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Social media was once a revolution. Now it’s a distraction, an addiction, and worse. Time to unfriend it?

By SHAGORIKA EASWAR

Malaysia became the latest country to ban social media accounts for the under-16.

To state the obvious, social media is a double-edged sword. It has provided youth with unprecedented access to each other and a platform to gather, express their views and question the powers that be in various corners of the world. At the same time, it has caused irreparable harm.

The 2025 mini series Adolescence garnered much praise and critical acclaim, and was highly recommended by family and friends. All of whom also said they found it incredibly hard to watch. I tried, and have to confess, I couldn’t, either.

In the series, 13-year-old Jamie Miller is arrested after the murder of a girl in his school who is later revealed to have rejected his romantic advances and then cyberbullied him.

Investigations at his school and interviews by a forensic psychologist uncover his manosphere-influenced views on women and the mockery he has received on social media.

Though I couldn’t watch the series, I read up on it. People were posting questions about whether it was based on a true case.

The writers confirmed that no part of the drama is based on a specific true story, that they wanted to “look in the eye of modern male rage”.

This is a 13-year-old boy, I wanted to shout.

But adolescence and adulthood come fast in an age when childhood meets what just a generation ago was deemed “adult” content.

So what are right-thinking adults – parents, teachers and policymakers – to do?

Restricting or outright banning under-16s from social media has been a hotly debated issue in the media recently.

Bright minds in the country have pitched in, equally fervent, whether for or against.

The federal government is in favour of setting 16 as the age of majority for Canadians to be able to use social media accounts.

What happens when childhood meets what just a generation ago was deemed “adult” content? Image credit: *LOKMAN SALAN* on Pexels.

An Angus Reid poll from March suggested widespread support for the idea, with as many as three-quarters of Canadians supporting a full ban on social media use for Canadians under the age of 16.

But the onus is on social media companies to enforce it. And in media reports, Carter Scott, a 17-year-old Liberal attending his first convention, said he doesn’t trust social media platforms to handle the data used to verify a person’s age, such as government IDs or facial recognition.

If there’s a data breach – as is likely – thousands of Canadians could have their data leaked, he was quoted as saying.

Another resolution sets age restrictions for chatbots that run on artificial intelligence over similar concerns about the technology affecting the mental health of youth.

It says the government should limit use of “all AI chatbots and other potentially harmful forms of AI interaction” to Canadians over the age of 16.

That includes popular software such as ChatGPT that people now commonly turn to for advice or even have full conversations with.

Anja Karadeglija, writing in The Canadian Press, highlighted a series of recommendations made by youth between the ages of 17 and 23 who took part in round-tables across the country including one on government ordering AI companies to curb the addictive aspects of their AI chatbots.

Participants presented the report – published by McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy and Simon Fraser University’s Dialogue on Technology Project – and its recommendations on Parliament Hill.

Maddie Case, a youth fellow with the McGill centre, introduced the 25 young people who developed the chatbot recommendations.

She said they talked about “the apps they used at two in the morning when they couldn’t sleep. About the friendly ears they found between AI systems when human ones felt so far away. About the moment they realized that they’d started turning to AI for things they’d never needed help with before.”

Case said the youth also discussed what it felt like to “use a tool that has been built deliberately to keep you coming back, not necessarily because it’s good for you, but because your attention is worth money.”

They also talked about encountering problematic content and how they had nowhere to turn if something went wrong in their engagements with chatbots, Case said.

Yusuf Zawahir, who took part in the Toronto roundtable, said his biggest concern about chatbots is their impact on mental health, adding that people in his generation use chatbots as therapists.

Prime Minister Mark Carney said the idea “merits an open and considered debate,” and although he does not have a settled view on it yet, there were good points on both sides.

And so, doing my part, I’ve been engaged in a discussion on the subject with a young man who feels very strongly that this is a bad idea.

“An incredibly bad, short-sighted, and ill-informed decision,” are the exact words he used. “It’s reactionary at best, and doesn’t actually hold the tech companies responsible for their role in said harms caused online.”

While I agree that it certainly doesn’t hold the tech companies accountable and I’ve never been in favour of banning stuff, that was also when there weren’t such horrors lurking online, I say.

“The horrors have always been there,” he responded. “It was the shift to algorithmically driven social feeds and the consolidation of online spaces to a handful of monopolistic companies that really highlighted/made it seem like a much more sudden shift.”

Dr Geeta Nayyar, a globally-recognized technologist, best-selling author and former Chief Medical Officer of Salesforce and AT&T, works to help leaders leverage a human approach to innovation, including rapid advances in AI, to achieve better health and business outcomes.

“There are algorithms that are absolutely meant to hook your brain, to make addicts out of users,” she says, unequivocally.

“Click on one out of curiosity or in error and you can get trapped in an echo chamber in which inflammatory content keeps coming up. There’s a barrage of one-sided information.”

“The connection between our mental health and social media is becoming more and more obvious as you look at research,” she had said in an interview with Desi News. “Look at the algorithms encouraging addictions and distortion of reality. At all the images of the perfect body, face, hair.

“It requires an ecosystem to bring a person back from misinformation.”

She calls this the Misinformation Illness, and wrote Dead Wrong to address the repercussions.

“Research suggests that in our search for the truth, most of us turn to the same places we discover falsehoods: the internet and our friends.

“I’m a mom, and what’s most interesting for me as a parent is that every generation has been taught about stranger-danger by their parents. Don’t talk to a stranger, don’t get into the car of someone you don’t know... but we let them loose on social media. Our kids might be aware of the danger in being approached by a stranger in the park, but not so much about a ‘friend’ request from a stranger on social media. They’ve not been given any guidance on what lurks on social media. We have to make this part of the conversations we have with our children.”

The young man I am in discussion with sends me reams of information on the topic.

Including Canadian academic, and the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa Michael Geist writing on the illusion of protection and why Canada’s growing push to ban social media for kids won’t work.

Geist lists several reasons, including the facts that the ban lets social media off the hook and the ban doesn’t work, citing Australia’s experience.

He goes on to add that the ban creates its own harms such as enormous privacy risks. It was educative, reading that where age estimation is used instead, the risks are even greater, including additional surveillance of users to better estimate their age since the technology cannot reliably distinguish 16 year olds from 17 year olds and has documented accuracy problems for darker skin tones. This additional surveillance tracks the user’s friends, their posts, messages, and any other indicia to obtain a more accurate guess of their age. In the name of greater protection, the technology puts people at greater risk.

There’s what parents know – teens do not go offline when banned from major platforms but instead migrate to smaller and less-moderated platforms with smaller safety teams and where regulators have less leverage. But there’s more. Geist writes that free VPN tools used to circumvent these laws come with their own data-collection and malware risks that children are even less equipped to evaluate than the platforms they are leaving.

“There are algorithms that are absolutely meant to hook your brain, to make addicts out of users.” Image credit: ROHIT SHARMA on Pexels.

And that social media is also a documented lifeline for marginalized youth, including LGBTQ+ youth in non-affirming environments, who rely on it for identity development and peer support, with the result that pushing kids off mainstream services hits hardest the kids with the fewest alternatives.

Kids have constitutional rights too, Geist rightly points out.

“The discussion of social media bans for minors typically treats children as objects of protection rather than as rights-holders, but they are both, and Canadian and international law has been moving steadily toward recognizing the latter.”

Conceding that there’s lots to digest in this, and acknowledging that outright bans rarely work – kids just get more creative around them – I have to point out that, off the top of my head, I don’t know if the “kids have constitutional rights” applies here. If that were the case then why do we have minimum age for everything from smoking and drinking to driving and voting?

Some of the controls may not make much sense or may be flawed, but I’m happy they exist. And I think the young man will be, too, as his infant grows. Some of these protections keep our kids safe – or at least attempt to. In my time, when our sons were growing up, they didn’t have access to the kind of stuff kids do today.

“That’s what I mean,” he says. “The online world used to be far more fragmented making it harder to come across bad things online. Now the online space is what, five companies? That consolidation is a large part of the problem.”

I think of the 12-year-old who had his “tech privileges” revoked because he rushed through a school assignment to work on his app.

Now that he’s home for the summer – for the most part, barring summer camp – what are his parents going to do? Monitor him 24/7? Building trust may be the better (and easier on both) option, but that takes time. And trial and error with a child.

And so we’re back to controlling access.

Recently, a friend in India asked if I had tried asking AI for book recommendations. He had, he said, and shared the “conversation” that ensued with Gemini.

While fascinating at one level, it was also creepy, I said to my friend. The way it kept him engaged, chatting him up, agreeing, joking, suggesting a variety of authors and books.

What stood out for me was how it was “tailored” to my friend’s thinking. The responses were exactly like what he would expect from a bibliophile pal sitting across the table with a drink in hand.

It’s a long conversation, but to give an idea:

“If you loved the suburban absurdity of The Wimbledon Poisoner, you are likely to enjoy his other work, though he rarely deviates from that specific comedic ‘lane’.

“While Williams is consistent, he can be relentless. His humour is often ‘cringe-comedy’ before that was a popular term.

“Given your interest in well-observed professional settings (like the mountaineering in Rum Doodle), this satire of the newspaper world is incredibly sharp and feels grounded even when it gets ridiculous.

“That explains everything! If Wodehouse is your north star, it makes perfect sense why you loved The Wimbledon Poisoner and The Ascent of Rum Doodle.

“If you have the full sets of Jeeves and Blandings on your shelf, you likely appreciate the clockwork plotting of the former and the pastoral madness of the latter.

“A ‘Wodehouse’ Pro-Tip: Since you own the full sets, have you explored Psmith? The ‘P’ is silent, as in phthisis, psychic, and ptarmigan.

“Given your background as a journalist and editor, you likely have a ‘low tolerance for filler’ – which explains why Torday’s later work felt like a slump. You need authors who maintain their ‘per-page wit’ throughout their entire career.

“Since you enjoy complex cultural histories, have you ever tried the Mortdecai books by Kyril Bonfiglioli?

“Since you are in Bangalore, there is a specific joy in reading Narayan’s Malgudi books through a Wodehouseian lens.

“The Financial Expert or The Guide by R.K. Narayan. The Connection: Wodehouse was a huge fan of Narayan. Why? Because they both built a ‘world in a bottle’.

“For a reader with your background, the joy is in the cadence. You want sentences that are so well-constructed they could stand alone as aphorisms, even if they’re describing something utterly ridiculous.”

Gemini doesn’t just provide recommendations, it jollies my friend along, identifying his interests accurately and stroking his ego.

“You are absolutely right to call that out – leaving it out was a ‘howler’ on my part, especially given your preference for intellectual, conversational wit.”

And it poses questions that facilitate further engagement.

“Given your preference for the intellectual over the physical, do you enjoy satire that targets specific professions (like journalism in Scoop) or social satire that focuses on the eccentricities of the upper/middle classes?”

My friend gleaned a few names for his reading list from the interaction and that was it – he didn’t start viewing Gemini as his new best friend. But should he have, one could have said, “Come on, you should have known better.”

But can one really say that to a child? Not when we now know that the teenage brain doesn’t fully develop until the early to mid-20s.

Could Jamie Miller’s parents have said, “Jamie you should have known better?”

As Dr Nayyar said, this requires creative strategies and is probably not an all-or-nothing solution.

Back in the day, kids thought they were ultra smart for having come up with POS – code for parent over shoulder – when they were on their devices. Now parents need to do way more than hover over kids to protect them.

As my debate with the young man continues, I note that he turns his phone away from his infant daughter when he takes a call while holding her, and sits so she is facing away from the screen if he’s on his laptop or watching a movie. Exercising parental control in his own way.

“IT COMES DOWN TO PARENTS, TOO”

Statistics Canada reports a 43 per cent increase in the rate of online sexual offences against kids in 2024. Image credit: *SHARATH* G on Pexels.

Government of Canada introduced Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, to make social media services and AI chatbots safer for children. While laws exist to respond once harm has happened, there is currently very little that requires online services to prevent harm in the first place. The Safe Social Media Act aims to change that by ensuring that social media services and artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are responsible for addressing harm before it occurs.

The proposed legislation will include an age restriction preventing children under the age of 16 from having accounts on social media services, with a pathway for social media services to seek an exemption if they can demonstrate that they have put in place sufficient safeguards for children.

The new requirements will also put children's safety first when products and features are designed, including measures to reduce children's exposure to certain content and high-risk interactions.

“Paediatricians at SickKids and across Canada are witnessing the consequences of an unregulated digital environment every day: rising rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm and disordered eating, linked not only to harmful content but to platform features deliberately engineered to maximize engagement,” said Dr. Charlotte Moore Hepburn, Medical Director, SickKids Child Health Policy Accelerator. “The introduction of this legislation is a critical and welcome step forward. The health and development of a generation of children and youth depend on getting this right.”

As reported by Danielle Pitman in Newmarket Today, police have raised concerns about the dangers of the online world and how kids are exposed to them. Excerpts from the article:

Officials from the Rama Police Service and the OPP Indigenous Policing Bureau teamed up to help educate community members about how to keep children safe online. “Would you give your 14-year-old kid the keys to your car and let them go without training? Why do we give kids an electronic device and let them use it behind closed doors and with no guidance?” asked Det.-Sgt. Brian Higgs.

He encourages open dialogue which ensures facing the reality when they do receive inappropriate material. Higgs said experience proves that inappropriate material online will end up in the hands of all teens at some point. Knowing what to do about it is key.

Statistics Canada reports a 43 per cent increase in the rate of online sexual offences against kids in 2024, attributing it to a higher rate of child luring. “We’re not going to arrest or teach our way out of this, it comes down to the parents, too,” said Higgs.

Resources and more info at Protectchildren.ca, protectkidsonline.ca.

Report online sexual exploitation at cybertip.ca. Young victims of online exploitation can contact kidshelpphone.ca or call 1-800-668-6868.

COVER STORY

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“IT COMES DOWN TO PARENTS, TOO”