Imagine this. Nearly every teen in Teentown hangs out at the same place—the Teentown Pool. It’s the place to connect, meet new people, learn about parties, and unwind. There’s just one catch: There’s no lifeguard on duty. One exists, technically, but they’re not by the pool and respond to emergencies unreliably.
Despite this, management still encourages teens to swim as long as possible, even if they show signs of fatigue or hypothermia. Most swimmers are fine. But those who aren’t are told it's their own—or their family’s—responsibility to know when to get out of the pool, and to live with whatever anxiety, shame, or fear the experience leaves behind.
There’s another catch. The pool looks private, but it isn’t. Management films swimmers, profiles them, and sells their data to advertisers pushing products that may harm their health: diet supplements to teen girls with normal BMIs, steroids to teen boys. And though Teentown Pool is advertised as teen-safe, adults occasionally slip in, posing as teens, to engage in disturbing, even illegal behavior.
Teens do their best to manage these risks: reporting hazards, taking breaks, ignoring ads, and avoiding the creeps, but it’s unfair to ask them to do it alone. Even so, most teens keep coming back, because the alternative—missing out on where their friends are—carries its own weight. They’re stuck in a bind: stay away from Teentown Pool and be isolated, or swim and constantly watch their backs.
Does this mean pools are inherently unsafe for teens? Should they be banned until 16, granted entry only after their birthday? Or is the problem not with the pool, but rather with the management?
By now, you’ve probably guessed that I’m not talking about a community pool. The example is farcical, but it tracks the very real risks and trade-offs teens face on social media every day.
On Instagram, nearly half of teens report receiving unsafe content or unwanted messages within the past month, and for those who do, they report feelings of discomfort, sadness, and fear. “It made me feel sad and insecure,” one 13-year-old boy reported in a 2025 survey conducted by Design It for Us. “I really wanted Instagram to remove that account. But I see that they are still up, victimizing individuals.” A 14-year-old girl added, “It made me afraid to be female and Asian. I did not feel safe.”
Additionally, despite claims that Instagram encourages teens not to overuse the platform, 65 percent of teens report that they haven’t received a single reminder to log off in the past six months. And harmful advertising is common: 41 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds in the U.K. have seen ads for prescription-only weight loss drugs, and Black teens are more than twice as likely as white teens to be targeted by skin-lightening ads (46 percent vs. 24 percent), in a country that has significantly stricter regulations than the U.S.
And yet the picture isn’t only negative. For many teens, especially Brown, Black, and queer young people, these platforms are often where they find community that’s harder to come by offline. LGBTQ+ teens are more than three times as likely to rate online spaces as “very kind and very safe” as compared to in-person spaces. Significantly more Black young people (77 percent) rate social media as important for connecting with others who share their mental health concerns than their white peers (53 percent). This is the real double bind: The same feed that exposes a teen to hate speech might also be the only place they feel seen.
These issues are not a problem inherent to the technology. They’re a problem manufactured by greed: the drive to maximize profits and shareholder equity regardless of the human cost. They reflect a series of deliberate design decisions to deprioritize solutions that would cost companies money but protect consumer well-being, such as stronger data privacy protections, more user control over algorithms, and active content moderation. Other industries, from pharmaceuticals to food to vehicles, have rarely addressed consumer safety issues voluntarily. It’s taken public protest and binding legislation to force their hand, none of which has destroyed these industries' profitability. The technology industry is no exception. Teens agree that social media companies should be doing more to protect their well-being, with a full 76 percent reporting that it would be helpful to have more active moderation and deletion of bullying and harassing posts.
Social Media Essential Reads
So what should we, as caring adults advocating for young people in our own lives, be pushing for to keep teens safe? One commonly advanced solution is age-related bans or restrictions on social media use. While simple and intuitively appealing, bans don’t work, according to growing evidence. In Australia, more than 85 percent of teens circumvented the nationwide ban within months. Age-verification requirements also enable Big Tech to collect more, not less, intrusive personal data from users. Most importantly, bans don’t address the root of the problem—the fundamental mismanagement of online spaces. Harms associated with social media don’t disappear when young people turn 16 or even 18. Over half of 18- to 22-year-olds continue to report encountering racist, sexist, and homophobic content online, and 53 percent report that they feel like they can’t control their use or end up using social media for a longer amount of time than they wanted to.
There are also underappreciated harms associated with banning teens from social media, especially for Black, Brown, and queer teens for whom these platforms often function as vital sources of connection and support that aren’t readily available offline. Cutting off access doesn’t make the underlying platforms safer; it just removes a coping resource from teens who rely on it most, rather than offering the safety improvements companies have chosen not to make.
Instead of bans, we need to push policymakers for clear, enforceable consumer protection laws that make everyone’s safety and well-being non‑negotiable. We also need to push tech companies to partner with teens to redesign platforms to support mental health and publicly report on progress. People of all ages deserve safe spaces, both online and in person, to congregate, share ideas and interests, express themselves, and unwind. The public will is there. Now we need policymakers to put public good over private profit.