EDITORIAL - Curbing youths’ social media use

Starting with Australia last year, governments are limiting or studying ways of scaling back social media use among children.

A recent study should help policy makers consider a similar move in the Philippines, which has been dubbed as the bullying capital of the world, based on the country’s participation in the Program for International Student Assessment.

Social media use among children and adolescents was tackled in a special chapter of the 2026 World Happiness Report, released recently.

Authors Jonathan Haidt and Zachary Rausch of the Stern School of Business in New York University cited “overwhelming evidence of severe and widespread direct harms (such as sextortion and cyberbullying), and compelling evidence of troubling indirect harms (such as depression and anxiety)” arising from youths’ social media use.

“Furthermore, we show that the harms and risks to individual users are so diverse and vast in scope that they justify the view that social media is causing harm at a population level,” the authors wrote.

They based their findings on surveys of youths, parents, teachers and clinicians; content from corporate documents, and findings from other studies and natural experiments.

The report detailed the direct and indirect harm to young users of social media, including sleep deprivation, “sextortion” and sexual harassment, mental health problems as well as addiction and other forms of problematic use of social media.

Among the measures resorted to in certain countries are banning students’ use of smartphones in schools, and the installation of apps to accurately screen the age of anyone trying to access social media platforms, with those below age 16 barred.

Many parents may support similar measures in the Philippines, where teenagers have gone on homicidal rampages in schools or killed themselves because of harassment and cyberbullying.

If ever policy-makers decide to adopt similar curbs on social media use, proper enforcement must be ensured. Accurate screening for the age of prospective social media users could pose a problem in a country where millions of people are still not covered by the national identification system.

But in-depth studies can be conducted to determine a viable way of proceeding with such curbs, as the World Happiness Report noted that the removal of smartphones from schools is starting to produce educational benefits, while removing social media from early adolescence “is likely to produce mental health benefits.”