The World Happiness Report is released every March alongside the United Nations International Day of Happiness. One of the biggest takeaways from this year’s study is that young people are less happy than they used to be, and that this may have something to do with social media use. Today, I wanted to explore some of the findings from this year’s report and look into what the effects of a social media ban could be.
Is social media making us miserable?
According to the 2026 World Happiness Report, most people indicated that they are willing to pay less money to use social media platforms than they would need to be paid to stop using them. In other words, people would pay a relatively low price to access social media, but they would expect a relatively high price to give it up.
This finding could point to something deeper about social media use: perhaps free access to social media generates a disproportionate amount of value that makes it hard to give up despite its negative effects, such as algorithmically curated content that keeps people hooked. Alternatively, this gap could stem from behavioral biases. People are used to a pre-existing zero-dollar price tag, and giving up an established habit feels costly.
Another interesting finding around how people value access to social media is that researchers found people demand a significant amount of money to stop using social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, but they would also be willing to pay to eliminate those platforms from their community entirely. This suggests that people’s lives are so entrenched with social media that it's challenging to give it up voluntarily, but people are far more receptive if they know their friends and family won’t be using it.
There are a few interesting takeaways from this finding. First, people recognize that platforms like Instagram and TikTok harm themselves and people they care about and that they would be better off without social media. Second, individuals still feel that their lives would be worse off without social media if everyone else in their community still has access to it, despite the harms they recognize. If everyone else is on the platform and you’re not, you start to feel like an outsider, even if you and your friends would be better off without social media.
A broader finding from the 2026 World Happiness Report is that life satisfaction is highest for people with low rates of social media use and lower for people with high rates of social media use. Internet use is associated with higher levels of life satisfaction for activities like communication, news, learning, and content creation, but only if they’re consumed in moderation. At high levels of use, all internet activities were found to be correlated with lower life satisfaction.
Among adolescents, there are some interesting trends. Adolescent girls tend to have the highest life satisfaction when they use social media for less than an hour per day, but adolescent boys tend to have both very high and very low levels of life satisfaction concentrated at high levels of social media use (7+ hours per day).
This is a great example of why economists are generally against outright bans: some amount of economic value gets destroyed (like the life satisfaction that some people are getting from 7+ hours of social media use per day). There are, of course, other factors that might be bad about extreme social media use outside of life satisfaction which could warrant a ban.
Would a social media ban increase happiness?
According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in May 2026, nearly 6 in 10 Americans support a social media ban for children under 16 years old. The demographic group that most strongly supports a social media ban for children under 16 years old is parents, 65% of whom support a social media ban. Since 2023, social media policies aimed at minors, such as requiring parental consent, age verification, or time limits, have all gained support. In general, support for a social media ban is nonpartisan and strong across most demographics.
Research from the American Psychological Association shows that limiting daily social media use improves mental health outcomes for young adults. Young adults who limited social media usage to 30 minutes per day reported significantly lower levels of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and fear of missing out. Other research from Liu et al. has found that doing “social media detoxes” has small but positive effects on well-being.
But many of these studies are flawed. For example, in a meta-analysis conducted by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, researchers could not find a single study on social media bans that included children or adolescents. Children and adolescents have different social dynamics than adults where losing access to social media could be harmful, so findings from studies about adults might not be applicable to children and adolescents. Additionally, most research is centered around brief social media intervention, and literature about long-term social media bans is scarce.
Nevertheless, various countries across the world are starting to implement social media bans for children under 16. In Australia, a ban took effect in December of last year. Both Denmark and the United Kingdom have signaled potential plans for banning social media for young children as well.
As of now, there is little evidence that social media bans are an effective solution, and Australia’s social media ban isn’t exactly promising. Take Business Insider’s article as an example, which is literally titled, “Australia’s social media ban for teens is going, uh, pretty badly”. As of last month, 26% of children aged 13-15 in Australia were on TikTok, just one percentage point lower than the rate prior to the ban. And the social media use rate for children between the ages of 10 and 12 is higher now than it was before the ban.
Extreme social media use is correlated with higher rates of unhappiness, especially among children, but social media bans have so far been ineffective. So what's the solution? Age verification tools from social media companies are easy to circumvent, and some families might have concerns about privacy. There doesn’t seem to be a clear path forward on how to solve the problem of social media use and well-being, but public policy analysis around some other alternatives could be a place to start.
