Jonathan
Haidt: Why the World Is Drawing a Line on Social Media for Kids
What
looked politically impossible just months ago has become a global movement to
restrict kids’ access to social media. Here’s how it happened.
02.11.26 —The Big
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Jonathan
Haidt is a professor, social psychologist, and author of The Anxious
Generation among others. His research includes political polarization
I just returned from 12 days in Davos, London, and
Brussels, where my goal was to encourage political leaders to raise the minimum
age to 16 for opening or having social media accounts in their countries. This
is the second of my four norms for a healthier childhood, laid out in my
book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring
of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. I met with leaders
from Indonesia, France, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. Some have
already acted decisively (Indonesia and France); the others are likely to do so. And
just as I arrived home, Spain and the Netherlands announced that they would
raise the age, too.
All of this happened less than two months after Australia
enacted the world’s first nationwide age limit, which requires users to be 16
for opening or maintaining social-media accounts, and which puts the
responsibility for enforcing the age limit on the platforms themselves.
The tide is turning, but I have been shocked by how quickly
it is happening. Social media has been dominating kids’ attention for decades.
Now, in the span of just a few weeks, the landscape has been transformed. What
happened?
The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker can help explain
it. His most recent book, When
Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the
Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life, explores the massive social
change that can occur when widespread private knowledge suddenly becomes public
knowledge. For example: Many people may privately know that a dictator is
brutal, or that an ideology is bankrupt, yet nothing changes for many years
until something happens that lets everyone know that everyone else knows it
too, and that everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone
knows. Once that threshold is crossed, new forms of coordination become
possible. Social movements ignite. Regimes and walls fall. Norms can change
almost overnight.
Hans Christian Andersen captured the same dynamic in his
famous story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”: The emperor was naked and everyone
could see it, but no one knew if others saw it, too—because the swindlers had
spread the idea that only the wise could see the cloth. It took a child’s
cry—“The emperor has no clothes!”—to convert private knowledge into public
knowledge. What the child said was “whispered from one to another,” until the
crowd finally cried out together.
This is what happened among leaders around the world in the
month after Australia’s age limit went into effect.
When The Anxious Generation was published
in 2024, many legislators saw a need for action to protect children, but there
was a general reluctance to get too far ahead of the public. Restricting
something widely used—and thought to be widely loved—seemed politically
dangerous. Furthermore, critics declared that a social media age limit of 16
was impossible to implement and was sure to ultimately harm children.
But in Australia, leaders said damn the torpedoes, full
speed ahead. The first was Peter Malinauskas (premier of South Australia), who
commissioned a report on how such a law could be drafted. He was soon joined by
Chris Minns (premier of New South Wales), and then by Prime Minister Anthony
Albanese. All three were from the Labor Party, yet the law was passed with
strong support from the right-leaning Liberal–National Coalition. The federal
law was signed in November 2024 and it took effect December 10, 2025.
Just two days later, journalist Casey Newton offered his
tech predictions for 2026 on the New York Times podcast Hard Fork. His highest-confidence
prediction was that at least five democracies would follow Australia’s lead by
the end of 2026. He recognized that we were about to see a rapid transformation
of private knowledge into public knowledge.
Over the weeks that followed, the world learned two
important lessons.
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Jonathan Haidt: The Devil’s Plan to
Ruin the Next Generation
First, action is possible. Phase one of
Australia’s rollout went smoothly. The companies complied. They
closed down 4.7 million accounts that were held by 2.5 million Australian
children between the ages of 8 and 15, and few adults were incorrectly shut out
of their accounts. The sky did not fall. Of course, some kids will find ways
around the law in the first year, but the burden is on the companies to
enforce the age limit, and they will get better at doing so as technology
companies develop ever more effective and privacy-preserving methods, and as
norms change in Australian society.
Second, action is popular. As coverage of Australia’s law
spread globally, it was met with an extraordinary amount of public support—from
parents, journalists, and politicians on the left, the right, and the center. Other countries asked: Why can’t we do that, too?
Many teens supported Australia’s law as well.
As research shows, young people see the harms of social media. They feel
trapped by it, and nearly half wish it had never been
invented.
The whispering turned into a chorus.
In January, a few weeks after the Australian law went into
effect, people discovered that they could use Elon Musk’s Grok to strip any
woman or girl down to a pornified string bikini. To give just one disturbing
example: Someone used Grok to show Renee Good in a bikini
within hours of her being shot in the head by an Immigration
and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis. The savagery of offering
frictionless, free, nonconsensual deepfake porn triggered a global wave
of revulsion in early January. These
widespread expressions of disgust were further
evidence that humanity now had common knowledge about the dangers of social
media.
By the middle of January, everyone knew that
everyone knew that governments can and should set minimum age rules for social
media, and that doing so was an electoral winner.
So, when I arrived in Davos, Switzerland, last month,
political leaders around the world had already realized that enacting an
age-limit law would not put them out ahead of public opinion. In fact, public
opinion was now far ahead of legislation. Polling confirmed what leaders already
sensed intuitively: Parents around the world are begging for help. They feel
overwhelmed by the digital tide. For years, they’ve watched social media hurt
children. Many felt powerless to protect their own kids.
There is no magical age when comparing how many likes your
photos get, or scrolling an endless stream of short videos when you should be
sleeping, becomes good for you. Like any addictive consumer product that
routinely exposes users to graphic sex, extreme violence, and anonymous sexual
predators, social media in its current form causes a variety of harms to people
of all ages. But we allow adults (often defined as age 18) to make decisions
that are bad for them.
In The Anxious Generation, I proposed 16 as a
pragmatic compromise—one aimed at shifting global norms quickly. I knew that
advocating for 18 would likely take many years and risk total failure. Sixteen
is also roughly the age by which a majority of adolescents have completed puberty:
a sensitive period of neural reorganization during which it is extremely
important to protect the brain.
The successes of the past few weeks
are testaments to rapidly changing public knowledge and public sentiment.
France will impose its age limit at 15, and in my two
conversations with President Emmanuel Macron, I came to understand why 15 is a
culturally salient age in France. I support his decision to act decisively this
year. Still, I urge countries that can enact 16 to do so. Each year of delay is a year of
additional maturity and protection.
I cannot support any law that includes a “parental consent”
exception—it defeats the central purpose of the law by dropping parents and
children straight back into the same collective-action trap: “Please, Mom! All
of my friends’ parents said yes!” I would rather see countries pass no law this
year than a weak one with parental consent exemptions.
But I am confident that leaders understand this, and that
they will move much more quickly and confidently in 2026 to pass minimum-age
laws and other policies to protect children online.
So, bravo, Australia, France, Indonesia, Spain, and the
Netherlands. And bravo to leaders in both major parties in the UK, and to
leaders across the EU, who are likely to follow their lead.
The successes of the past few weeks are testaments to
rapidly changing public knowledge and public sentiment. By this time next year
this sentiment will be even stronger, and laws offering additional protections
will be common. After all, now everyone knows that everyone knows that we can
do this—and that we must.
