The New Victorian Internet: How Social Media Restrictions Are Reshaping Youth Digital Life

Social media restrictions for young people are becoming increasingly widespread globally.

A significant movement toward implementing social media bans for youth has emerged worldwide, driven by increasing concerns about potential harms platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat may inflict on developing minds.

Australia pioneered these restrictions by prohibiting social media accounts for those under 16. New Zealand appears poised to follow suit, while Denmark's prime minister has announced plans to ban social media for children under 15, claiming that mobile phones and social networks are "stealing our children's childhood."

This regulatory trend continues to spread internationally. The United Kingdom, France, Norway, Pakistan, and the United States are all considering or implementing similar age-based restrictions, often incorporating parental consent requirements or digital identity verification.

While these policies ostensibly aim to protect young people from mental health issues, inappropriate content, and addictive design features, they reflect a deeper cultural shift. Beneath the protective rhetoric lies what appears to be a fundamental change in societal values.

These restrictions suggest a moral reorientation that risks reviving conservative pre-internet notions about youth behavior. Are we witnessing the emergence of a new Victorian era for the internet, where young people's digital experiences are shaped not only by regulation but by reasserted moral control?

The Victorian period was characterized by strict social codes, modest presentation, and formal communication standards. Public behavior was heavily regulated, with schools functioning as critical institutions for socializing children into established gender and class hierarchies.

Today, we observe similar patterns in contemporary "digital wellness" frameworks. Screen-time management apps, digital detox retreats, and minimalist "dumb" phones are marketed as tools for cultivating "healthy" digital habits—often with implicit moral judgments. The idealized digital citizen is portrayed as calm, focused, and restrained, while users who are impulsive, easily distracted, or emotionally expressive are often pathologized.

This perspective is particularly evident in Jonathan Haidt's influential work, "The Anxious Generation," a foundational text for the age-restriction movement. Haidt argues that social media accelerates performative behavior and emotional dysregulation among young people.

From this perspective, young people's digital engagement represents declining psychological resilience, increasing polarization, and eroding civic values, rather than complex developmental or technological adaptations. This framing has popularized the notion that social media is not merely harmful but morally corrupting.

However, the research supporting these claims remains contested. Critics note that Haidt's conclusions often rely on correlational studies and selective interpretations of available data.

While some research does associate heavy social media use with anxiety and depression, other studies indicate these effects are modest and highly variable depending on context, platform specifics, and individual differences.

The current debate frequently overlooks young people's agency—their capacity to navigate online environments intelligently, creatively, and socially.

Youth digital engagement extends far beyond passive consumption. It represents spaces for developing literacy, self-expression, and meaningful connection. Platforms like TikTok and YouTube have fostered innovative approaches to oral and visual communication.

Young users create complex content by combining memes, remixing videos, and employing sophisticated editing techniques to develop new narrative forms. These practices demonstrate evolving literacies rather than cultural decline. Regulating youth access without acknowledging these skills risks suppressing innovation to preserve familiar cultural forms.

This is where the Victorian analogy becomes particularly relevant. Just as Victorian social norms aimed to maintain established social hierarchies, today's age restrictions risk imposing narrow visions of appropriate digital engagement.

Terms like "brain rot," which superficially appear to describe the harmful effects of excessive internet use, are often repurposed by teenagers to humorously resist the pressures of constant productivity culture.

Concerns about young people's digital habits frequently stem from anxieties about cognitive differences—the perception that certain users are too impulsive, irrational, or nonconforming.

Young people are often criticized for supposedly improper communication habits—avoiding phone calls, hiding behind screens—but these changing practices reflect broader technological and social transformations. The expectation of constant availability and responsiveness ties us to our devices in ways that make disengagement genuinely challenging.

While age restrictions may address some symptoms, they fail to address the underlying design of platforms engineered to maximize engagement, sharing, and data generation.

If protecting young people is the genuine objective, a more effective approach might be regulating the platforms themselves. Legal scholar Eric Goldman characterizes the age-restriction approach as a "segregate and suppress" strategy that penalizes youth rather than holding platforms accountable.

We wouldn't ban children from playgrounds, but we do expect those environments to meet safety standards. Where are the equivalent safety measures for digital spaces? What responsibility do digital platforms bear for user wellbeing?

The growing popularity of social media restrictions suggests a resurgence of conservative values in digital regulation. However, protection should not come at the expense of autonomy, creativity, or expression.

For many, the internet has become a contested moral space where values surrounding attention, communication, and identity are intensely debated. Yet it also represents critical social infrastructure that young people are actively shaping through innovative literacies and expressive forms.

Shielding them from this environment risks suppressing the very capabilities and perspectives that could contribute to building a more positive digital future.

Alex Beattie, Lecturer, Media and Communication, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.