We owe children more than a ban

Opinion piece by Snežana Nikčević

Listening to the current debate, you would think children somehow wandered into the digital world by accident, as though one day they collectively decided to abandon playgrounds for smartphones and real conversations for Instagram. They didn't. We took them there. 

For more than two decades, we have treated digitalisation as synonymous with progress. Being "digitally ready" became a measure of success, not only for governments and businesses, but increasingly for children themselves. The problem was assuming that simply introducing more technology would somehow solve deeper social, educational and institutional challenges.

We created digital spaces shaped by business models built around attention, engagement and data extraction. We allowed platforms to become central to childhood before demanding that they become safe for children. And now, after years of pushing young people into a digital environment we failed to shape responsibly, our solution is not to fix that environment. It is to remove children from it. Children don't magically become immune to manipulation on their fifteenth birthday. An algorithm doesn't suddenly become less addictive because a user is one day older. The problem hasn't disappeared. We've simply postponed the encounter. 

And instead of saying social media accelerates problems, I'd go even further: social media industrialises them. Because that's really what algorithms do. They don't invent cruelty. They optimise it, amplify it, monetise it and distribute it at scale. 

One thing keeps bothering me whenever I hear politicians talk about protecting children online. We speak as if social media created bullying, as if Instagram invented misogyny, as if TikTok gave birth to sexual violence, harassment, humiliation or exploitation. It didn't. These are not digital problems. They are societal problems. Social media did not invent these problems. It gave them better infrastructure. It made them faster. Louder. More visible. And, perhaps most importantly, profitable.

If we convince ourselves that social media is the cause, then banning social media starts to feel like the obvious solution. The harms we are trying to protect children from, such as peer violence, organised harassment, misogyny, sexual violence, blackmail and exploitation, did not emerge because social media exists. Banning a platform does not teach empathy. It does not fund school psychologists. It does not help parents have difficult conversations. It does not improve media literacy. It does not make institutions respond more effectively when a child reports abuse. And it certainly does not change the business models that reward outrage, conflict and endless engagement. If those things remain exactly as they are today, then what have we actually solved? Children eventually grow up. They eventually return to the same digital ecosystem. The algorithms are still there. The manipulative design is still there. The incentives are still there. The only difference is that we've convinced ourselves we've done something. 

It is also worth remembering that the same digital spaces where abuse can occur are also the places where many children first seek information, support and disclosure when they feel unable to approach adults. That should make us cautious about treating exclusion as a universal form of protection. 

Banning children is what governments do when regulating platforms becomes too difficult

Think about what has happened over the past decade. We have accumulated a lot of evidence about how large social media platforms operate. We know recommendation algorithms amplify harmful content. We know engagement-driven business models reward sensationalism and polarisation. We know manipulative design keeps users online longer than they intended. We know children are particularly vulnerable to these systems because they are still developing emotionally, socially and cognitively. None of this is controversial anymore. The platforms know it. Researchers know it. Regulators know it. Governments know it. So the obvious question should be: why aren't we changing the systems that create these harms?

Instead, we're increasingly changing the rules for children, because banning children is politically much easier than redesigning the digital economy. It is easier to introduce an age limit than to confront business models built around surveillance, profiling and engagement. It is easier to restrict a fourteen-year-old than to require billion-dollar companies to fundamentally redesign products that generate billions in advertising revenue. It is easier to regulate access than to regulate power. That is why I struggle to see these bans as signs of political strength.

There is another issue that deserves far more attention than it receives. Age verification is not a neutral technical fix. It requires collecting and processing personal data, raising serious questions about privacy, data protection, children's rights, but also human rights in general. And I have not even begun to address the obvious risks of surveillance and abuse that such infrastructures inevitably invite.

The irony is that policymakers already know what a more ambitious approach looks like. For example, the European Union's Digital Services Act does not begin with the assumption that children should be removed from online spaces. It begins with the premise that platforms have responsibilities. Very large online platforms must assess systemic risks, mitigate harms for minors, redesign dangerous features, improve transparency and reduce manipulative practices. Researchers at the London School of Economics argue that age bans risk addressing the visible symptom while leaving the underlying architecture of online harm intact. Amnesty International has made a similar point, warning that protecting children online starts with platform design, accountability and enforcement rather than simply excluding youngest users. 

We know far more today than we did ten years ago. The evidence is no longer the problem. Political action is. What I find difficult to understand is that, despite this growing evidence, political momentum is moving in a different direction. Researchers are asking how platforms should change. Governments are increasingly asking how children should.

But I also think that the deeper point is this: Bans transfer responsibility. Not on the companies that designed the platforms. Not on the regulators who failed to intervene earlier. Not on governments that underinvested in education, child protection or mental health. Ultimately, the person expected to change their behaviour is the child. That should give us pause. When the least powerful actor in the system carries the greatest burden of adaptation, something has gone fundamentally wrong.

If bans are the answer, where is the evidence?

Perhaps the most surprising thing I discovered while researching this was not how much evidence exists about social media harms. It was how little evidence exists that blanket bans are the solution. Listening to political debates, one could easily conclude that the case has already been settled, that restricting children's access is the obvious next step. Take Australia, frequently presented as the example. Millions of accounts have reportedly been removed or restricted since the introduction of age-verification measures, and those figures are often cited as proof that decisive action works. But they do not prove that. Even Australia's own eSafety Commissioner is careful to distinguish between accounts and individual users. 

Children can create multiple accounts, migrate between platforms or find ways around restrictions. More importantly, account removals tell us almost nothing about the outcomes we actually care about. Have rates of bullying declined? Have children reported fewer experiences of online exploitation? Has anxiety decreased? Are schools dealing with fewer incidents? Are parents receiving better support? Has children's overall well-being improved? Those are the questions that matter. They are also the questions for which, at least so far, there are remarkably few answers. That should matter because democracies are not supposed to restrict rights simply because doing so feels reassuring. They are expected to demonstrate that restrictions are necessary, proportionate and effective.  

When Albania moved to block TikTok nationwide, the Constitutional Court ruled that the government had not sufficiently demonstrated that such a restriction satisfied the constitutional requirements. The decision did not declare that governments can never regulate digital platforms. It simply reaffirmed a basic democratic principle: rights cannot be restricted merely because policymakers believe doing so is desirable. They must demonstrate why such restrictions are justified.  

I am not arguing that governments should do nothing. Quite the opposite. Children deserve serious protection. But serious protection deserves serious evidence. And that is precisely what seems to be missing from much of the current political debate. 

We demand evidence before approving medicines, we demand evidence before approving bridges, we demand evidence before changing educational curricula, and so on; yet when it comes to restricting millions of children's participation in digital spaces that have become part of everyday education, culture, communication and civic life, political confidence often seems to arrive much faster than evidence-based consensus. 

Perhaps that is because bans are visible. They produce headlines. They communicate decisiveness. They reassure anxious parents that something is being done. But visibility is not the same as effectiveness. And we should be particularly careful not to mistake symbolic policy for successful policy.

Montenegro cannot simply copy European regulation without European institutions.

Now, my country, Montenegro, enters the story. Not because our debate is unique. But because it illustrates a much broader problem. The proposal for the Draft law on the protection of children in the digital space, submitted in June this year, appears to borrow heavily from the logic of European digital regulation. The proposal assumes a regulatory capacity that Montenegro (a country with a little over 600.000 people) simply does not possess. It borrows concepts from the European Union's Digital Services Act while operating outside the institutional ecosystem that makes the DSA enforceable. It is particularly difficult to understand why the proposal seeks to replicate elements of the Digital Services Act as the legal basis for a national ban when Montenegro is already developing a dedicated implementation law for the DSA through the competent institutions, in close cooperation with the European Union. That framework will become applicable upon accession and is specifically designed to regulate digital services within the EU's institutional enforcement architecture, not as a standalone national instrument.

This proposal arrives in a country where regulatory institutions remain under-resourced, public administration continues to face significant implementation challenges, data protection authorities have limited capacity, and major legislative reforms have frequently been adopted without sufficiently robust public consultation or implementation planning. None of these problems disappears because Parliament adopts another law. Even the language of the proposal deserves closer scrutiny. Public discussion has framed this as a ban on social media. The proposal itself speaks of digital platforms. Those are not synonymous. One is a familiar political slogan. The other is a legal category with considerably broader implications. Before asking whether such a restriction is justified, we should first know precisely what is being restricted. And if the state cannot effectively supervise compliance, protect children's personal data, oversee age-verification systems or regulate cross-border digital services, we are also talking about a practical governance problem. 

There is a recurring tendency in Montenegro's legislative process to confuse legislative ambition with institutional capacity. Passing a law is treated as if it were equivalent to solving a problem. It is not. Laws do not enforce themselves. Institutions do. 

If we want children to become adults capable of defending democracy, why are we teaching them that when a problem becomes too difficult to govern, the answer is to stay away from it?

Criticising a proposal is easy. So let me be clear. I do not believe children should simply be left alone in today's digital environment. Social media exposes children to bullying, exploitation, misogyny, self-harm content and countless other risks. Pretending otherwise would be irresponsible. 

The question has never been whether children need protection. The question is what meaningful protection actually looks like. If there is one lesson that emerges from my research, it is this: there is no single intervention capable of making children safer online. The problem was never purely technological. It is educational. Psychological. Economic. Institutional. Legal. And ultimately social.

We, as adults, pushed technology into every corner of children's lives. We ignored the structural problems, failed to regulate the platforms, failed to build institutions capable of protecting children, and failed to ask whether the digital world we were creating was one we would actually want them to be a part of. If our states have become too weak to govern Big Tech, the solution cannot be to govern children instead. 

We live in a society where a handful of companies increasingly shape how we communicate, learn, think and participate, while democratic institutions struggle to keep up. A society where people are becoming products, attention becomes currency, and public interest gives way to commercial interest. 

If this is the world our children are inheriting, then our responsibility is not to teach them to retreat from it. It is to raise a generation capable of changing it. A generation that thinks critically, questions power, defends democracy, stands for human rights, protects nature, fights for social justice and refuses to accept that people exist simply to be measured, profiled and monetised.

We owe them more than a ban.