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Bullying. Sextortion. Body-shaming. Self-harm. Viral student-fight videos. Never-ending newsfeeds. Unhealthy relationships with A.I. chatbots. Teenagers who can’t seem to put down their phones.
Parents and teachers are understandably concerned about social media. For all of the community, creativity and just plain fun kids enjoy online, hazards remain all too frequent, some children’s advocates say.
Over the past few years, as public concern over youth mental health has mounted, government and education leaders have been searching for ways to reduce online risks. Lawmakers have rushed to curb young people’s access to social networks. S…
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Bullying. Sextortion. Body-shaming. Self-harm. Viral student-fight videos. Never-ending newsfeeds. Unhealthy relationships with A.I. chatbots. Teenagers who can’t seem to put down their phones.
Parents and teachers are understandably concerned about social media. For all of the community, creativity and just plain fun kids enjoy online, hazards remain all too frequent, some children’s advocates say.
Over the past few years, as public concern over youth mental health has mounted, government and education leaders have been searching for ways to reduce online risks. Lawmakers have rushed to curb young people’s access to social networks. Schools have banned phones. Instagram, TikTok and Snap have introduced new teen safeguards. Now, Australia is poised to go even further with a sweeping social media ban for teenagers.
Can these bans actually help? Below, I explain what we know so far.
What is happening?
Young people regularly report having bad experiences with social media.
In 2021, a former Facebook employee warned executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, that a company survey found more than 20 percent of 13- to 15-year-olds said they had been bullied on Instagram — just within the previous week. Many of the teens surveyed, the former employee noted, also reported receiving “unwanted advances.”
Instagram has since bolstered safeguards for teens, including some intended to stop adult strangers from directly messaging teenagers who don’t follow them. Last year, Instagram also introduced a new safeguard to automatically blur nude images in direct messages sent to teenagers under 18.
But researchers and government officials have found flaws in some of the safeguards. Last year, New Mexico arrested three men who were accused of targeting children for sex, the state’s attorney general said, alleging that the men solicited state investigators who had posed as children on fake Instagram and Facebook accounts.
How are people responding?
Some lawmakers and schools are resorting to tech bans.
One of the most sweeping is in Australia, where the government is trying to keep most kids off social media. Starting in December, the country will require platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube to take “reasonable steps” to prevent Australians under the age of 16 from having accounts. As my colleague Victoria Kim in Sydney has reported, the country also wants social apps to deactivate existing accounts belonging to more than one million young Australians.
The Australian ban could address a vexing problem. Regulators complain that social networks have enabled millions of young children under the age of 13 to sign up for accounts, without sufficiently enforcing the companies’ own age restrictions. But the ban could affect social media benefits like friendships, UNICEF Australia has said, without fixing the problems young people face online. “Social media has a lot of good things, like education and staying in touch with friends,” the organization said in a statement on its website.
Britain has taken a different approach — by promoting increased privacy and time management controls, rather than banishing young people from apps. In 2020, Britain began prohibiting services like social networks and video game apps from using “nudging techniques” to steer young people to give up more data. Online services must also turn on the highest privacy settings by default for kids under 18. In 2022, California enacted a similar law. But a lawsuit by NetChoice, an industry trade group, has halted it, at least for now.
Schools are also trying to curb tech distractions. Today, 40 percent of countries bar or restrict student cellphone use, as do more than 30 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.
We have limited research on whether the bans work. After surveying more than 1,200 students in 30 schools across England, researchers at the University of Birmingham recently reported that cellphone bans did not improve students’ mental well-being.
Bans have drawbacks
Blanket tech bans can be crude instruments. They may make it harder for many young people to have social media accounts. But they often don’t change the underlying app features that many parents are worried about.
Many popular apps use powerful attention-hacking techniques that can hook young people, said Julia Powles, an Australian researcher who is the executive director of the U.C.L.A. Institute for Technology, Law and Policy. This keeps users online longer, she notes, and makes the companies more money from advertising.
“The root cause is the monetary incentive that drives these platforms,” Powles said. “It creates manipulative practices,” she added, “and it can be exploited by harmful industries like gambling and unhealthy food.”
Lawmakers may be missing the point, she said. Australia’s new social media ban, she noted, instructs companies to “disregard” the ads they run as well as ad revenue.
If she is right, the tech bans may be treating the symptoms — while doing little to tackle the root causes of the online risks for kids and teens.
THE LATEST NEWS
Politics
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Distributing groceries.Credit...Marco Postigo Storel for The New York Times
New delays and disruptions to food-stamp benefits affected millions of low-income families. The most-clicked story in The Morning yesterday was about the Supreme Court letting the Trump administration temporarily withhold funding for those benefits.
What’s next for the Democratic Party? In Maine, Michigan and other states, primary candidates will choose between a center-left and a left-wing vision.
Far-right influencers have been pushing charges of a grand conspiracy against President Trump’s adversaries. Their case, whose theory is unsupported by evidence, is finally taking shape.
Someone fired shots at Border Patrol agents in Chicago, an official said, the latest in a series of clashes during an immigration crackdown that has lasted two months. No agents were injured.
Business
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Yachts for sale.Credit...Scott McIntyre for The New York Times
Yacht owners are younger and wealthier than they were a decade ago. And they’re increasingly American, enriched by a roaring stock market and deep tax cuts.
The Trump administration is handing out hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to some of the country’s most profitable companies and wealthiest investors.
The Justice Department opened an investigation into possible collusion among big meatpacking companies. The effort may mollify ranchers, who complain of rising beef prices.
International
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After release from prison.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times
The Times interviewed 40 men deported by the U.S. to a prison in El Salvador. They say they were shackled, beaten and sexually assaulted.
Trump insists that U.S. strikes “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program this summer. But regional officials have become less convinced in the months since and now fear another war between Israel and Iran.
China is on a scientifically shaky mission to conquer aging. That includes longevity labs, “immortality islands” and grapeseed pills.
Hurricane Melissa ravaged Jamaica’s power grid. But people with rooftop solar panels, increasingly popular on the island, got their power back almost immediately.
Other Big Stories
Kim Kardashian and Joe Rogan want to know whether an interstellar object was sent by aliens. Almost all astronomers say it’s just a comet.
Psychologists consider chatbots the future of therapy. The F.D.A. is exploring whether to regulate them. Are they safe?
THE SUNDAY DEBATE
Should Democrats’ path to the 2026 midterms be progressive or moderate?
Moderate. Moving to the left will only continue to alienate working-class Democrats, who decidedly prefer capitalism to socialism. “In politics, as in life, moderation is key,” Douglas Schoen and Carly Cooperman write for The Hill.
Progressive. Centrism has allowed the Democratic Party to appear listless, unprincipled and beholden to the ultrawealthy; Mamdani’s politics are the opposite. “This, too, might scare the Democratic establishment: not because Mamdani could fail, but because he could succeed,” The Guardian’s Moira Donegan writes.
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A tiled facade.Credit...Atif Aryan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
**Countless cracks: **The Blue Mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, shed turquoise, indigo and lapis tiles in a strong earthquake last week. But, like Afghanistan, it has endured for centuries.
News tool: A.I. is sweeping through newsrooms, transforming the way journalists gather and disseminate information.
BOOK OF THE WEEK
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Credit....
**“Finding My Way,” by Malala Yousafzai: **Yousafzai became a household name at 15, when she was shot by the Taliban for speaking out against its brutal regime in Pakistan. “She gave an indelible speech at the United Nations, wrote a best-selling memoir, became the youngest-ever winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and transitioned into a kind of living sainthood, all before finishing high school,” Reggie Ugwu wrote in a recent profile. In her new memoir, Yousafzai, now 28, tells a different story — a human, refreshingly down-to-earth one about her struggles to fit in during college and her determination to forge her own path, separate from the one prescribed for her when she was a teenager.
For more: The winner of the Booker Prize will be announced in London tomorrow. Which novel should win? Have your say.
THE INTERVIEW
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Credit...Phillip Montgomery for The New York Times
This week’s subject for The Interview is the pugnacious Fox News star Greg Gutfeld. His show, “Gutfeld!,” has firmly established its dominance in late night, drawing a significantly bigger audience than those of Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert. We talked about hypocrisy, why Fox News wanted him to do this interview (against his own instincts) and his late-night rivals.
Do you see Kimmel, Colbert and Fallon as competition?
Not really.
You called Colbert a “smug loser” or something like that. And the one that stood out for me about Kimmel was: “If that man was any more full of [expletive], he’d be a colostomy bag.”
I have this thing called the hierarchy of smears, and that means if you call somebody a fascist who’s going to destroy the world, I can call you anything. I’m never going to call somebody fat because they’re fat. I’m going to call you fat if you called me Hitler. And the best part about that is it hurts them. It hurts them more than if they were to call me Hitler because they have to look in the mirror every day. I know I’m not Hitler. They know they’re fat.
Charming.
[“Gutfeld!” panelist] Kat [Timpf] makes fun of me over this. “Greg, you’re trying to turn calling people fat into a heroic endeavor.” But again, stop calling me a Nazi or Hitler or a fascist, and I’ll lay off the physical stuff. But the physical stuff doesn’t come close to ascribing this moral evil to somebody that then generates animosity among people who might do something to you, who might come to your house. That’s what I think. Does that make sense?
I understand what you’re saying. That’s not the same as saying I think it makes sense.
I’ll take “I understand what you’re saying” as “making sense.”
Read more of the interview here.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
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Credit...The New York Times
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Credit...Armando Rafael for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Cyd Raftus McDowell.
Many people may already be thinking about Thanksgiving, but there are still quite a lot of weeknights between now and then on which you’ll want to eat a delicious — and easy! — dinner. To get you started, this week’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter looks back at some reader favorites from last November, like chicken au poivre and baked salmon with dill rice.
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Natasha Singer is a reporter for The Times who writes about how tech companies, digital devices and apps are reshaping childhood, education and job opportunities.
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