Indiana Secretary of Education Dr. Katie Jenner took a bold step earlier this month by introducing legislation to ban Indiana youth from using social media platforms.

Should Senate Bill 199 go into effect, children ages 14-17 would need age verification and parental consent to access social media platforms. Youth in this age range who do get verified to have an account would also have their usage restricted during night-time hours. Meanwhile, children under 14 would be banned entirely from creating or using social media accounts.

Similar legislation popped up last year too, though it eventually failed in the House. In theory, this legislation feels like a win for youth and schools. In practice, it could be a lot more complicated.

Is Social Media at the Root of What Ails Youth?

Is social media bad for society? I’m comfortable saying yes on the whole (or, perhaps, specifying that social media companies are bad for society, which is a distinction that, at least right now, doesn’t really have a difference).

But is social media the reason that “the kids aren’t alright”? That’s much trickier to claim, even if Jonathan Haidt made an enormous amount of hay with his recent bestseller The Anxious Generation.

There’s no shortage of critiques of the book’s central claim. Perhaps the most insightful I’ve come across is from Candice Odgers writing in Nature. This line stands out: “Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, is a gifted storyteller, but his tale is currently one searching for evidence.”

As Odgers emphasizes, our ongoing youth mental health crisis has no simple answers. Importantly, her critique raises a litany of trends concurrent to the proliferation of social media that cannot be ignored. For example:

• Suicide rates have been rising the past 20 years in the US for pretty much all ages, not just youth
• Today’s adolescents came of age in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession
• 1 in 6 kids in the US lives below the poverty line at a time when the opioid crisis has run rampant, school shootings occur with startling regularity, and racial and sexual discrimination and violence rise instead of fall
• There’s 1 school psychologist for every 1,119 students, on average, across the US

Just as all roads lead to Rome, all these trends lead Odgers to the kind of levelheaded conclusion Haidt should have arrived at (even if it would have certainly sold less books): “Two things can be independently true about social media. First, that there is no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children’s brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness. Second, that considerable reforms to these platforms are required, given how much time young people spend on them.”

Even more apropos to our discussion here, Odgers ultimately notes… “age-based restrictions and bans on mobile devices, are unlikely to be effective in practice — or worse, could backfire given what we know about adolescent behaviour.”

The Problem With Social Media Bans

I find cellphone bans during school hours to be a no-brainer. But social media bans, oftentimes because of the complexity inherent to implementation, are much more fraught.

For a cogent exploration of the breadth of the issues at play, I recommend this Brookings write-up. If you just want the essence, know that there are many potential issues with bans. One especially stands out to me: privacy. Social media bans, including Indiana’s proposed one, depend on age verification. For age verification to mean anything, it typically needs to come with some requirement to show government-issued ID.

This I do not like. As Brookings writes, “The potential use of government-issued IDs or biometric information introduces significant risks, including data breaches, misuse, and exclusion of those who lack formal identification.”

Unless a ban is concocted in a way that guarantees protection for youth’s personal info and privacy (which I’m not sure is possible), I’ll always be wary of it.

The Deeper Issues That Bans Don’t Address

There’s another problem: Bans tend to leave deeper issues untouched. They hyper-focus on youth access at the expense of platform design. There’s a world where we could focus on both, or even primarily design (and better yet, corporate regulation and oversight). That world largely isn’t our world right now, at the state or federal level.

As the Brookings deep dive notes, rather than pursue bans alone, “The more effective path is to hold technology companies accountable for the design of their platforms and the content moderation systems that allow harmful material and behaviors to persist.”

To which I suppose you could say, “But something, even a half measure like a ban, is better than nothing.” But I’m not sure it is given youth privacy concerns and the host of other landmines that come with any kind of ban.

I get why Dr. Jenner feels urgency to do something. I feel urgency too. Because, truly, the kids aren’t alright. And schools are feeling it.

But they say sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. In the case of social media bans, I don’t think it’s fair to say they’re worse. But they could be bad in a different way. And they leave the underlying disease riddling all of society, not just youth, untouched.