Spain’s Social Media Ban: “The Problem Doesn’t Go Away. It Just Moves.”

I asked readers what they thought of Spain’s proposed ban on social media for children under 16. Tiina, a parent based in Spain, sent back a response that I think deserves more than a brief mention.

I am presenting her arguments here as she made them, with my own thoughts at the end. Not because I agree with everything she says, but because these are the right arguments to be having — and they rarely surface in the coverage that tends to dominate.

“Our government wants to be first”

Tiina’s first point is about motivation. Spain’s approach, which includes potential criminal liability for platform executives who fail to protect minors, has been framed internationally as bold and progressive. Tiina is more sceptical. She argues the Spanish government is largely seeking international recognition, moving quickly to be first in Europe on a high-profile issue without fully considering the consequences.

It is a reasonable thing to watch for. The political optics of being seen to protect children are powerful, and the evidence base for what actually works remains contested. Australia’s ban is less than six months old. The data on whether restrictions reduce harm, or simply displace it, is not yet in.

“Spanish kids are not Australian kids”

This is the argument I find most interesting. Tiina pushes back on the assumption that social media fills the same role in every country, pointing out that Spanish children still have significant in-person social infrastructure: local festivals, long family lunches, afternoons in town squares, and the kind of neighbourhood life that has largely disappeared from more urban or atomised settings elsewhere.

Her argument is not that the harms of social media are imaginary — it is that the severity of those harms may be partly a function of what children have in their offline lives. A child with rich in-person connection may use social media differently from a child for whom it is their primary social outlet. Treating the whole country as if it matches the data from one demographic, she argues, produces bad policy.

This matters for the UK debate too. The evidence most frequently cited in parliamentary arguments comes predominantly from US and Australian studies. Whether it translates directly to different social environments is a question that rarely gets asked.

“Fines are absorbed. Criminal liability is different.”

Tiina makes an interesting distinction on enforcement. She is sceptical that financial penalties change platform behaviour, arguing that a company generating billions in revenue simply treats fines as a cost of doing business while the government collects the revenue. Criminal liability for executives is a different matter. It introduces personal consequences that cannot be absorbed into a balance sheet.

She is not optimistic even about that, noting that criminal accountability in other areas of public life does not always produce the deterrent effect in theory. But the logic is sound. If the goal is to change how platforms are designed, the incentives need to be personal.

“The word banned creates the urge to do it”

Tiina’s forbidden fruit argument is one of the most frequently cited objections to age bans, and she puts it plainly: teenagers are wired to take risks, and prohibition makes a thing more attractive, not less. The moment a government declares social media off-limits for under-16s, it becomes something teenagers want.

There is genuine research on this. Reactance theory in psychology describes exactly this pattern — perceived restrictions on freedom tend to increase desire for the restricted thing. The question is whether the effect is large enough to outweigh the protective benefit of a ban. That is genuinely not settled.

Her alternative is closer to a speed limit model: not prohibition, but regulated access. Platforms could be required to set time limits for younger users, switch off algorithmic features, or restrict certain content types — with parents able to adjust settings for their own children. Regulation rather than removal.

“What about the children a ban leaves behind?”

This is where Tiina’s argument becomes hardest to dismiss. She raises two groups specifically.

The first is neurodiverse children, and children who are deaf or mute. For these children, online spaces are often not supplementary to in-person connection — they are the primary means of finding community, sharing experiences with people who understand them, and developing identity alongside peers facing similar challenges. A blanket ban removes that.

The second group is children in difficult home situations: parents going through divorce, domestic conflict, families in crisis. Tiina’s point is that for these children, the ability to find and speak to someone going through the same thing is significant. The online support that adults often dismiss as inferior to face-to-face connection may be the only support some children can access.

Both arguments apply equally to the UK debate, where they are rarely central to the conversation.

“The problem moves to 16, not away”

Tiina’s final argument is structural. If you ban social media for under-16s, you do not eliminate the exposure — you concentrate it. A child who has been completely restricted from social media encounters it at 16 with no experience managing it, no understanding of how it works on them, and no habits built up over years of graduated use. The same harms, unleashed all at once.

Her preferred approach is gradual education: teaching children to use social media correctly and safely, rather than removing it entirely and hoping they figure it out as adults.

These are not arguments you hear much in the mainstream coverage. Whether you agree with them or not, they are worth having a think about.