After Nepal restricted 26 social media sites in September 2025, the country witnessed massive, youth-dominated riots. Three months later, Australia passed a controversial ban preventing children under 16 from having social media accounts. Within the United States, eight states have laws that outright ban social media, require parental consent or limit screen time for social media accounts for minors, or those below 16. From restricting use of social media apps at night to enforcing parental controls on youth accounts, the conversation around social media has shifted from a parental concern to a legislative priority.

Restrictions on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube have grown as concerns over youth mental health intensify. According to a social media advisory from the U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, adolescents who use social media over three hours a day have double the risk of poor mental health outcomes — most notably depression and anxiety. This finding has led many countries to attempt partial restrictions by limiting screen time or restricting the creation of accounts.

These concerns aren’t limited to health professionals; teenagers are increasingly aware of the harm social media can cause. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2024, 48% of teenagers aged 13 to 17 said social media has a mostly negative effect on their generation, a 16% increase since 2022. West High student Isabel Aronson ’29 spends her summers in China, a country with harsher social media restrictions. She has noticed how a reduction in social media use improves face-to-face interactions.

“[Everyone] is more present, even the older people,” Aronson said. “They’re outside, in nature and hanging around in parks. They’re more human-like.”

Alongside mental health concerns, social media bans have also been directed towards political censorship. Nepal’s social media ban was fueled by internet trends highlighting its wealth inequality issues. This backfired with in-person protests, leading to the ban being rolled back only a few days later. Protesters then used their regained internet access to organize further protests under calls for transparency from the national government, culminating in the prime minister’s resignation and the election of an interim government through social media.

West student Thomas Gao ’29 is mainly concerned about the implications social media restrictions have on what information is available to the public.

“Social media bans are sometimes valid, but sometimes they’re going overboard. For example, China’s firewall bans YouTube and [other social media platforms], so, only their propaganda is shown to the public,” Gao said.

Yet, attempts at network-level bans like Nepal’s bans are never entirely successful. One of the most common ways to avoid these bans is through virtual private networks, a service that masks the user’s IP address and location. During the brief period in which Nepal’s ban existed, Proton VPN — a popular VPN hosting company — reported a spike of 80 times as many downloads as normal. West computer science teacher George Alexander explains the functionality of using VPNs.

“VPNs disguise where the traffic from your device is coming from. If I were watching a baseball game that was blocked in Iowa, I [could] just log into a VPN. Then, as far as my internet service provider is concerned, I’m not coming from Iowa anymore. I’m watching from whatever VPN I signed into, and that could be anywhere in the world,” Alexander said. 

Instead of focusing on restricting the locations that users can access certain services, many governments have turned to requiring parental permission for social media accounts. In 2025, state representative Bobby Kaufmann introduced Iowa House Bill 278. Later renamed to House Bill 798, this bill proposed requiring social media companies to obtain parental authorization before allowing minors to create accounts. American history teacher Scott Jespersen compares social media to other regulated forms of media. He believes that any large-scale bans will allow parental permission to exempt individuals, due to the precedent set by music and movies.

“The internet itself has really been an interesting subject for free speech, because it’s a completely different platform. If people know what they’re doing, saying [and] seeing, that’s something that falls under parental control,” Jespersen said.

Even with methods to avoid social media bans, through technology or with permission, Alexander stresses that it would still have significant effects on the proportion of students who use that technology.

“The thing about any kind of ban on a technological innovation, website or app is it’s going to be circumvented,” Alexander said. “That doesn’t mean that there’s no purpose in [the legislation]. If a state or a country were to outlaw social media for minors, not everybody is going to be motivated to access that anymore.”

While only applying to youth, Aronson thinks that a potential Iowa ban would be a net positive for many.

“There’s obviously some positives and negatives, but I think we would benefit from just being more alive and being more in the moment, instead of just being on our phones all the time,” Aronson said.

As a teacher, Jespersen’s concerns lie with the lack of media literacy surrounding information on social media. He believes that banning social media would only address symptoms of a larger problem: misinformation.

“You’re picking and choosing pieces of a problem that’s much greater than social media. You can get the same amount of garbage on cable television,” Jespersen said.

According to a 2025 Pew Research Center poll, over half of U.S. adults report getting their news from social media sometimes or often. While Jespersen recognizes that social media is often blamed as a cause of misinformation, he thinks that the best solution for improving media skills is education. 

“Half the population in this country has a TikTok account, and that is where they’re getting news and information. That’s [why] they need to be able to have the skills to recognize bias, fake news, poor journalism and [ask] where this information is coming from. Those are more important to teach than to ban [social media] and have them figure it out by themselves,” Jespersen said. “You have to educate people. If you don’t want somebody to see something that’s uncomfortable, [and you] just ban it; there’s no learning there.”

Although social media has problems, Gao believes that the interactions facilitated through social media allow individuals to connect on a deeper level. 

“I consider [social media] mostly a good thing. It gives me the news, entertainment and ways to communicate with people with similar interests,” Gao said.

Overall, Jespersen concludes that the most effective way to restrict social media would be to target the companies. He considers banning to only encourage youth to find work arounds, while many of the problems with social media platforms could be fixed with stronger moderation.

“Why can’t there be [system where] social media platforms allowing a bunch of misinformation [receive] some sort of penalty that will get them to change it?” Jespersen said. “I don’t want to sound like the grumpy old government teacher. I just seriously think that we’re looking in the wrong place.”