The Great Under-16 Disconnect: Are Social Media Bans the Answer—or Just Good Business for Big Tech?

There’s something unprecedented happening across the globe right now. From Sydney to Copenhagen, governments are pulling the plug on teenagers’ ability to scroll, snap, and share. Australia just became the first country to ban social media for everyone under 16, effective as of December 2025. Denmark is planning to follow suit with an under-15 ban. France, Spain, Norway, Brazil, and even the EU Parliament are all moving in the same direction.

The reason? Mental health. Rising suicide rates among Gen Z. Cyberbullying. Eating disorders. The whole toxic cocktail that comes with infinite scrolling and algorithmic manipulation designed to keep young eyeballs glued to screens.

But here’s where it gets interesting: while parents and politicians are cheering these restrictions as a victory for child safety, there’s a nagging question nobody’s really addressing. Could these bans actually be the best thing that ever happened to Meta, Snap, and TikTok?

What’s Happening in the United States?

The U.S. hasn’t passed a nationwide ban—yet. But it’s coming. The Kids Off Social Media Act (KOSMA), reintroduced in January 2025, has bipartisan support and advanced out of the Senate Commerce Committee in February. The bill would ban anyone under 13 from creating social media accounts and prohibit algorithmic recommendations for users under 17.

That’s right: no more personalized feeds for teenagers. No more TikTok’s eerily accurate “For You” page. Just chronological feeds of content from people they actually chose to follow.

Several states aren’t waiting around. Florida signed a ban on under-14s using certain platforms last year. Virginia now limits teens under 16 to one hour per day on social media unless parents give explicit consent. Texas, Utah, Arkansas, Louisiana, California, and New York have all introduced various restrictions, though many face legal challenges from NetChoice—a lobbying group representing Meta and Google—arguing these laws violate First Amendment rights.

The irony? The same companies fighting these restrictions in court are already implementing age verification systems in Australia and planning for similar rollouts elsewhere.

The $11 Billion Question

Let’s talk money. A 2022 Harvard study found that social media companies collectively made over $11 billion in U.S. advertising revenue from minors. That’s billion with a “b.”

Snapchat derived 41% of its entire 2022 ad revenue from users under 18. TikTok? 35%. YouTube pulled in 27%, and Instagram—despite having a much larger overall user base—still generated 16% of its ad revenue from minors.

Breaking it down further, Instagram alone made $4 billion in ad revenue from users aged 13-17, followed by TikTok at $2 billion and YouTube at $1.2 billion. Snapchat may be less talked about than TikTok these days, but it’s absolutely dominated by young users—over 75% of Snapchat users are under 35, with teens making up the core audience.

So yes, these bans will hurt. But maybe not as much as you’d think.

The Historic Power of Young Users

You’re absolutely right to remember that Instagram and Snapchat were built on the backs of young users. When Instagram launched in 2010, it exploded among teens and young adults who wanted a more visual, less cluttered alternative to Facebook. By 2017, surveys showed that 83% of U.S. teens used Snapchat monthly, and 82% used Instagram.

Facebook saw this coming. That’s why Zuckerberg spent $1 billion to acquire Instagram in 2012 when it was just a two-year-old startup with 30 million users. Four years later, he dropped $19 billion on WhatsApp. These weren’t just acquisitions—they were insurance policies against irrelevance.

The pattern is clear: younger generations don’t want to use the same platforms as their parents. Facebook learned this the hard way when it lost three million users under 25 in 2018 alone. Instagram and Snapchat became the escape routes. TikTok became the nuclear option.

So Why Aren’t Social Media Giants Panicking?

Here’s the twist: these age restrictions might actually cement the dominance of existing platforms rather than threaten them.

Think about it. Who has the resources to build sophisticated age verification systems that comply with regulations across dozens of different countries, each with slightly different requirements? Meta. Google. ByteDance. Snap. Maybe Microsoft.

Who doesn’t? The scrappy startup in someone’s garage trying to build the next big thing. The new platform trying to compete with TikTok. The innovation that could actually challenge the status quo.

Age verification isn’t cheap. It requires facial recognition technology, ID verification systems, database management to track millions of users, legal teams to navigate the regulatory maze, and customer service infrastructure to handle the inevitable mistakes and complaints. For Meta, which reported $40 billion in revenue last quarter, this is a rounding error. For a startup? It’s a death sentence.

The Monopoly Nobody’s Talking About

Here’s what makes this situation so deliciously ironic: these bans are being sold as a way to protect kids from Big Tech, but they might actually protect Big Tech from competition.

Network effects have always been social media’s moat. Facebook is valuable because everyone’s on Facebook. But historically, young users have been the battering ram that breaks through those network effects. Teens adopted Snapchat en masse not because their friends were there, but because their parents weren’t. They flocked to TikTok not because it had the most users, but because it was different and exciting.

That’s how new platforms break into the market—they capture the next generation before they’re locked into the incumbent’s ecosystem.

But if you have to be 16 to join any social media platform, where does that leave innovation? Every platform starts at the same gate. There’s no land grab for the teenage market. There’s no viral growth driven by high school hallways and college campuses. There’s just the waiting game until users turn 16, at which point… they probably join the platforms their slightly older friends are already on.

Meta has already demonstrated a “copy, acquire, kill” strategy for dealing with competitors. They copied Snapchat’s Stories feature across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. They tried to acquire Snapchat (failed) and TikTok (blocked by regulators). They’ve used their API control to kill smaller competitors like Vine.

A federal judge recently ruled that Meta is not a monopoly, pointing to competition from TikTok and YouTube. But that decision might not age well if regulatory barriers make it nearly impossible for new competitors to emerge.

The Real Impact

Let’s be clear: there are legitimate concerns about social media’s impact on youth mental health. The correlation between heavy social media use and rising rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm among teenagers is well-documented. Something needs to change.

But blunt-force age bans might not be the solution everyone thinks they are. Australia is already seeing teens posting on TikTok about how they’ve successfully evaded the age restrictions. One 13-year-old displayed a message from Snapchat locking his account, while teen influencers are telling followers to change their email addresses to their parents’ emails to get around verification.

Meanwhile, civil liberties groups like the ACLU warn that these laws could cut off minors from important educational resources, LGBTQ+ support communities, and civic engagement opportunities—particularly for kids in conservative areas or unstable home situations who rely on online communities for support.

The Bottom Line

So here’s the uncomfortable truth: age restrictions on social media might reduce some harms to individual teenagers while simultaneously reducing competition in the tech sector. They might protect kids from algorithmic manipulation while protecting Meta from the next Instagram or TikTok.

The platforms will lose some revenue in the short term. But they’ll gain regulatory certainty, barriers to entry for new competitors, and—perhaps most importantly—time to adapt their business models before the next generation of users arrives.

You asked if this is really a negative for social media companies or if it preserves their monopolies. The answer might be both. They’ll take the hit on teen ad revenue (which, while substantial, represents only a portion of their total earnings) in exchange for a more stable, predictable, and competitor-free future.

Maybe that’s fine. Maybe protecting kids is worth the trade-off of less innovation in social media. But let’s at least be honest about what we’re trading. Because when the dust settles on these global bans, don’t be surprised if the same five companies that dominate social media today are the same five companies that dominate it a decade from now.

And that, more than anything else, might be the real story nobody’s talking about.