Zócalo Public Square.
Aug. 27, 2026, 9:12 a.m. PT
Save the children. Restore democracy. And ban everyone age 18 and older from social media.
Yes, 18 and older. Effective immediately.
We adults are having the wrong conversation about digital safety. Every week, more grave-faced politicians declare that we must protect kids by banning them from social media, even though most unhinged people online are old enough to vote.
If any demographic has proven it cannot handle an unmoderated feed, it is fully grown adults.
Ask yourself: Who is getting scammed out of their life savings by AI-generated deepfakes of celebrities? Who spends five hours a night arguing with X bot accounts over political conspiracies? Who ruined your family reunion because a post from an uncle who thinks the cloud has something to do with weather?
Adults.
We adults already possess a monopoly on formal societal power. We control the ballot box, public spending, corporate boards, regulatory agencies, and elected bodies. We hold exclusive power to sell or mortgage legal property, sign binding contracts, or practice law.
If adults ban ourselves from social media tomorrow, what do we really lose? A few million ranting threads about dog-walking, Donald Trump, and our diminishing sex drives? For adults, social media is a unnecessary, toxic luxury, set atop a full suite of rights.
Which is why social media should be reserved exclusively for people under the age of 18. They are the only demographic that genuinely needs its communications power.
When you are 12, as my youngest child is, you cannot vote. If you show up to city council, the mayor will patronizingly call you a “leader of tomorrow” and then vote to pave your park for a data center.
For minors, the digital public square, for all its awfulness, is the only public square.
So, in the name of fairness and democracy, if lawmakers insist on proceeding with their sweeping youth restrictions, they must give the kids something in return.
Namely, full legal and political rights.
What does this mean? Give minors full voting rights, deliberative rights, contractual agency, and formal representation in every single hallway of power. Allow teenagers to run for Congress, state legislatures, and school boards. I’ve seen enough city councils worldwide to know that adult politicians are no more mature than the kids I coach in Southern California youth baseball.
Call me crazy, if you like, but what’s truly insane is what adults are doing now: stripping away the only megaphone the youth population possesses, while keeping the door to institutional power padlocked from the inside.
And, since the kids probably aren’t reading this column, how about we adults be honest about what is really driving the global stampede toward youth social media bans?
Yes, governments frame these laws around mental health and screen time. And lawsuits to stop addictive features and predatory design — like the U.S. states’ litigation against Meta — are important But let’s not pretend the sudden political urge to lock teens out of their phones and apps is wholly benevolent. Instead let’s admit that we’re afraid that our kids might take our power away.
Over the past decade, global youth activism — Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future climate movement, the gun-control student group March for Our Lives, anti-authoritarian youth movements waving the One Piece flag — has succeeded by turning social media platforms into decentralized political weapons. On their feeds, the kids have live-streamed state violence, embarrassed corrupt adult institutions, and overthrown the governments of Nepal and Bangladesh.
So, is it any wonder that, under the cover of protecting the children, the adult political establishment wants to confiscate kids’ phones?
If adults want to ban social media to save ourselves from our own worst impulses, by all means, let’s all delete our accounts today.
But if policymakers are going to force youth off the digital stage, they had better be ready to hand over full political and legal rights first.
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.
