A psychologist who has studied teen mental health for 25 years says social media bans will make things worse
Candice Odgers argues the adults in the room, not the apps, are the bigger danger to young people online. Her case is worth hearing.
Key points
- Candice Odgers, a Canadian psychologist, has researched adolescent mental health for 25 years.
- Odgers says adult men are the primary perpetrators of sextortion, which is the crime of threatening to share someone's private images unless they pay money or comply with demands.
- She argues that teenage social media bans are likely to increase harm rather than reduce it.
- Her research points to Covid-19's aftermath and the mental health of parents and caregivers as bigger drivers of teen distress than screen time.
Candice Odgers has a simple thought experiment she uses to make a point. The fastest way to make the internet safer for children, she says, would be to remove all adult men from it. Men commit the overwhelming majority of sextortion offences and are the most likely group to spread health misinformation online.
She is not actually calling for that. "That would be crazy, right? It would be unfair," she told The Guardian. The point is sharper than it sounds: if we are serious about online harm, we keep pointing at the wrong people.
Odgers has spent a quarter-century studying how adolescents develop and what derails them. She is deeply sceptical of the current political push to ban teenagers from social media platforms. Her view is blunt. Bans do not fix the underlying problems, and cutting young people off from online connection could leave the most vulnerable ones more isolated, not less.
Won't keeping teens off social media protect them?
Not straightforwardly, no. Odgers argues that the evidence linking social media use directly to poor mental health in teenagers is far weaker than the headlines suggest. The larger forces battering young people, in her reading of the research, are the long fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic and the mental health struggles of the adults raising them. A struggling parent or caregiver shapes a teenager's wellbeing in ways that a TikTok feed simply cannot match.
That does not mean social media is harmless. Real dangers exist: sextortion, predatory adults, and the spread of false medical information can all reach teenagers through their phones. But Odgers's argument is that the policy conversation keeps treating platforms as the single lever worth pulling, while ignoring the adults who do the most damage and the social conditions that make young people vulnerable in the first place.
Banning teenagers may also be harder to enforce than politicians promise, and could drive young people toward darker, less moderated corners of the internet where there are genuinely no guardrails.
Survivorship bias matters here too. The teens whose parents cite social media as a problem are not the whole picture. For plenty of isolated young people, an online community is one of the few places they find belonging.
The honest takeaway: Before supporting any social media age-ban policy, ask what it actually does to the adults causing the documented harms, and what replaces the genuine connection some teenagers get online. A policy that ignores both questions is probably incomplete.
