Norway Plans to Raise Social Media Minimum Age to 15
The Scandinavian country is serious about protecting kids online.
Norway has announced that it will be raising the minimum age to use social media from 13 to 15. The Scandinavian country says it is cracking down on tech companies that are “pitted against small brains” and trying to protect children from “the power of the algorithm.”
The changes have yet to be explained in detail, but it looks like Norway will amend its Personal Data Act so that any users of social media platforms will have to be 15 to consent to have their data collected, and there will some form of age verification required to do so. This will prevent kids from simply clicking through, claiming to be older than they are, but this may be tricky to implement.
As explained by the Minister for Child and Family Affairs, Kjersti Toppe: “Some form of electronic identification, such as BankID, could be the solution, but it’s not that simple. If there is to be an age verification, it must apply to everyone, and there are surprisingly many people who do not have BankID.”
Toppe has spent time listening to parents who campaign for stricter online regulation for kids, and she says that this decision is meant to help parents. “It is also about giving parents the security to say no. We know that many people really want to say no, but don’t feel they can.”
How Do Parents Feel?
Parents need regulatory support when it comes to limiting kids’ access to online content. There is a lot they can do on their own—parents are the primary gatekeepers who ultimately control if or when a child gets a smartphone or tablet—but this task gets a lot easier when they are backed by the law. Social media is not unlike other harmful substances, like alcohol or cigarettes; you can tell your kid no, but you also want to know that a storeowner is going to intervene if your kid tries to buy it anyway.
While many parents are concerned about the lax sign-up rules for social media, many others clearly are not. Even the age-13 minimum hasn’t been enough to stop more than half of Norwegian 9-year-olds, 58% of 10-year-olds, and 72% of 11-year-olds from using social media platforms. This reveals that a significant number of parents are not enforcing the legal age limit at home, despite being as low as it is. It remains to be seen if those parents will suddenly change their behaviour once the age limit rises, but it seems doubtful.
What About Loneliness?
As for the argument that social media provides a sense of community to lonely children, Norway’s prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre said that “self-expression must not be in the power of algorithms. On the contrary, it can cause you to become single-minded and pacified, because everything happens so fast on this screen… We know that this is an uphill battle, because there are strong forces here, but it is also where politics is needed.”
It's refreshing to hear that. Social media is notoriously anti-social, opening the door to all kinds of unhealthy self-comparison, performative behaviours, meanness, and compulsive use that gets in the way of other, healthier activities and in-person interactions. It is far from being the shining beacon of connectedness that tech companies would have us believe, and many children would do far better if forced to seek out alternative forms of engagement with others. (Parents may need to help them with this, at least initially.)
I do not believe that kids “need” social media as badly as we think. Haidt, Rausch, and Torres argued this in a recent Atlantic piece that said tech lobbyists deploy “the dual argument that social media is especially beneficial to teens from historically marginalized communities, and therefore nearly any regulation would harm them.”
Despite this, there are numerous examples of tech company executives limiting their own kids’ use of these same platforms, from the TikTok CEO not letting his kids use it, to Bill Gates not giving his kids phones till 14, to the Snapchat CEO limiting his son’s total tech use to 90 minutes/week, to Zuckerberg sharing no identifying photos of his kids on Instagram.
“Of course, few people would call the children of tech elites marginalized. But it is curious that these elites publicly assert that digital technology helps children—especially the most vulnerable—while expunging it from their own kids’ lives.”
What About Staying Informed?
One critic of the Norwegian government’s announcement, Christer Hyggen, a children’s screen use researcher, pointed out that kids offline will miss out on the public discourse that now takes place on social media. “Raising the age limit for social media could limit children’s opportunities to participate on an equal footing with others,” Hyggen said.
As a parent, I immediately took issue with Hyggen’s “participate on an equal footing” comment. Children are equal to adults in terms of inherent value, but they cannot possibly participate in public discourse on the same level as adults because they are children. Their perspective is valuable, but their job is to learn, absorb, observe, and grow—not to add their voices in an ageless online environment to topics they cannot possibly understand yet.
And what does Hyggen think kids are doing on social media? They’re certainly not parsing the nuances of the presidential debates! No, they are sending random pictures of the ceiling and their feet to “friends” on Snapchat to maintain their Snapstreaks. The vast majority of kids do not use social media in constructive ways. It’s pure entertainment, often inane; many time-use surveys reveal that.
Norway’s announcement is a positive one, and it will be interesting to see how it spurs other countries to tighten up their own rules around kids and social media. In my house, though, the rules don’t change: No social media before 18.
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'Parsing the nuances of the Presidential debate' 🤣🤣🤣🤣
What a crazy world we live in. Adults are determined to screw up the youngest amongst us. It is our responsibility to protect them, to step back and reevaluate where we are, and how we’ve come to this place. I agree, 18 years sounds better to me.