Why the World Is Drawing a Line on Social Media for Kids

What looked politically impossible just months ago has become a global movement to restrict kids’ access to social media. Here’s how it happened.

This essay was originally published at The Free Press.

Source: Shutterstock.

I just returned from 12 days in Davos, London, and Brussels, where my goal was to encourage political leaders to raise the minimum age to 16 for opening or having social media accounts in their countries. This is the second of my four norms for a healthier childhood, laid out in my book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. I met with leaders from Indonesia, France, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. Some have already acted decisively (Indonesia and France); the others are likely to do so. And just as I arrived home, Spain and the Netherlands announced that they would raise the age, too.

All of this happened less than two months after Australia enacted the world’s first nationwide age limit, which requires users to be 16 for opening or maintaining social-media accounts, and which puts the responsibility for enforcing the age limit on the platforms themselves.

The tide is turning, but I have been shocked by how quickly it is happening. Social media has been dominating kids’ attention for decades. Now, in the span of just a few weeks, the landscape has been transformed. What happened?

The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker can help explain it. His most recent book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life, explores the massive social change that can occur when widespread private knowledge suddenly becomes public knowledge. For example: Many people may privately know that a dictator is brutal, or that an ideology is bankrupt, yet nothing changes for many years until something happens that lets everyone know that everyone else knows it too, and that everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows. Once that threshold is crossed, new forms of coordination become possible. Social movements ignite. Regimes and walls fall. Norms can change almost overnight.

Hans Christian Andersen captured the same dynamic in his famous story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”: The emperor was naked and everyone could see it, but no one knew if others saw it, too—because the swindlers had spread the idea that only the wise could see the cloth. It took a child’s cry—“The emperor has no clothes!”—to convert private knowledge into public knowledge. What the child said was “whispered from one to another,” until the crowd finally cried out together.

This is what happened among leaders around the world in the month after Australia’s age limit went into effect.

When The Anxious Generation was published in 2024, many legislators saw a need for action to protect children, but there was a general reluctance to get too far ahead of the public. Restricting something widely used—and thought to be widely loved—seemed politically dangerous. Furthermore, critics declared that a social media age limit of 16 was impossible to implement and was sure to ultimately harm children.

But in Australia, leaders said damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. The first was Peter Malinauskas (premier of South Australia), who commissioned a report on how such a law could be drafted. He was soon joined by Chris Minns (premier of New South Wales), and then by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. All three were from the Labor Party, yet the law was passed with strong support from the right-leaning Liberal–National Coalition. The federal law was signed in November 2024 and it took effect December 10, 2025.

Just two days later, journalist Casey Newton offered his tech predictions for 2026 on the New York Times podcast Hard Fork. His highest-confidence prediction was that at least five democracies would follow Australia’s lead by the end of 2026. He recognized that we were about to see a rapid transformation of private knowledge into public knowledge.

Over the weeks that followed, the world learned two important lessons.

First, action is possible. Phase one of Australia’s rollout went smoothly. The companies complied. They closed down 4.7 million accounts that were held by 2.5 million Australian children between the ages of 8 and 15, and few adults were incorrectly shut out of their accounts. The sky did not fall. Of course, some kids will find ways around the law in the first year, but the burden is on the companies to enforce the age limit, and they will get better at doing so as technology companies develop ever more effective and privacy-preserving methods, and as norms change in Australian society.

Second, action is popular. As coverage of Australia’s law spread globally, it was met with an extraordinary amount of public support—from parents, journalists, and politicians on the left, the right, and the center. Other countries asked: Why can’t we do that, too? Many teens supported Australia’s law as well. As research shows, young people see the harms of social media. They feel trapped by it, and nearly half wish it had never been invented.

The whispering turned into a chorus.

In January, a few weeks after the Australian law went into effect, people discovered that they could use Elon Musk’s Grok to strip any woman or girl down to a pornified string bikini. To give just one disturbing example: Someone used Grok to show Renee Good in a bikini within hours of her being shot in the head by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis. The savagery of offering frictionless, free, nonconsensual deepfake porn triggered a global wave of revulsion in early January. These widespread expressions of disgust were further evidence that humanity now had common knowledge about the dangers of social media.

By the middle of January, everyone knew that everyone knew that governments can and should set minimum age rules for social media, and that doing so was an electoral winner.

So, when I arrived in Davos, Switzerland, last month, political leaders around the world had already realized that enacting an age-limit law would not put them out ahead of public opinion. In fact, public opinion was now far ahead of legislation. Polling confirmed what leaders already sensed intuitively: Parents around the world are begging for help. They feel overwhelmed by the digital tide. For years, they’ve watched social media hurt children. Many felt powerless to protect their own kids.

There is no magical age when comparing how many likes your photos get, or scrolling an endless stream of short videos when you should be sleeping, becomes good for you. Like any addictive consumer product that routinely exposes users to graphic sex, extreme violence, and anonymous sexual predators, social media in its current form causes a variety of harms to people of all ages. But we allow adults (often defined as age 18) to make decisions that are bad for them.

In The Anxious Generation, I proposed 16 as a pragmatic compromise—one aimed at shifting global norms quickly. I knew that advocating for 18 would likely take many years and risk total failure. Sixteen is also roughly the age by which a majority of adolescents have completed puberty: a sensitive period of neural reorganization during which it is extremely important to protect the brain.

France will impose its age limit at 15, and in my two conversations with President Emmanuel Macron, I came to understand why 15 is a culturally salient age in France. I support his decision to act decisively this year. Still, I urge countries that can enact 16 to do so. Each year of delay is a year of additional maturity and protection.

I cannot support any law that includes a “parental consent” exception—it defeats the central purpose of the law by dropping parents and children straight back into the same collective-action trap: “Please, Mom! All of my friends’ parents said yes!” I would rather see countries pass no law this year than a weak one with parental consent exemptions.

But I am confident that leaders understand this, and that they will move much more quickly and confidently in 2026 to pass minimum-age laws and other policies to protect children online.

So, bravo, Australia, France, Indonesia, Spain, and the Netherlands. And bravo to leaders in both major parties in the UK, and to leaders across the EU, who are likely to follow their lead.

The successes of the past few weeks are testaments to rapidly changing public knowledge and public sentiment. By this time next year this sentiment will be even stronger, and laws offering additional protections will be common. After all, now everyone knows that everyone knows that we can do this—and that we must.