The Magnifica Humanitas case for an under-16 social media ban

On June 15, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced a social media ban for children under 16 in Britain. Beginning in early 2027, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, X, and other similar platforms will be prohibited for kids.

England isn’t the first country to take this measure: Australia already implemented a similar ban last December. And they certainly will not be the last: A dozen other countries are actively moving in the same direction.

The US has not yet joined the list or announced any intention to—even though a majority of Americans now support such a ban.

But a powerful passage on the issue in Magnifica Humanitas, the first encyclical of the first American pope, could be just the thing to awaken the consciences of US legislators and policymakers and inspire them to take action—and soon.

Many experts have been increasingly concerned about the corrosive effects of social media on society. Even the people behind the technology have been sounding the alarm on their own industry—the 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma being a striking example. Fake news, attention fragmentation, and political polarization are among the major concerns, but underlying them all is the sheer addictiveness of the platforms, which are carefully engineered to keep users on them as often and as long as possible.

But no one has felt the corrosive effects of social media more than Gen-Z.

The social media boom has ushered in a startling collapse in mental wellness in young people, particularly young girls; anxiety and depression levels have skyrocketed, as have reports of cyberbullying, self-harm, and exposure to graphic content at earlier and earlier ages. The AI boom has only added gasoline to the fire, allowing tech companies to carefully tailor feeds and ads to their users.

Anecdotal evidence of this collapse abounds, but it’s also been painstakingly studied by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Haidt has tracked the devastating impact of social media on young people and recommended “four new norms” in response: (1) no smartphones before high school, (2) no social media before 16, (3) phone-free schools, and (4) more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. His research has received bipartisan support in the US, inspiring phone bans in schools from Arkansas to New York. It was also a key motivator in Australia’s move to ban social media for kids altogether—a move Haidt has publicly applauded.

But when it comes to a US ban in the vein of the UK or Australia, pundits seem to agree: Even if it were desirable, it’s highly improbable. A US ban, the thinking goes, faces a steep uphill climb in the courts over free speech concerns. (Haidt rejects this First Amendment argument, since the law already draws a line in the sand at 13. “This isn’t about who can say what,” he says. “The laws are written about at what age you can sign a contract.”)

What’s more, social media, smartphones, and AI are all homegrown products—the fruit of American innovation, nurtured on American soil and managed by American companies. And there are undeniably a host of benefits that these technologies can and do give, including to young people.

A social media ban would thus cut against some of the deepest instincts of our liberty-loving culture. Indeed, some in the US are already calling the UK law a Trojan horse for censorship of speech and digital ID enforcement for adults.

The American government made its position clear in a statement on the UK law issued by the US embassy: “The best answer to challenges posed by technology is almost always better technology, not broad bans or blunt regulatory instruments.” The onus, the statement goes on to say, ought to fall not on tech companies but on parents, who are “the first and best line of defense”: “The United States favors parental empowerment over government mandates.”

Enter Pope Leo XIV. The pontiff’s recently released social encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, takes up the theme of human dignity with a primary focus on artificial intelligence. Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology, a former Google employee who appeared in The Social Dilemma and who also supports the under-16 bans, met with the pope ahead of the encyclical’s release, and Tristan’s fellow cofounder Aza Raskin says that the document “marks a point on the human timeline of moral leaders standing up to push back against technological encroachment or overreach into our humanity.”

And in one of its most striking passages—paragraphs 141–142—Leo turns his attention to young people and social media. He begins by outlining the various negative impacts of “early and unsupervised exposure to digital devices and social media”: a loss of sleep, attention, and control of emotions; “easy access” to violent, pornographic, and corrupting content; the rise in “grooming, blackmail and the sexual exploitation of minors; “fake profiles” and AI-generated images and videos; isolation, cyberbullying, and the “pressures to share intimate images or sensitive information.”

But the pope then pivots to parents—the US embassy’s “first and best line of defense” against tech exploitation. And he begins with a trenchant observation: Parents are overwhelmed by the magnitude of this problem, and they need help. “It is difficult for parents by themselves,” Leo writes, “to resist the influence of business models that monetize attention and time. Therefore, it is essential to form an alliance among policy-makers, educational institutions and families that is capable of concretely supporting adults in this task.”

The issue, Leo seems to be suggesting, ultimately isn’t one of free speech or technology but the love of money—“a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Tim 6:10). And it has put parents between a rock and a hard place: Either succumb to crushing cultural pressures to digitize their child’s life, with all the attendant miseries that this entails, or become a kind of social pariah, swimming helplessly against the current. Thus, rather than “shifting the whole burden of control onto families,” the pope writes, legislators need to take concrete action to support them in protecting children: opposing “the immediate interests of platforms,” “holding service providers accountable,” and, yes, imposing age restrictions: “Interventions by legislators are appropriate for setting age limits.”

The pope, of course, is offering general principles for the whole world, not particular policies for one country. These two paragraphs alone speak of “young people,” “children,” “adolescents,” and “minors,” covering a broad range of possible ages—never mind the particular laws governments might enact.

But it would be difficult to harmonize this passage of Magnifica Humanitas with the statement of the US embassy, and much easier to do so with the bans in the UK and Australia. At the very least, it seems clear that, for Pope Leo, policymakers shouldn’t simply be leaving it to parents to sort it all out; to do so would be to fail the children “entrusted to our care”—socially, morally, and spiritually.

Is there another way forward—one that honors the concerns raised by the pope without resorting to a UK-style ban? Niall Gooch at First Things suggests an even more dramatic measure: Simply ban smartphones for under-sixteens, just like we do with nicotine and alcohol products. This would help keep social media out of children’s hands and pockets, but it would also ease fears about a government stranglehold on free speech online. (And after all, it’s not just social media that poses threats to young people, but also the easy access to the internet. Indeed, the pope himself introduces this crisis by speaking of both “digital devices and social media.”)

The editors of Newsweek, meanwhile, offer a more modest proposal: “Focus on age-appropriate design, safer defaults, limits on addictive features, privacy-preserving age assurance, better enforcement against harmful algorithmic recommendations, and statutory duties that place real burdens on platforms instead of symbolic burdens on parents.” A measure along these lines recently passed the state legislature in Minnesota, to the applause of the bishops there.

Either of these alternatives would certainly be preferable to the current laissez-faire state of affairs. But would either one be as viable and effective as a national ban on social media for kids?

The bottom line is that these technologies are causing great harm to our children on a massive societal scale. Something has to be done. But as Pope Leo exhorts, it can’t just be left to parents to do it.

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