The Ban on Children’s Use of Social Media “for the Good of Our Children” in the Light of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard

This piece is published in response to the Greek government’s recent initiative to ban the use of social media by minors under the age of 15, and to the post by the minister, Mr Adonis Georgiadis (https://x.com/AdonisGeorgiadi/status/2109714261861675478, in Greek).

Introduction

The ban that the minister, Mr Adonis Georgiadis, extols is coercive paternalism, not reform. It is parents — not the state — who bear the responsibility for guiding their children in choices of information and technology that do not violate the rights of others. They already set rules, use parental-control tools, and know how mature their children are; the central planners do not.

Parental, not state, guardianship

Murray N. Rothbard (The Ethics of Liberty, ch. 14) regarded the relationship between parent and child as one of natural guardianship, grounded in the responsibility of the family and in the prospect of the child’s full self-ownership — not as a relationship of state ownership. According to Ludwig von Mises, the role of the state is limited to protecting individuals from aggressive violence by others; it has no legitimate authority to dictate choices that violate no one else’s rights concerning information, social contacts, or minors’ use of technology.

Parents already decide on bedtimes, diet, schooling, sport, and screen time. They can — and many do — make use of the available parental-control tools, device locks, agreements with their children, and the gradual granting of greater autonomy as trust is built. A blanket state ban replaces this decentralized knowledge of particular circumstances with the judgment of political power.

As Mises stressed in his critique of interventionism, central authorities lack the specific knowledge that parents have of a particular child’s maturity, temperament, and family circumstances. Treating identically all children born in the same calendar year — as the Greek proposal provides — is the very opposite of methodological individualism.

Rothbard was clear: even imperfect parental decisions do not justify the state taking over a child’s upbringing, as long as they do not amount to direct aggression against the child. Inadequate supervision is not aggressive violence; a coercive ban is.

The dynamics of interventionism and unintended consequences

In his critique of interventionism, Mises explains that isolated coercive measures rarely achieve their declared aims and usually create new problems, which then provide the grounds for further interventions. Banning voluntary activities creates illegal markets and incentives to circumvent the ban.

Australia’s ban on social-media accounts for people under 16 has already revealed this dynamic: the great majority of the teenagers covered by the measure continued to gain access to the platforms by getting around the restrictions. At the same time, account-level bans can deprive minors of precisely those safety and supervision features that are available to logged-in users.

The use of VPNs, shared accounts, and unsupervised browsing spreads. Children who would otherwise use the platforms under parental supervision turn to secret use, which makes them less likely to report a problem.

Enforcing the ban requires age-verification infrastructure and state apps, widening surveillance and data collection under the banner of “protection.” Every failure — the circumvention of the restrictions, leaks of personal data, the withdrawal of platforms, or continued harm — supplies the argument for stricter rules. This is exactly the spiral of interventionism that Mises described.

Weak causal evidence and an overlooked opportunity cost

Correlations between screen time and mental-health problems prove neither that a state ban is the solution nor that social media are the dominant cause.

The effects differ greatly from one individual to another: a minority suffers significant harm, while a larger group benefits or is not materially affected. The outcomes depend to a large extent on the context of use, pre-existing conditions, the family environment, and the opportunities for social contact offline. Blanket rules ignore this heterogeneity.

Social media also provide information, communication with peers, outlets for creative expression, and opportunities for entrepreneurial activity. Universal exclusion from them deprives every child of these benefits in exchange for an uncertain reduction of harm for some children.

The market is already responding to parents’ demand with better control tools, age-differentiated environments, and competition among platforms. Coercive regulation crowds out this discovery process and replaces the signals of profit and loss with political commands.

Freedom of association, of expression, and of contract

The platforms are private property. Users — or parents acting on behalf of minors — enter into contracts with them voluntarily. Mandatory age barriers and bans interfere with freedom of association and freedom of contract.

Minors also have interests worth protecting in expression and in access to information. Excluding them wholesale goes beyond what is necessary to deal with specific design features — such as endless scrolling and notifications — which could be addressed by less coercive means or with parental-control tools. Earlier court decisions in the United States that struck down overly broad restrictions on minors’ online access rest on similar reasoning.

Safety made absolute, and the formation of character

This kind of state “protection” cultivates dependence on externally imposed rules, instead of encouraging the gradual development of self-regulation, judgment, and psychological resilience that adolescence requires.

The Misesian and the classical-liberal tradition favor education on a voluntary basis, market innovation, and family responsibility, rather than an absolutism of safety that expands state power “for the sake of the children.”

In short, the measure extends state power into family life, replaces parents’ knowledge with the judgment of political power, creates predictable problems of circumvention and costs of surveillance, and rests on exaggerated claims of causation.

The Misesian alternative is clear: the decision should remain with parents; the market and civil society should be free to offer tools and information; and the state should confine itself to protection against real acts of aggression, instead of imposing predetermined social outcomes.

Praxeologos