Social Media’, came at a moment when the political momentum behind age-based social media bans is accelerating across the globe. Australia’s ban for under-16s took effect in December 2025. France has proposed its own version for under-15s. Spain, Denmark, and Norway are all moving in the same direction. And European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has declared that “parents, not algorithms, should be raising our children,” announcing a presidential expert panel to define Europe’s approach.
It all feels decisive. Bold. Common sense, even. But common sense is not the same as good policy. As I sat at that table listening to Professor Amanda Third from Western Sydney University, who advises the Australian government on the impact of the very ban everyone is now trying to copy, I could not shake a nagging thought. We have seen this before. Or rather, we have heard it. The album is The Wall by Pink Floyd.
“All in All, It Is Just Another Brick in the Wall”
Pink Floyd’s The Wall tells the story of a man so damaged by the institutions meant to protect him (school, family, society) that he builds an emotional wall around himself, brick by brick, until he is completely isolated. The cruel irony is that each brick was laid with good intentions, or at least with the rhetoric of good intentions. “We don’t need no education” is not really an anti-education anthem; it is a howl against a system that claims to care for children while treating them as products to be moulded rather than people to be heard.
I kept returning to that image during the roundtable. Because what we are watching unfold in global digital policy has a similar quality: a well-intentioned wall being built around children, brick by legislative brick, by adults who are convinced they are protecting them while rarely bothering to ask the children what they actually think.
The Book That Became a Blueprint
To understand how we got here, you need to understand the extraordinary influence of a single book. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, published in March 2024, has become arguably the most politically consequential book of the decade. It spent over 73 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, sold more than two million copies worldwide, and was named one of Barack Obama’s favourite books of 2024.
Its thesis is seductively simple: the transition from a “play-based” to a “phone-based” childhood has rewired adolescent brains and caused an epidemic of mental illness. The solution? No smartphones before 14, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and more unsupervised outdoor play.
The book did not just shape the conversation. It became the conversation. And its journey from bedside table to statute book is remarkably direct. South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas has publicly stated that his wife read the book and told him: “You better bloody do something about this.” He then had a video call with Haidt, commissioned a 267-page legislative proposal, and the momentum cascaded to the federal level. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called social media“ a scourge” and pushed legislation through Parliament in just six days. In the UK, Health Secretary Wes Streeting invited Haidt to address government officials directly.
This is the legislative equivalent of rewriting your national building code because your spouse read a compelling book about architecture over the weekend. The instinct is understandable. The process is alarming.
The Potato Problem
Here is where it gets uncomfortable for the ban enthusiasts. Haidt’s narrative is powerful, but his evidence base is, to put it charitably, contested. And “contested” might be generous.
The most prominent scientific critique came from Candice Odgers, professor of psychological science at UC Irvine, in a review published in Nature. Her assessment was blunt: the book’s central claim that digital technologies are rewiring children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness “is not supported by science.” She noted that when individual-level studies do find associations, they more often suggest that young people who already have mental health problems use platforms more. That is reverse causation, not the direction Haidt claims.
Andrew Przybylski of the Oxford Internet Institute, one of the field’s most rigorous methodologists, told Platformer: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Right now, I’d argue he does not have that.” His landmark 2019 study with Amy Orben, published in Nature Human Behaviour and analysing over 355,000 individuals, found that digital technology use explains at most 0.4% of the variation in adolescent wellbeing. To put that in perspective, that is roughly equivalent to the negative association of eating potatoes or wearing glasses. We propose to hence refer to this as the potato effect: if social media were truly rewiring the brains of an entire generation, you would expect the signal in the data to be significantly louder than “roughly as harmful as a baked potato.”
Haidt himself acknowledged the tension to Science editor Holden Thorp, admitting he is “promoting a social change program before the scientific community has reached full agreement.” That is an extraordinary admission for someone whose book has become the primary legislative blueprint for multiple national governments.
Christopher Ferguson of Stetson University, who reviewed the book before publication and advised Haidt not to publish it, pointed out an inconvenient fact: teens today are less violent, smoke less, and use fewer drugs than previous generations, all during the smartphone age. U.S. suicide rate increases span nearly every age group, undermining the claim that smartphones uniquely harmed teenagers. And European suicide rates fell 17% between 2012 and 2021 despite equivalent smartphone penetration.
The Perverse Incentive
Back at the Lisbon Council, one of the most striking contributions came from Professor Third, who raised a concern that should give every policymaker pause. If platforms are legally absolved of responsibility for hosting children (because children are officially banned) they may scale back their safety-by-design efforts entirely. Why invest in protecting minors if, legally speaking, there are no minors on your platform?
This is the perverse incentive at the heart of the ban model. It is the equivalent of banning swimming lessons and then being surprised when children cannot swim. The wall does not make the water safer. It just means children who fall in have fewer tools to cope.
The evidence from Australia’s early implementation bears this out. In the initial rollout, 4.7 million accounts were removed across covered platforms. But teens quickly migrated to alternatives like Lemon8 and Yope, used VPNs, or borrowed older siblings’ credentials. Children’s rights organisations warn that bans may drive children into darker, unregulated corners of the internet where predators operate with fewer safeguards.
Meanwhile, ReachOut, Australia’s leading youth mental health service, found that 73% of young people who accessed mental health support did so through social media. For LGBTQ+ youth, the numbers are even starker: organisation Minus18 found that 95.7% of LGBTQIA+ youth relied on social media for friends and emotional support, with 82% saying the ban would leave them more disconnected. In a landmark joint statement, Beyond Blue, Headspace, ReachOut, and the Black Dog Institute (Australia’s peak mental health organisations) collectively opposed the ban, warning it would “stop young people from accessing essential support.”
The wall, it turns out, does not just keep the bad things out. It locks vulnerable children inside with their problems.
“We Do Not Need No Thought Control”
Perhaps the most troubling pattern across all of these policy processes is one that resonates uncomfortably with that lyric. The actual people these laws are designed to protect, the children themselves, are being treated as passive subjects rather than active participants. Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child guarantees children’s right to be heard in matters affecting them. Yet across jurisdiction after jurisdiction, that right is being quietly set aside.
Australia’s ban was developed without meaningful youth consultation. The Senate inquiry allowed submissions for approximately one day. This type of bullish approach is not specific to Australia: at a Canadian parliamentary hearing in February 2026, 12-year-old Zachary Fathally told the committee that adults rarely ask children what it is like to grow up online.
When young people have spoken, their perspectives complicate the simple narrative. An Australian teen named Vance shared with researchers: “Back in 2023, I was super depressed… my support system was this little friend group I had on social media… if the ban had happened back when I was still depressed, I would have gone really bad.”
Von der Leyen’s 2025 State of the Union address is a case study in this exclusion .Academic analysis from DCU Law and Tech noted that she spoke primarily as a parent, centering adult anxiety rather than children as rights-holders. She prioritised the voices of “parents, teachers, and scientists” while the young people most affected were entirely absent from the frame. As scholars observed, treating children solely as vulnerable “obscures their right to participation, privacy and protection in ways that respect their evolving capacities.”
Two fifteen-year-olds, Noah Jones and Macy Neyland, have launched a challenge in the High Court of Australia, arguing the ban violates the implied freedom of political communication. Their case, expected to be heard in 2026, could set a critical precedent. The government compares the ban to restrictions on alcohol and tobacco, but the plaintiffs contend that those are physical products. Social media is a medium of expression. It is the difference between banning a drink and banning a conversation.
“Tear Down the Wall”
The near-unanimous position of organisations like UNICEF,Eurochild,Save the Children, the 5Rights Foundation, and the WHO is not that children do not need protection online. They emphatically do. It is that blanket bans are the wrong tool. As UNICEF put it, age-related bans on their own “will not keep children safe online and may have unintended consequences.”
What these organisations converge on instead is a model that addresses platform design rather than children’s access. That means compelling platforms to eliminate addictive features like infinite scroll, autoplay, and dopamine-driven reward loops. It means banning profiling-based advertising targeted at minors. It means mandatory transparency so researchers can access platform data and move the debate from anecdote to evidence. It means age-appropriate design codes that offer tiered protections rather than total lockout. And it means investing in digital literacy for children, parents, and educators alike.
“Outside the Wall”
Sitting at that roundtable, listening to experts from Australia, Europe, civil society, and the tech sector, what struck me most was the gulf between the complexity of the conversation in the room and the simplicity of the political narrative outside it. Every speaker acknowledged real harms: cyberbullying, grooming, algorithmic amplification of harmful content, the exploitation of developing brains by addictive design. Nobody was dismissing parental concern.
But the question we should be asking is not whether this generation of children deserves protection. Everyone agrees they do. The question is what precedent we are setting. If the response to a technology’s harms is to remove children from it entirely, we will find ourselves building new walls with every innovation that follows. The pattern will repeat. The wall will grow. And with each brick, we will further normalise the idea that the correct way to protect young people is to exclude them from the spaces where public life increasingly takes place.
Pink Floyd understood something fundamental about walls: they are easier to build than to tear down, and the people they hurt most are usually the ones trapped inside. As Europe decides its next move, we should make sure we are not building a wall that isolates children from the support, connection, and participation they need, all while congratulating ourselves on our concern for their welfare.
The children, after all, are watching. Even if the grown-ups they look up to have stopped listening.
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Written by Caroline De Cock, LL.M., Head of Research
