Supporters of the British government’s plan to ban under-16s from using major social-media platforms were boosted by news from the US last week. During a California federal trial, Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, agreed to an out-of-court settlement worth up to $18 billion over various states’ claims that its products were intentionally designed to keep young users ‘hooked’ on social media. For advocates of a social-media ban, this has been treated as yet further proof that Instagram, TikTok and the rest are bad for kids’ health.

But does the evidence really support a social media ban? Not exactly.

To be clear, I do not think that social media is harmless. So-called doom-scrolling, cyberbullying and misinformation are problems. The question is how harmful social media can be relative to its benefits.

When we look at the evidence for the harms caused by social-media consumption, there are no strong answers within academic circles. For a start, the data are not exactly reliable. According to a 2021 meta-analysis in Nature Human Behaviour, researchers found that the self-reported social-media use used for research correlates only moderately with participants’ actual logged social-media use. In other words, self-reports are rarely an accurate reflection of actual behaviour. Great swathes of extant stats, therefore, are very unreliable. Indeed, the authors of the Nature Human Behaviour paper have argued elsewhere that official concerns over screen-time guidance are ill-founded, as so many people either under- or over-report their own usage.

Likewise, in Clinical Psychological Science, researchers Matti Vuorre and Andrew Przybylski note that over the past two decades, during which large swathes of the world’s population have gained access to internet and mobile broadband, any changes in global wellbeing and mental health have been inconsistent. These findings undercut the claim that social-media use is causing mental-health problems.

Other studies also cast doubt on some of the more hyperbolic claims about young people’s social-media use. In 2019, researchers at the University of Oxford carried out a study of 300,000 adolescents and parents in the UK and the US, and found that only 0.4 per cent of wellbeing in adolescents is associated with technology use. Comparatively, eating potatoes has nearly as negative an effect on adolescent mental health as screen use (although they do not specify whether it’s chips or dauphinoise).

In 2020, an eight-year longitudinal study, involving 500 participants, looking at the relationship between time spent using social media and depression, was published in Computers in Human Behaviour. The researchers found that increased time spent on social media did not lead to increased mental-health issues.

I admit, I am cherry-picking certain pieces of research that disrupt current narratives around social-media studies. There are plenty of other studies, all of which are highly credible, that do show social media’s negative impact on young people’s mental health. But what the contrary findings and pieces of research show is that nothing is settled in this debate. The case for a blanket social-media ban is simply not supported by the available evidence.

Young people are certainly growing up in a very different environment to that of their parents and grandparents. Their development has effectively been digitised. But what tends to be downplayed in arguments over social-media bans is that parents have enabled this digitisation. As Ofcom statistics show, 83 per cent of 11-year-olds own a mobile phone – they are not buying these devices themselves. Just as parents are responsible for their kids having smartphones, so they should be responsible for regulating their usage. The government certainly shouldn’t be supplanting parental responsibility by stepping in with a social-media ban.

There is no evidence that a ban would be effective anyway. When asked, 56 per cent of children did not believe it would work. As we are seeing in Australia, after its government’s own foray into social-media prohibition, over 80 per cent of children are still using platforms they’re supposed to be banned from. Worse, the Molly Rose Foundation, set up in memory of Molly Russell to campaign against ‘tech-facilitated self-harm and suicide’, found that 14 per cent of Australian children now feel less safe online, as they have migrated to less well-regulated platforms.

It seems clear that a social-media ban is neither supported by existing evidence, nor does it work in practice. Yet thanks to a moral panic, too many seem keen on further state regulation of ours and our children’s private lives. To all the other assaults on our everyday liberties, we may soon be adding a ban on Instagram, TikTok and the rest. This is policymaking with no evidence base.