If Kids Are Going to Be Taken Off Social, They Need Full Democratic Rights
This column is published by Zócalo Public Square Image created with Google Gemini.
Save the children.
And restore democracy.
By banning everyone age 18 and older from social media. Yes, 18 and older. Effective immediately.
We adults are having the wrong conversation about digital safety. Every week, more grave-faced politicians in more countries declare that we must keep children and teenagers from social media. They claim to be protecting the kids, while ignoring the fact that most unhinged people online are old enough to vote.
If any demographic has proven it cannot handle an unmoderated feed, it is fully grown adults.
Ask yourself: Who is getting scammed out of their life savings by AI-generated deepfakes of celebrity influencers promising cryptocurrency riches? Adults.
Who is spending five hours a night arguing with obvious bot accounts on X over political conspiracies? Adults.
Who just turned your family reunion into a gladiatorial deathmatch because of a meme shared by an uncle who still thinks the cloud has something to do with weather? Adults.
We adults already possess a monopoly on formal societal power.
We control the ballot box. Only we can vote on candidates, ballot measures, and public spending. We control institutional access. Only we can serve on juries or corporate boards, write regulations, or run for public office. And we control law and finance, with our exclusive ability to sell or mortgage legal property, sign binding contracts, or practice law.
If adults ban ourselves from social media tomorrow, what do we really lose? A few million ranting threads about dog-walking, Donald Trump, and our diminishing sex drives? Adults would still retain 100% of institutional power. For adults, social media is an unnecessary, toxic luxury, set atop a full suite of rights.
Which is why social media should be reserved exclusively for people under the age of 18. They are the only demographic that genuinely needs its communications power.
When you are 12, as my youngest child is now, you cannot vote. And if you show up to city council, the mayor will smile and patronizingly call you a “leader of tomorrow” and then vote to pave your local park for a data center. For minors, the digital public square is the only public square.
Now, I’d like to stop the column here, but I can’t. Because there’s a structural flaw in my brilliant idea to make social media under-18 only.
Picture a passionate 16-year-old in the Argentine pampas who creates a video exposing the environmental harm of cattle waste. The post gets one million views! But in a world of child-only social, every single person who sees her video is another kid who cannot vote, pass legislation, or levy taxes on corporations. An adult-free social media would be a sandbox for kids, easily ignored by adults as they go on adding to the national debt or subsidizing fossil fuels.
So, in the name of fairness and democracy, if lawmakers insist on proceeding with their sweeping youth restrictions—like Australia’s world-first under-16 social media ban, age restrictions in California and other states, or the European regulatory crackdown—they must give the kids something in return.
Namely, full legal and political rights.
Put another way: if you seal off the only digital public square to protect your adult selves, you must open the doors of reali-life governments.
What does this mean? Give every citizen, regardless of age, an automatic ballot. Also remove age floors for public office. Allow teenagers to run for Congress, state legislatures, and school boards. I’ve spent enough time in provincial parliaments and city councils worldwide to assure you that many adult politicians are less mature than the kids I coach in Southern California youth baseball.
Don’t stop there. Give minors full deliberative rights, contractual agency, and formal representation in every single hallway of power.
Call my concept crazy, if you like, but what’s truly insane is what adults are doing now: stripping away the only megaphone the youth population possesses, while keeping the door to institutional power padlocked from the inside.
And, since the kids probably aren’t reading this column, how about we adults be honest about what is really driving the global stampede toward youth social media bans?
Yes, governments frame these laws around mental health and screen time, and to be fair, predatory platform design is a genuine problem. Lawsuits like the one U.S. filed against Meta, forcing a $17 billion settlement and an agreement to remove addictive features, are good. But, let’s not pretend the sudden political urge to lock teens out of their phones is wholly benevolent. Instead, let’s admit that we’re afraid that our kids might take our power away.
Over the past decade, global youth activism—Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future climate movement, the gun-control student organizing March for Our Lives, anti-authoritarian youth movements waving the One Piece flag—has been successful because kids could turn ubiquitous social media platforms into decentralized political weapons. Using social media, the kids have live-streamed state violence, embarrassed corrupt and incompetent adult institutions, and overthrown the governments of Nepal and Bangladesh.
A generation of politicians who built careers on billionaire donors and closed party lists is now being held accountable by teenagers with smartphone cameras and millions of followers.
So, is it any wonder that, under the cover of protecting the children, the adult political establishment wants to confiscate kids’ phones?
If adults want to ban social media to save ourselves from their own worst impulses, by all means, let’s all delete our accounts today. But if policymakers are going to force youth off the digital stage, they had better be ready to hand over full political and legal rights first.
You shouldn’t get to silent kids’ voices at the same time that you’re holding on to the keys to their future.
