Protecting minors on social media: beyond a ban

By María Martín · Head of Communications at GAD3.

One of the founding principles of the modern state is as simple as it is demanding: its primary function is to guarantee security. Max Weber put it clearly when he defined the state as the entity that holds the legitimate monopoly on the use of force to protect the common good. Rather than redistributing or regulating, the state exists to ensure that life in society is not a jungle.

The government’s recent proposal to ban access to social media for under-16s should be analysed from this basic premise. For beyond the stated good intentions, the measure reveals something disturbing: the implicit acknowledgement that the state has lost control of the digital world and has opted for the easiest route, which is not to exercise its natural authority, but to remove minors from the space where they now socialise, learn and build their identity.

The state left behind in the digital world

The digital world has left the State behind. For years, platforms were allowed to grow without clear rules, the attention economy was allowed to take precedence over user protection, and serious crimes were allowed to find refuge within opaque technological architectures. When the problem is finally acknowledged, the response is not to regulate that space, but to ban those who inhabit it most naturally: young people.

Would anyone suggest banning children from playing in the street because of crime? No. What society demands is greater vigilance, greater control, and greater institutional accountability. Families need the space to be safe for children, not for children to disappear from the space.

Why, in the digital world, do we accept exactly the opposite?

Thomas Hobbes warned that, without an authority capable of imposing order, life descends into constant conflict. The current problem is not that children are on social media, but that the state has relinquished its role in imposing order in the very place where much of social life now takes place. To ban is not to govern; it is to abdicate.

The data allows us to nuance the debate. According to the study ‘Perceptions on the impact of digital content consumption on children and adolescents’, carried out by GAD3 for Empantallados, Spanish parents do not perceive the digital environment as an exclusively negative space: they consider around 13 to be the appropriate age for a child’s first smartphone and 15 for access to social media, and they rate the impact of screens at 2.9 out of 5, reflecting a balanced view of risks and opportunities. Furthermore, actual usage confirms its social centrality: 93% of adolescents use digital platforms primarily to interact with others (study on Children and Adolescents in Digital Environments for the Orange Foundation, 2024). The issue, therefore, is not to keep children away from the digital environment, but to ensure that it is a safer and better-regulated space.

If you’d like to find out more about the Empantallados study or theel Fundación Orange, you can access their publications by clicking on the links.

The unmentioned effect

Public demand is clear: more state intervention in its essential role of protection, not fewer rights for minors. However, the political response reverses this logic. Access is restricted, responsibility is shifted onto families, and conflict with major tech companies operating on a global scale is avoided.

There is also a perverse effect that is scarcely mentioned: the ban pushes many minors to use social media clandestinely, without adult supervision or additional safeguards. This creates an even more opaque and potentially more dangerous environment.

Perhaps the fundamental question is this: at what point do we stop demanding that both the physical and digital worlds be safe places for our children and start accepting that the solution is to remove them from everyday life? The measure may be presented as protection, but it is, in reality, a symptom of weakness. And a state that is weak in its protective role ends up paying a high price, especially when it is children who are left unprotected.