Articles
Ubiquity
Volume 2025, Number August (2025), Pages 1-9
Ubiquity Symposium: Teens and Screens: The Siren Song of Social Media
Kemal Delic, Jeff Johnson
DOI: 10.1145/3760264
The effect of the internet on children is not well understood but the evidence is that the mental health of the young has been deteriorating since about 2012 and that between 2004 and 2020 there has been a doubling of teens reporting depressive episodes. In the U.K. a coroner's report detailed the negative effects of social media contributing to the suicide of a 14-year-old girl. Social media platforms use algorithms that amplify minority views, impose conversation topics, lead to social division, and spread anxiety-making misinformation and disinformation. The peer pressure on children to have an internet-enabled mobile phone is enormous. According to the U.K.'s communications regulator, nine in ten eleven-year-olds have a mobile phone. Although parents try to manage their children's online activity, and there is software to restrict children's access to the internet, a determined child can circumvent such control. Many parents would like the state to be proactive in protecting their children. Australia leads the world in this with a law that, after December 2025, requires social media platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent under 16-year-olds having accounts on their platforms. Similar laws are being enacted in the U.K. and by the European Commission. Behind the internet platforms are billionaires running trillion-dollar companies with strong interests in preventing such regulation. To counter the untrammeled power of Big Tech to affect children's development, it has been suggested that four foundational reforms could protect children: no smartphones before the age of fourteen; no social media before the of age sixteen; phone-free schools; and far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. It is uncertain how the ongoing struggle between the tech giants and governments will play out. Effective regulation and eternal vigilance are required to keep our children safe in a bewildering online world.
The invention of the internet has provided a huge platform for academic, business, government, and personal applications. By now some two thirds of the global population uses the internet. A variety of social media platforms targeting youngsters have become their preferred sources of news and information, and means for communication, coordination, and the sharing of music, audio, video, and text materials. For example, in March 2024, approximately 76% of online users between the ages of 15 and 24 in the United Kingdom engaged with social video app TikTok [1].
After the initial enthusiasm and rapid growth of the internet and social media, some undesirable consequences have been observed among the teenage population. Attention span is reduced, and many hours are spent on screens, scrolling for more information. Addiction and dependencies have reached a critical stage, while misinformation, disinformation, manipulation and shaming have provoked psychological troubles and sometimes physical violence or self-harm. Observed behaviors morphed from curiosity into obsession and addiction leading to entirely new social phenomena including celebrity circles, influence peddling, entrapment, alienation, and deteriorating mental health. Beyond the horizon we observe a Metaverse framework fusing together gaming, gambling, digital currency; and digital assets creating either augmented or virtual reality as an escape from the real world. Being extremely attractive and addictive for teens, it may yet represent a major social phenomenon.
The effect of the internet on children is not well understood, but we allow our children to spend many hours each day in this potentially damaging environment. We do not know the effect the internet has on the individual child or how it will impact their behavior as adults, and the impact this will have on our societies.
In his book The Anxious Generation, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt shows a doubling between 2004 and 2020 of U.S. teens reporting major depressive episodes within the last year: up from under 15% to 30% for girls, and up from 5% to more than 10% for boys [2]. Haidt argues this is due to the "rewiring" of childhood due to a phone-based childhood, as opposed to a play-based childhood.1 Although Haidt has his critics, it is obvious to many parents that access to the internet can put their children in danger. Haidt's central claim is "that these two trends—overprotection in the real world and under protection in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation." This argument is supported by a report for the UN by Jean Twenge and David Blanchflower that "There is growing evidence in the U.S. that the mental health of the young had started deteriorating around 2012 or so. This coincided with the increased use of smart phones and social media" [3].
In the U.K., are similar stories. The following is an excerpt from a coroner's report detailing the circumstances of the death of a teenage girl in London.
"Molly Rose Russell was found having hanged herself on the Twenty-First of November 2017. Molly was 14 years old. Molly appeared a normal healthy girl who was flourishing at school, having settled well into secondary school life and displayed an enthusiastic interest in the Performing Arts. However, Molly had become depressed, a common condition affecting children of this age. This then worsened into a depressive illness. Molly subscribed to a number of online sites. At the time that these sites were viewed by Molly some of these sites were not safe as they allowed access to adult content that should not have been available for a 14-year-old child to see. The way that the platforms operated meant that Molly had access to images, video clips and text concerning or concerned with self-harm, suicide or that were otherwise negative or depressing in nature. The platform operated in such a way using algorithms as to result, in some circumstances, of binge periods of images, video clips and text some of which were selected and provided without Molly requesting them. These binge periods, if involving this content are likely to have had a negative effect on Molly. Some of this content romanticised acts of self- harm by young people on themselves. Other content sought to isolate and discourage discussion with those who may have been able to help. Molly turned to celebrities for help not realising there was little prospect of a reply. In some cases, the content was particularly graphic, tending to portray selfharm and suicide as an inevitable consequence of a condition that could not be recovered from. The sites normalised her condition focusing on a limited and irrational view without any counterbalance of normality. It is likely that the above material viewed by Molly, already suffering with a depressive illness and vulnerable due to her age, affected her mental health in a negative way and contributed to her death in a more than minimal way" [4].
Social Media Principal Driving Forces
We observe three important forces shaping contemporary social media content—which we denote by: personalization, polarization, politicization. Aiming to attract individuals, the majority of social media provide personalization, which in reality is a huge privacy invasion used for commercial and advertising purposes. Personalization includes the capture of habits, preferences, movements, and beliefs. Consequently, social media companies, while profiling users, are de facto operating as ubiquitous ever-present eavesdroppers, imperceptibly collecting huge amounts of personal data and using it for advertising, exchange and other forms of monetizing and personal manipulation. How those data traces and collections are being used is typically unknown to the average user.
According to a briefing report for the British government: 99% of children spend time online; nine in ten children own a mobile phone by the time they reach to age of eleven; three-quarters of social media users aged between eight and 17have their own social media account or profile on at least one of the large platforms; almost three-quarters of teenagers between age 13 and 17 have encountered one or more potential harms online; three in five secondary school-aged children have been contacted online in a way that potentially made them feel uncomfortable; and there is a "blurred boundary between the lives children lead online and the 'real world'" [5].
A major problem for parents of teenagers is squaring the circle of providing their children with a mobile phone in order to know where they are and to be able to contact them and protecting them from the unknown dangers of the internet. The peer pressure on children to possess a smart phone is enormous and hard for a parent to resist. To counter this pressure, almost 60% of parents in the U.K. favor a ban on smartphones for the under 16-year-olds [6].
Parents worry that their children will be tricked into sharing intimate materials with adults pretending to be teenagers aiming to entrap and exploit them. For example, criminals coerce or trick children into sharing nude or sexual images and then demand money, threatening to send the images to the victim's family and friends, or publish them on the internet. "Children and young people targeted this way are exposed to violent threats and abuse, and made to feel isolated and humiliated. Some children and young people have even taken their own lives as a result of the shame and distress inflicted on them by the criminals" [7].
Parents try to manage their children's online activities as best they can. There is software to restrict children's access to the internet and to keep parents informed, but a determined child can circumvent such control. Many parents would like the state to be more proactive in protecting their children. Australia leads the way in this with new laws to ban social media for the under-16s from December 2025 [8]. Big tech companies resist all such legislation and generally have a poor record for online safety.
Having no oversight or human content moderation, algorithms can amplify minority views, impose conversation topics and lead to divisive polarization, engaging the mass of users in fruitless debates and disagreement on artificially amplified topics. As an example, Figure 1 shows the algorithmic augmentation of certain opinions can bring distortions so that the opinions of a small minority could look like the opinions of the great majority in social media info-spheres, obviously impacting the democratic process and integrity of electoral outcomes.
Politicization through personalized news is an acknowledged problem: phenomena known as echo chambers and opinion filters. Individuals receive personalized information that the platform calculates they may want to receive, or that the platform sponsors want to be seen.
The information that young people get from the internet influences their political opinions; in a recent poll 19% of British 18–24-year-olds said they prefer strong leaders without elections to democracy [9]. This is a generation who grew up with social networks and has experienced nothing but democracy and its freedoms. They might have answered differently if they were informed by verified sources.
Is Social Media Non-Regulated or Over-Regulated?
Behind the internet platforms are billionaires running trillion-dollar companies who have strong interests to prevent any regulation of this space. Their usual argument is that over-regulation will kill innovation. Some of these tech titans are getting involved in politics, lobbying and spreading disinformation, trying to prevent or delay any kind of regulation.2 Some countries have regulated this space, introducing age limits, reducing time spent on screens, or forbidding mobile phones in the class, for example. Finding the right balance between non-regulation and over-regulation represents an ongoing debate. Compliance procedures impose additional cost, delaying the process and creating new, unwanted challenges. It is possible that we will see the splitting of the Internet into regulated and non-regulated parts. For example, China has its own TikTok version that differs from the platform deployed for the rest of the world.
Since all critical domains of human activities are regulated (health, finance, transportation, etc.) one should think about social media space as especially delicate, having large impact and long-term consequences. Knowing that today's teens are tomorrow's citizens and voters, one should be aware of the negative impacts of modern technologies and consider citizens' well-being to be above company profits and unlimited, uncontrolled growth.
In Britain the response to the challenge is on-going.
"The Online Safety Act 2023 is a new set of laws that protects children and adults online. It puts a range of new duties on social media companies and search services, making them more responsible for their users' safety on their platforms. The Act will give providers new duties to implement systems and processes to reduce risks [that] their services are used for illegal activity, and to take down illegal content when it does appear. The strongest protections in the Act have been designed for children. Platforms will be required to prevent children from accessing harmful and age-inappropriate content and provide parents and children with clear and accessible ways to report problems online when they do arise" [10].
The independent U.K. regulator of online safety, Ofcom, has published guidance on how to implement the Online Safety Act: "Ofcom sets out guidance on highly effective age checks to stop children accessing online porn services. Methods could include photo ID matching, facial age estimation and credit card checks" [11]. But in practice implementation has been slow: "Ofcom consulted on the age assurance proposals between December-February 2024 and the final guidance for part 5 services [commercial porn providers] was published in January 2025. … Services must implement age verification or age estimation on their services by July 2025" [12]. In principle companies can be fined up to £18m or 10% of global revenue, but the effectiveness of this legislation and its enforcement in protecting children remain to be seen.
Although regulation might be seen as a natural approach, serious empirical evidence about large-scale social impact is still badly missing. Furthermore, while regulation is still debated at length, the problem of enforcing it will be the major obstacle to practical, large-scale, global deployment.
The reckless ethical behavior and hypocrisy of the big tech companies is illustrated by Sarah Wynn-Williams' book Careless People: The explosive memoir that Meta doesn't want you to read (MacMillan, 2025). Like all the big tech companies, Meta avoids constraints on its content in the cause of free speech. However, this did not extend to Wynn-Williams when in March 2025 Meta won an emergency ruling in the U.S. to stop her from promoting or further distributing copies of her memoir [13]. Despite this the book is widely available.
Regulation of the big tech companies is very weak worldwide. In the U.S. the political position is that big tech should be unregulated, and that "free speech" is paramount—even when this means promoting views and arguments that are known to be false. Europe is particularly active in resisting the power of the big tech companies, having successfully implemented GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and the Digital Services Act (DSA) to protect its citizens. The key goals of the DSA are as follows. For citizens they are: better protection of fundamental rights; more control and choice, and easier reporting of illegal content; stronger protection of children online, such as the prohibition of targeted advertisements to minors; less exposure to illegal content; and more transparency over content moderation decisions with the DSA Transparency Database. For providers of digital services, the goals are: legal certainty, a single set of rules across the EU, and easier start-up and scale-up in Europe. This is, of course, a particularly Eurocentric perspective. But the power of big tech is enormous. In a world where big tech has revenues greater than the GDP of South Africa and other countries, and major struggles can be expected over the next few years.
Resisting the Siren Song
In conclusion, our social reality is ingrained into daily torrents of data and information, and our children are exposed to many age-inappropriate influences and dangers. It will be very difficult to change mass behavior and resist the siren song to our children of always being connected and easily manipulated. Individual parents can do little to protect their children—keeping in mind parents too are also big consumers of mass-media content.
Haidt suggests four foundational reforms: "(1) No smartphones before high school. Parents should delay children's entry into round-the-clock internet access by giving only basic phones (phones with limited apps and no internet browser) before ninth grade (roughly age 14); (2) No social media before 16. Let kids get through the most vulnerable period of brain development before connecting them to a fire hose of social comparison and algorithmically chosen influencers; (3) Phone free schools. In all schools from elementary through high school, students should store their phones, smartwatches, and any other personal devices that can send or receive texts in phone lockers or phone locked pouches during the school day. That is the only way to free up their attention for each other and for their teachers; (4) Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. That's the way children naturally develop social skills, overcome anxiety, and become self-governing adults." He argues these are not hard to implement, cost almost nothing and will work even if we never get help from our legislators.
Of course, not all parents are proactive in protecting their children, and it is the duty of governments to protect those who cannot protect themselves. It seems that screens-and-teens legislation is required to protect children, and this should be followed by regulation (perhaps as three levels: light, mild, and strict)—as is the case with all, well-established, long-lasting industries. This is probably the best current option and hope for a better future of social media.
Summary
In this article we have shown that:
- There is ample evidence that access to the internet is damaging children in many countries.
- Tech companies have a poor record on online safety and resist regulation that attempts to constrain unethical profit-driven behaviors including dangerous content and algorithms that direct innocent children to escalating engagement with dangerous consequences.
- Some jurisdictions, including Australia, Europe, and the U.K., are implementing online safety legislation.
It is uncertain how the ongoing struggle between the tech giants and governments trying to ensure online safety for children will play out. If eternal vigilance is the price of democracy, it seems that it is also the price of keeping our children safe in the bewildering online world.
References
[1] Ceci, L. U.K.: TikTok usage 2024, by age. Statista. May 13, 2024.
[2] Haidt, J. The Anxious Generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Allen Lane (Penguin Books), 2024.
[3] Twenge, J. and Blanchflower, D. G. Declining life satisfaction and happiness among young adults in six English-speaking countries. NBER Working Paper 33490. National Bureau of Economic Research. February 2025.
[4] Walker, A. Molly Russell: Prevention of future deaths report. Barnet Coroner's Court. Office of the Chief Coroner - Courts and Tribunals Judiciary. Oct. 13, 2022.
[5] Woodhouse, J. and Lalic, M. The impact of smartphones and social media on children. House of Commons Library. U.K. Parliament. May 13, 2024.
[6] Parentkind. Parent poll on smartphones. March 2024.
[7] Internet Watch Foundation. 'Exponential increase in cruelty' as sextortion scams hit younger victims. Aug. 23, 2024.
[8] eSafety Commissioner. Social media age restrictions. Australian Government. 2025.
[9] Mason, R. One in five Britons aged 18–45 prefer unelected leaders to democracy, poll finds. The Guardian. Jan. 13, 2025.
[10] Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. Guidance - Online Safety Act: explainer. HM Government. May 8, 2024. Updated April 24, 2025.
[11] Ofcom. Implementing the Online Safety Act: Protecting children from online pornography. HM Government. Dec. 5, 2023
[12] Walsh, M. A guide to the OSA and its implementation. Online Safety Act Network. May 14, 2025.
[13] Razzall, K. and Bell, S. Meta stops ex-director from promoting critical memoir. BBC News. March 13, 2025.
Authors
Kemal A. Delic is a senior visiting research fellow at the Centre for Complexity and Design at the Open University. He is the co-founder of AI-Inc, Ltd. and a lecturer at the University of Grenoble and the University of Sarajevo. He is an advisor and expert evaluator to the European Commission. He previously held positions as a senior enterprise architect and senior technologist and scientist at Hewlett-Packard.
Jeffrey Johnson is professor of complexity science and design at The Open University in the U.K., CEO of Vision Scientific Ltd, co-founder of AI-Inc, and a past president of the Complex Systems Society. His research interest is mathematical modelling and AI for policy in the design and management of public and private sector organizations.
Footnotes
1. Haidt's term "phone-based" is shorthand for any way of accessing the internet and social media. Phone-based includes "all of the internet-connected personal electronics that came to fill young people's time, including laptop computers, tablets, internet connected video games consoles and, most important, smartphones with millions of apps." By "play-based" Haight means children experiencing the "real world" through experiences less restricted than today.
2. Adam Becker's book More Everything Forever: AI overlords, space empires, and Silicon Valley's crusade to control the fate of humanity (Basic Books, 2025) gives a highly critical account of the actions and motivation of the tech billionaires.
Figures
Figure 1. Social media as an opinion megaphone and opinion inverter.
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