Video after video, minute after minute, hour after hour. After opening a social media platform, time seems to drift away. Every few minutes you promise yourself you’ll stop watching, but you stay hooked, unable to focus on any other task.
For many social media users, this experience is a normal occurrence, and for a good reason. Social media is purposefully designed to keep people engaged and constantly using the app, which has led it to become an addiction. This social media epidemic is something that people today, especially teenagers, have to face.
According to Forbes, 42% of kids in the U.S. have a phone by age 10. As kids tend to get phones at even younger ages nowadays, we need to do all we can to prevent the damage from spreading.
The General Surgeons Advisory found that in 2021 the average time spent on social media for 8th and 10th graders was 3.5 hours a day. Yale Medicine has also found that excessive use of social media has been linked to sleep and attention problems, as well as feelings of exclusion in adolescents.
Social media distracts us from our goals, reduces our attention span, disrupts our sleep, and heightens feelings of insecurity. It’s like a disease, ensnaring both teenagers and adults worldwide, with seemingly no intention of letting go.
“Social media has its positives as everything in our society does,” Palo Alto High School sophomore Kacey Washington said. “But when you look at the harm that social media can cause to the ones around you, I can’t rationalize social media having more positives than negatives.”
As the negative effects become more prevalent, especially in teens, there have been more attempts to take action. On March 25, Florida Governor Ron De Santis signed a bill greatly restricting social media for minors, which is to take effect on Jan. 1. The bill prohibits social media accounts for children under 14 and requires 14 and 15-year-olds to have parental permission to make an account.
This is part of a larger campaign in the United States hoping to limit the influence social media has on American teens. Ohio Republicans have also proposed a bill that would require public schools to ban social media, as well as prohibit students from using electronics during class. Thirty-three states are also banding together to sue Meta.
Overall, the government is attempting to limit the grasp social media has on the American population. Although this is a step in the right direction, these regulations aren’t enough. Instead of only having a few select states enforcing these rules, there should be a country-wide policy limiting social media usage.
“I think a ban [on social media] could work, but only if there’s an age verification with some legal document,” Paly sophomore Deniz Aba said. “Adding on to that, it would also be incredibly difficult to get the ban passed into law since there would be heavy lobbying against it.”
To make policies more enforceable, they should be less severe than the Florida state ban, focusing only on removing accounts of children under the age of 13. There already is technically an age requirement to make a social media account, but it is loosely enforced and is easily avoidable. The 2023 General Surgeons Advisory found that nearly 40% of children ages 8–12 use social media despite most social media platforms requiring users to be over the age of 13.
Although any nationwide ban restricting all social media will most likely never be possible due to the concerns over free speech rights, proposing them does put more pressure on social media companies to enforce age restrictions. It will also hopefully shine more light on the negative effects kids face due to social media, and encourage them to make smarter decisions and be self-aware.
As teens, our generation has been the guinea pig. It’s not our fault that we’ve been sucked in, but it will be our fault if we don’t prevent this social media addiction from further hindering future generations.
The younger kids get social media, the bigger the impact it has on their development. It’s our job to prevent social media from having a widespread negative impact on youth around the world. Adolescents must advocate for more age-related regulations for social media on a local, and national level now.
We must look past the screen.