What we get wrong about children and social media

14th June 2026

The case against children’s access to social media isn’t just about online harms, argues Goldsmith’s Dr Veli Hillman, but about the steady narrowing of what childhood is allowed to become.

Modern societies routinely restrict children’s access to activities where power, incentives and risks are radically unequal. Laws prevent them from driving, drinking alcohol, accessing pornography or competing in regulated sports below certain ages.

These restrictions are not about silencing children’s voices or denying their rights, but recognising that where consent cannot be meaningful, protection should take precedence. This is not because children lack agency, but because agency is never exercised in a vacuum. It is shaped by environments, incentives and constraints—and some environments are designed precisely to overwhelm it.

This matters because opposition to recent proposals to ban children’s access to social media largely frames the issue as one of insufficient evidence of harm or infringement of children’s digital rights—to expression, participation and opportunity online. But this framing rests on a conceptual mistake. It treats social media platforms as neutral spaces in which children exercise rights, rather than as commercial systems designed to extract value from their attention, data and behaviour.

The predictable pushback is that children have ‘evolving capacities’ and agency. That may be true but beside the point. Agency is always exercised within environments that shape what becomes possible, desirable and imaginable. The mistake is to assume that the digital realm represents the full horizon of children’s possible futures. It doesn’t. What’s worse, when adults present the future as inevitably digital, participation comes to feel less like a choice than a necessity, while its absence—as a disadvantage.

Where participation is no longer a choice
A system that presents itself as unavoidable is already exercising power. Consider how participation now works in practice. School notices, homework and teacher-parent communication increasingly flow through platforms such as Google, Microsoft, or PowerSchool. Friendship groups, invitations and social coordination default to social media. Opting out means missing information, being absent from social life, or becoming administratively invisible. At that point, participation is no longer about choice—it becomes a condition.

This is what power looks like working in plain sight—in essence, it’s the lack of alternatives. The task of protection, then, is not to decide when children are ready to consent to data extraction, surveillance and algorithmic manipulation, but to ensure that their sense of what kinds of futures are possible is not prematurely narrowed by it. Put more simply, childhood should be organised around a plurality of activities and spaces, not concentrated within a handful of platforms designed to track, optimise and monetise children’s time and attention.

The narrowing of history
Much of the argument in favour of children’s participation in social media rests on an outdated picture of the internet. Social media spaces is not a continuation of the early internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Platform capture has fundamentally altered the terrain. What was once built around open, decentralised protocols has been replaced by enclosed systems whose organising logic is monetisation. Today, platforms control visibility, influence behaviour, and bind users to opaque and unequal terms. Children are subjected to contracts they cannot meaningfully understand, algorithmic ranking they cannot see, and data practices they cannot refuse.

To argue that children must be present on these platforms to participate in society is therefore to ignore these transformations of the internet, which in turn normalises something deeply troubling: the idea that children’s experiences, relationships and identities should be routinely monetised. Platforms don’t create friendships, creativity or social belonging. These already exist in schools, neighbourhoods, families, and clubs. What platforms do is capture, quantify and monetise them, yet adults increasingly accept this as fundamental.

When children say they will ‘miss out’ by not being on social media, that’s not an expression of freedom or the right to something but evidence of narrowing of options so completely that alternatives barely register. Then the sense that there is ‘nothing else to do’ can only reveal how thoroughly the environment of childhood has been impoverished.

The politics of digital inclusion
In spite of energetic advocacy for children’s digital rights and online agency, why has there been so little comparable mobilisation to reclaim physical space, time, and autonomy for children? Across advanced economies, policy attention, funding, and institutional effort increasingly converge on bringing more people online. In the United States, for example, federal programs and large-scale public-private initiatives channel substantial resources into digital inclusion, digital infrastructure and AI-oriented learning, treating digital participation as the primary pathway to social and economic opportunity.

This reflects a deeper asymmetry in how different futures are supported. Physical environments for children require long-term public investment and yield benefits that are not easily monetised. By contrast, digital-first childhoods align closely with existing market incentives. They scale easily, produce measurable outputs, and attract public and private investment. Over time, this alignment normalises the assumption that children’s futures are digital by default. In this sense, the emphasis on digital inclusion and online safety doesn’t challenge the prevailing order; it quietly reinforces it.

Once inevitability is accepted, the debate narrows from whether children should be drawn into platform environments to how early, how safely and how efficiently this should be done. Children, in turn, absorb the message adults send them—that the future is digital and opportunities are there, so that they should learn to adapt to it.

Anyone who has tried to pull a child away from these platforms understands how difficult disengagement has become. This has nothing to do with failure of discipline or parenting. Social media systems are engineered to maximise engagement and dependency because that is how they make profit.

The foreclosing of alternative futures
Here, an analogy with a confidence trick feels apt. As Mazzucato and Collington have argued, much of what is celebrated as innovation today involves value extraction, presented as value creation.

Social media platforms epitomise this logic, claiming credit for social goods they didn’t produce while positioning themselves as indispensable intermediaries—a dynamic long analysed by Shoshana Zuboff. Some scholars have argued that concerns about new technologies frequently fall into a cycle of technology panics, but these fail to engage with the deeper political and economic forces that shape digital platforms. It is precisely this structural logic that tends to disappear when debates about children and social media are reframed as cycles of moral panic.

To be precise, much of the research cited in defence of children’s social media use doesn’t position platforms as harmless, but argues that correlations between social media use and self-reported wellbeing are small or inconsistent. This is useful for puncturing any possible exaggerated claims about harm, but it also narrows the debate in a revealing way. When the central question becomes whether social media measurably damages mental health, everything else disappears from view: the business model, the extraction of value, the reshaping of childhoods, and the assumption that digital participation itself is inevitable.

Once these premises are accepted, the debate can only ever concern harm reduction and online optimisation. What’s camouflaged is the more fundamental question: should platform-based systems be organising childhoods at all?

Seen in this light, protecting children from social media is a recognition of power rather than a retreat from rights. It recognizes that the digital realm has been allowed to close in on childhood itself, thus narrowing the sense of what counts as opportunity, progress and a viable future.

Childhood doesn’t need to be platform-mediated to be rich, social, or full of possibilities. Treating the digital as inevitable can only impoverish the imagination of what children can be and do. The most serious harm is not exclusion from platforms, but the shrinking of what childhood is allowed to become.

Author
Velislava Hillman
For the past ten years Dr Hillman has researched at the intersection of learning, digital technologies, children and young people with focus on their personal perspectives, uses and experiences. More recently, Dr Hillman’s interests are in the integration of AI systems in schools, data-driven decision-making and the role and participation of children and young people in increasingly digitised learning environments. She is an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmith’s and was a Visiting Fellow at LSE from 2020-25.

Source
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2026/06/08/what-we-get-wrong-about-children-and-social-media/