Social Media Bans: ICCO position paper calls for inclusive approach

A new position paper from the International Communications Consultancy Organisation argues that bans alone will not address the harms driving global age-restriction policy, and calls on the profession to help convene regulators, platforms, and educators around a combined response.

Forty-two countries are now considering, proposing, or implementing some form of social media age restriction, according to a new ICCO position paper. Australia has already implemented a ban. Brazil, Denmark, Austria, France, Malaysia, Spain, Turkey, and the UAE are moving on legislation of their own, and in July, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that Brussels intends to draft its own legislation after the summer, based on recommendations from an expert panel on child online safety.

The paper, “Beyond the Screens: Growing Up With(out) Social Media,” was released this month by the International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO). It follows an April 2026 survey of PR and communications professionals worldwide, in which respondents asked ICCO to define a role for the profession in the debate, develop a common position on age restrictions, and set out a position on education. ICCO’s Public Affairs and Healthcare Working Group led the response, working with partners from across the ICCO community.

On the central question of bans, the paper takes no position. ICCO states that it “neither endorses nor opposes social media bans as a matter of principle,” arguing that decisions on child-safety policy should be led by organizations with direct expertise in child protection, mental health, and online safety, rather than by communicators. The paper states that the profession’s role is limited to supporting informed debate, facilitating stakeholder engagement, and promoting digital literacy.

The data behind the push for bans

The paper cites several data points behind the political momentum for restriction: a U.S. Surgeon General warning that adolescents on social media more than three hours a day face double the risk of poor mental health outcomes, and a 2024 WHO study finding that 36 percent of adolescents surveyed across Europe, Central Asia, and Canada reported near-constant social media contact, with roughly one in ten showing addiction-like symptoms – a pattern the report says is more common among girls than boys.

Where the paper says bans fall short

The paper lists several reasons it treats bans as insufficient on their own. Age-verification systems, it says, are porous, and motivated teenagers can route around them, in some cases ending up on less-regulated platforms with weaker safeguards. A full ban, it notes, raises free-expression and constitutional questions in some democracies. The paper also points to an overlap between harm and benefit on the same platforms: it notes that the same feeds exposing young people to algorithmic content linked to body dysmorphia also give marginalized youth access to peer support unavailable elsewhere.

The paper cites research on adolescent autonomy and reactance, stating that prohibitive policies – particularly those that restrict communication – can trigger psychological resistance that erodes trust between young people and institutions rather than building it.

The paper does not take a position against regulation itself. It states that platforms carry responsibility for designing and governing their services around user safety, and it calls on health authorities and governments to consider formal risk labeling for design features and usage patterns linked to harm, drawing a comparison to how automobiles, food and beverage, and pharmaceuticals are regulated.

The paper’s recommendations on education

On education, the paper is more prescriptive. It calls for digital and media literacy to move from a supplementary safety unit into core curriculum, alongside literacy and numeracy, and sets out several principles for what an effective program should include:

• Literacy should be developmentally sequenced. The paper notes that a six-year-old and a sixteen-year-old on the same platform occupy different cognitive worlds, and states that existing programs often fail by treating young people as a single, undifferentiated audience with one curriculum.

• Understanding should precede protection. Rules without comprehension, the paper argues, produce compliance rather than resilience; a young person who does not understand how a feed is assembled cannot meaningfully protect themselves within it.

• Safety education should extend beyond basic stranger-danger rules. The paper calls for teaching young people to recognize manipulation and fake identities, understand the permanence of online posts, and evaluate synthetic and AI-generated content.

• The emotional dimension should not be treated as optional. The paper describes comparison, visibility, and urgency as functions of platform design rather than accidents, and calls for giving young people vocabulary for concepts like FOMO along with explicit permission to step back.
  
• Families and teachers are both underequipped, according to the paper. It states that programs confined to the classroom lose effectiveness if household rules contradict them, and that many educators lack the training and confidence to teach fast-moving digital topics without sustained institutional support.

The paper also surveys existing literacy programs it holds up as models, including UNESCO’s Global Media and Information Literacy effort, which it says supported 32 countries on national policy in 2024 and trained more than 10,500 digital content creators; Finland’s early integration of media literacy into its national curriculum; and Malta’s 2025-2030 Digital Education Strategy, which makes digital literacy part of every subject from early years through secondary school. Against those examples, the paper flags gaps across eight European case studies it reviewed: inconsistent policy approaches between countries, fragmentation among states, nonprofits, and schools pursuing similar goals without coordination, and educators who lack training and confidence to teach the material.

ICCO’s formal recommendations follow from that framework: mandatory social media and AI literacy education in schools, youth participation in designing the programs aimed at them, and evaluation frameworks that track wellbeing, resilience, and critical thinking rather than usage metrics alone. The paper also suggests that policymakers consider treating digital wellbeing as a basic skill for young people and, potentially, as a standard worth protecting formally, alongside sleep, attention, and emotional balance.

The paper’s case for the profession’s role

The paper also addresses the profession’s own position in the debate. It states that PR sits at the intersection of disinformation risk, social polarization, and reputational fragility, and argues that the industry has standing to help convene child-protection organizations, platforms, educators, and families that the paper says are rarely in the same room. It also states that engagement-optimized platform design raises ethical questions for an industry that helps brands build relationships on those same platforms, and calls on its members to address those questions directly.

Several ICCO partner bodies contributed commentary published alongside the paper. PRCA endorsed the expert-led framing and the emphasis on proportionate regulation over prohibition alone. APECOM called for the industry to develop guidelines shifting client measurement away from engagement metrics toward trust and credibility indicators. Guillame Labbez, ICCO’s Institutional and Government Affairs Coordinator, argued that because technology evolves faster than regulation, governments are better served setting protection objectives and leaving platforms, families, and civil society to determine the mechanisms, rather than legislating specific features that risk becoming obsolete before the law takes effect.

The regulatory approaches described in the paper vary by jurisdiction. Brazil’s new statute requires guardian links and bans infinite scroll for users under 16. The EU’s Digital Services Act and proposed Digital Statute for Children focus on platform accountability rather than user bans. China uses device-level minor mode restrictions without a ban, and the UK and several Nordic countries are testing time-restricted access rather than full prohibition.

ICCO’s stated conclusion is that no single approach – regulation, platform accountability, or literacy – is sufficient on its own, and that combining the three, with communications professionals playing a convening role among institutions that do not typically work together, is necessary to address the underlying harms driving the current wave of legislation.

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The paper is available for download here.