As social media age restrictions spread, is the internet entering its Victorian era?

A wave of proposals to ban social media for young people has swept the world recently, fueled by growing concern about the apparent harm TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat can cause to vulnerable minds.

Australia was the first to announce restrictions on people under 16 with social media accounts. New Zealand may soon follow suit, and Denmark’s prime minister recently said his country would ban social media for under-15s, accusing cell phones and social media of “stealing our children’s childhood.”

The measures are part of a growing international trend: the United Kingdom, France, Norway, Pakistan and the United States are now considering or implementing similar restrictions, often requiring parental consent or verification of a digital identity.

On the surface, these policies appear to be aimed at protecting young people from mental health issues, explicit content, and addictive design. But behind the language of security lies something else: a change in cultural values.

These bans reflect a sort of moral shift, one that risks reviving conservative notions that predate the Internet. Could we be entering a new Victorian era of the Internet, where young people’s digital lives are reshaped not only by regulation but also by a reassertion of moral control?

Moral decline of the police

The Victorian era was marked by rigid social codes, modest dress, and formal communication. Public behavior was tightly regulated, and schools were seen as key places for socializing children along gender and class hierarchies.

Today, we see echoes of this in the way “digital well-being” is defined. Screen time apps, detox retreats, and “dumb” phones are marketed as tools for cultivating a “healthy” digital life, often with moral overtones. The ideal user is calm, focused and restrained. The impulsive, distracted, or emotionally expressive user is pathologized.

This framing is particularly evident in the work of Jonathan Haidt, psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation, a central text of the age restriction movement. Haidt argues that social media accelerates performative behaviors and emotional dysregulation among young people.

Seen in this light, young people’s digital lives involve a decline in psychological resilience, increasing polarization, and an erosion of shared civic values, rather than being a symptom of complex developmental or technological changes. This helped popularize the idea that social media is not only harmful but corrupt.

Yet the data behind these claims is disputed. Critics have pointed out that Haidt’s conclusions often rely on correlational studies and selective interpretations.

For example, while some research links heavy social media use to anxiety and depression, other studies suggest that the effects are modest and vary widely depending on context, platform, and individual differences.

What is missing from much of the debate is recognition of the agency of young people, or their ability to navigate online spaces in intelligent, creative and social ways.

Indeed, the digital lives of young people are not limited to passive consumption. It is a site for literacy, expression and connection. Platforms such as TikTok and YouTube have fostered a renaissance in oral and visual communication.

Young people are assembling memes, remixing videos and engaging in rapid editing to produce new forms of storytelling. These are not signs of decline but of literacies in evolution. Regulating access for young people without recognizing these skills risks suppressing the new in favor of preserving the familiar.

Regulate platforms, not young people

This is where the Victorian metaphor comes in handy. Just as Victorian norms sought to maintain a particular social order, current age restrictions risk imposing a narrow view of what digital life should look like.

On the surface, terms like “brain rot” seem to express the harms of excessive Internet use. But in practice, they are often used by teenagers to laugh and resist the pressures of 24/7 hustle culture.

But concerns about young people’s digital habits seem rooted in fear of cognitive differences — the idea that some users are too impulsive, too irrational, too deviant.

Young people are often portrayed as unable to communicate properly, hiding behind screens and avoiding phone calls. But these changes in habits reflect broader changes in our relationship with technology. The expectation to be always available, always responsive, ties us to our devices in a way that makes disconnecting truly difficult.

Age restrictions may address some symptoms, but they don’t address the underlying design of the platforms designed to let us scroll, share, and generate data.

If society and governments are serious about protecting young people, perhaps the best strategy is to regulate digital platforms. Legal scholar Eric Goldman calls the age restriction approach a “separate and delete” strategy, one that punishes young people rather than holding platforms accountable.

We will never prohibit children from accessing playgrounds, but we expect these spaces to be safe. Where are the security barriers for digital spaces? Where is the duty of vigilance of digital platforms?

The popularity of social media bans suggests a resurgence of conservative values ​​in our digital lives. But protection must not come at the expense of autonomy, creativity or expression.

For many, the Internet has become a moral battleground where values ​​around attention, communication and identity are fiercely contested. But it is also a social infrastructure, which young people are already shaping thanks to new literacies and forms of expression.

Protecting them from this threat risks removing the skills and voices that could help us build a better digital future.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.