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Denmark plans social media ban for under-15s – PM Mette Frederiksen links social media use to anxiety, depression and lack of concentration
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- Title
- Danish PM plans to ban social media for under-15s, warning it is 'stealing childhood'
- Authors
- Miranda Bryant
- Published
- Oct 7 2025
- Word count
- 452 words
I work in a school that teaches 12-17 years old kids, I also have two nieces that are 13 and 15 years old. Our school banned cellphones completely this year for the first time and I can really see the difference.
It's tough to fully grasp how much cellphones impact the kids because we (people my age) haven't really lived through it. I was lucky enough that Facebook only took off at the end of my high school years. Before that, anything related to public opinion and stigma was only done through discussions at school, what you heard, what you saw.
Can you imagine having the whole world influence how you live your life? Can you imagine how quick a single snapchat sent to ~100 people can be influential? Can you imagine how easier shittalking and gossiping is now? It used to take months or years to make or break a reputation, now it can take a single afternoon or overnight. It's so easy to become paranoid when you cannot control how people talk about you. So much of growing up is trying to fit in and be accepted, "being yourself" comes after.
I've seen the kids come up to me after talk and literally cry deeply because some asshole posted a mean snapchat in the class group chat (yes, that's a thing now) and now everyone laughs at that girl. All of that bullshit because one single idiot kid wanted to make a joke. The circle of influence is so much bigger than it used to be. It's no wonder that you don't see a lot of "different" kids compared to when we were young. If you're different, you're laughed at. All the girls are pretty, all the boys are pretty. They are all decked out, have good haircuts, nice shoes, etc.
I applaud Denmark to think about banning that. It's a tough call and there will be a ton of backlash, but social media is absolutely terrible for their development. The cons far outweigh the pros.
What I want to know is, when did it become the norm for cellphones to be usable during school? When I grew up most people had cell phones, but you were not allowed to have it on in class. Even as a teen, I understood that it was rude to be distracted on your phone while someone is trying to talk to you and teach you something.
Seems like a no-brainer that cell phones should not be allowed during the school day except in cases of emergency, and I've never understood how, when, or why that changed.
It's always been banned in the class, but you know the drill. Kids all have them in their pockets anyways and over time, teachers have used it for teaching purposes or as a behavior tool, like "you can use your cellphones the last 5 minutes if you guys behave well".
Some schools had it banned everywhere inside the school (especially private schools), but not all of them. It's the first year it's banned everywhere in all schools.
Maybe it's just the honors class environment (I graduated 2010), but we just followed the rules for the most part. one simple warning here and there and it wasn't much worry. Not to say there was never any cheating (or in my case, a blaring alarm you forgot to turn off. 7AM classes but your alarm is set for 730-8), but you just didn't make it blatantly obvious you were on your phone, especially during a test day.
I do absloutely agree with no phones in class, though. It's a place of focus and phones are a distraction from what the teacher prepared for you that day. It should be a norm similar to being quiet in a library.
I basically watched this happen in my high school. As an american, the details certainly differ, but I'd be shocked if the dynamics weren't universal.
The tipping point: classes got too big for teachers to meaningfully engage with every student as individuals, and smart phones got fun. Whenever a student was fucking around, the teacher had to threaten them with punishment to put the phone away, because they always texting a parent, or looking something up for class, or just belligerent (because teenagers are Always Right, you know). Most of the time, the parents would push back on any of these punishments: a) sometimes the kid was being honest about their parent wanting constant contact; b) smartphones are expensive, who are you to confiscate what I paid for; c) the parents just assumed their kid was perfect and the teacher was targeting them (it does happen, to be fair).
At a certain point, the teacher has to either give up enforcing no cell phone usage, or they don't have time to teach. It's nice to imagine they could teach more engagingly, but plenty do, and it's inevitable that some number of children in a class will dislike the subject or the teacher, and most children are bored in school in the best of conditions.
Ahh,, I didn't consider that point. Classes tended to be 20-30 students max and that's around what a single teacher can manage (it's also just a fire hazard to jam more people in the rooms we had). Even then, it's stretching it a bit to manage 20 kids less than 90% of them are disciplined.
A post covid environment with even more kids and teachers being paid less compared to my grade school 10-15 years ago? That's a recipe for disaster. Not to mention that in the US parents WANT their kids to have phones (something about "but what if I need to contact them?" Well, you contact the school and they can contact the kid. Like pre ubiquitous cell phones).
I presume you mean they're banned during school hours. If not, how can this possibly be enforced?
See phone, confiscate phone.
First offense is kind of a warning, depending on who intervenes, but it can be a full 24h before you see your phone again, 48h the second time and your parents have to get it for you; up until a week.
We confiscated some phones the first week and now the students just don't use them, it's working pretty well!
They meant whether phones were banned for teenagers completely or just during school hours.
At school of course.
I wasn’t sure because it might be a live in school. I’m surprised this made that much of a difference, since the kids get immediate access to their phone before and after school.
Are those more common in your country? Those are extremely rare in the US to begin with. And when they do occur, boarding schools tend to be thought of with prestige reserved for the most wealthy families. The ability to pay for rent and board and tuition all at once for grade school is a very high bar to meet.
No, they're not. It was the only way I could think of that a full phone ban might work.
You'd think it was this easy but this doesn't work because parents demand their kids are reachable at all times.
Holy slippery slope, batman!
Not to be too dismissive, but good lord. These are all things that have to be considered when implementing a policy. The benefit outweighs the small chance of those scenarios actually happening.
Damaged or stolen property thats been confiscated has a lot of precedent for courses of action.
If a child is unreachable on their phone during school, well the parent or whoever can.... Call the school.
If there is enough risk to the well-being of a kid that they shouldn't walk home, they can stay at school until a parent can pick them up.
For real, I wasn't sure how to respond to that, thank you for the elaborate response.
Of course it's a slippery slope. We were able to live without cellphones prior to ~2010, of course we can still live without them now. Especially if it's only during school hours. It's not like the kids cannot use them outside of the school perimeters or in the bus ride. The parents know where they are anyways.
If the kid is dumb enough to use the cellphone at school then it's on him/her. Almost all parents agree with the cellphone being confiscated if they don't respect the rule. Most parents dislike how much their kid use their cellphone anyways.
The school would be liable in the first scenario. In the second, the parent should call the school to dismiss the student - as they always have.
The third one is a little ridiculous, but the solution would be to have the student and a principal/administrator call the parents together to figure out a reasonable way to navigate the transportation issue.
If the phone gets broken while in the school’s custody, then the school would need to pay to fix it, replace it, etc. This isn’t some novel situation. If they truly won’t own up to it, small claims court exists. Parents are enough of a headache already though, nobody would intentionally do something like this because it’s just going to invite more problems.
Schools also aren’t going to spend the time to crack students’ phones and search their data or install spyware, nor do they have staff with that expertise anyway. If they did do something like that, it’s a really serious lawsuit waiting to happen, and schools are terrified of being sued.
You seem to think that the schools are “out to get” kids, and that they’re actively adversarial towards their students. Mostly the people who work at schools really just want to teach and help students. They have way better things to do with their time and energy than scheme about hacking into your phone or breaking it intentionally.
Then if you’re a kid at school, and don’t want the headache of navigating that issue in an unpleasant conversation with your parent(s) and the principal, don’t use your phone during the school day. It’s not like the school is just going to shrug and say “guess you’re fucked, good luck” to a kid that needs to get home – they just want you to stop using your phone in class.
While I think I agree with banning social media for kids, I still want to know how they're going to enforce this, while also doing it securely. And without further tying my real name to an account, permanently. Discord, or a "support vendor" of Discord that was involved in age verification with govt IDs, just had a breach, including some of those govt IDs.
It's not like I've never had to show my ID, online, to a company for verification. It's entirely normal for banking apps for KYC and AML purposes. I've done the "take a picture of your ID...now look into your phone camera and move your head around slowly" thing multiple times.
Is that what we're going to have to do with Discord the rest of the proprietary social media companies? How does Mastodon and the Fediverse, a decentralized network, going to do this? How about about reddit or even here at Tildes? These are social media sites, too, right?
I'm curious to what tech comes up with, how it's regulated, if it's regulated, and how privacy concerns will be allayed. I get it, kids should not be on social media. For all the reasons @randomise stated, and more. But this isn't just going to affect kids. Kids generally don't have government ID. Adults (and at least older minor teens who drive and/or work) do.
Probably won’t win you any elections but there is a somewhat clean ban available: make smart phones like cigarettes, only available to 18 plus.
Offenders could be at risk of having their smart phones seized.
Problem solved?
I haven't thought about this before! It's an interesting idea, to get rid of the object rather than restrict its use. It would probably require heavy restriction/definition on what counts as a "smartphone", though.
Under 18s get T9s lol.
What I'd do if I was Lord High Bureaucrat of the school system is to just blanket ban all smartphones (if you're caught with a smartphone you get it taken away until the end of the day and get some kind of detention that doesn't hurt academic progression. I've got a past with out-of-school suspensions.) Once the smartphones are effectively out, schools can offer a deal with some dumbphone manufacturer for a basic, no-frills call-and-text device for cheap if students/parents want, or go without entirely. The dumbphones wouldn't be restricted in functionality or monitored; kids could try and be slick and text during class but having to text to only other phone numbers, with a numpad again and no image functionality would severely limit overuse compared to the ease of full-text typing and multimedia.
Basically, take schools back to the 2006 era of mobile phone technology.
While not perfect, since it’s mass social media, I could see them starting out with a set of companies/apps that are the most used currently (similar to who is designated affected by the EU gatekeeper legislation) and if some new thing pops up that everyone uses they can just amend the list.
That way the burden wouldn’t come down on every last small platform, and since both the majority of its appeal as well as the harm potential in social media is in its popularity/user base size, this might work?
I know what a struggle it’s been to move people to Signal in a WhatsApp-dominated area (country, really), and am now seeing the fruits of it literal years later – almost everyone I want to stay in contact with has either Signal or iMessage, including but not limited to older and not-tech savvy folks. Young people won’t switch to some unknown new Instagram/Tiktok/Snapchat clone, they’ll stick to texting, especially if that new platform will get caught in having to do age verification in a matter of potentially months anyway if it ever did blow up to the tune of e.g. BeReal. Constant platform-hopping is too exhausting for the masses, in my experience.
Another thought: Here in Germany, the digital features of the national ID card are available to use for companies. In theory, you could just scan the card with any NFC-capable smartphone, see in the app which information is requested, and can then approve to give it out to confirm age requirements. The capabilities include a binary “old enough/under the limit” for any minimum age including 13 or 18 without giving away the birthdate, let alone things like ID card number and photo.
Only that the main issues with it are:
Edit: on the surface more costly solution, but things like customer trust & brand value are notoriously hard to factor into asset value, especially in the longer-term :P
Hopefully it will only be enacted once EU's zero knowledge proof solution for age verification has been implemented.
It's always easiest to pin anxiety and depression on those pesky phones instead of the state of society and the economy.
Social media improved my life immeasurably. It gave me access to knowledge and experiences that helped me understand myself better. It would've taken me years to get this far on my own. I'd be heartbroken if someone is denied that opportunity.
As someone who is just old enough to remember cassettes, but never had the opportunity to buy them, and spent way too much time online as a youngster and teen, the details are going to make or break this kind of regulation.
I can deeply empathize with what you've said here: were it not for a lot of friends I made online, I may not have made it to today; without social media, I would not have been exposed to half my interests; as someone who struggled with empathy and vulnerability in my youth, without the web, I'd be a lot less socially adept than I am today.
At the same time, social media is objectively toxic. All the popular ones actively manipulate the worldviews of their users, the latent social energy to organize (whether for productive or recreational purposes) has never been lower, the kinds of conspiracy theories and extremist ideologies that abound are deranged from any sort of norm, the wider web has shrunk, etc. We need to do something; equally, that doesn't justify any something.
For instance: if this specific law outlaws youtube for kids, what does that mean for channels like Khan Academy? They've moved to their own site these days, but plenty of enriching material is available there. It's the default video archive, not just the boobtube of the internet! What about when a tiktok clone that doesn't allow user submissions, filled with scraped videos, pops up, just to harvest kids' data and spread propaganda, and provide overworked parents with a break? That's not social media, and it's no better.
And that's not to mention things like the externalities of enforcement, or kids being parked in front of Netflix from infancy. It doesn't change that toddlers need to interact with one another, and adults, in physical space, and the proposal is basically to let the parents keep being manipulated and addicted to the unhealthy spaces, and keep parking the kids in front of screens, they are just not allowed to be abused in spaces they can participate in.
Social media is a trap, I suspect. Its best features existed before Facebook/Twitter, its worst were novel, like the normalization of broadcasting lazy thoughts under your real name and engagement farming. But we can't pretend this is an easy problem, this is a hell of our own creation, one with deep hooks in most of us one way or another.
I do wonder a bit about child welfare regulations being used to avoid the "iPad baby" stuff in the first place, but Denmark's services seem more interested in cultural erasure than bettering people, and my nation's child welfare track record is no better, so that's not even a very viable first step.
I’m glad you had that experience and that’s a really important point we must not forget. What’s important here is we’re talking kids and here the cons really outdoes the pros. Also they’d still be able to chat via sms or other similar channels so they’re not just cut off in that regard.
Eh. I'm not sure that it make sense.
For me it looks like the fight against consequences, not against the cause. It's always the most simple solution: ban something. "Stop cyberbullying, let's return to vintage time-honored usual bullying"?
Like school that unofficially ban using word "bullying" between school employees to "fight bullying".
I have a kid under 15 and I'm ok with him using phone and laptop. He watch educational and funny mem videos on youtube, speaks with schoolmates in a few instant messangers, and hes ok with me explaining to him what is ok and what is not ok to do on the internet.
Wikipedia, millions of videos on youtube and other platforms... I don't want my kid to be separated from world even if this world is not a completely safe place.
The difference is that you’re a responsible parent and your kid probably knows what to do based on your guidance already, which don’t get me wrong is absolutely great!
The issue is that a vast majority of kids, like their parents, have close to no understanding in these companies’ business models and why they’re addicted to (some aspects of) their smartphones, behaviors which then transfer over onto the children.
Worse still, being mean on social media regularly has less consequences than it would’ve had offline, due to less parental and school/other institutions’ oversight. (Admittedly I may be wrong here, this is totally anecdotal and I don’t work with kids.)
Wikipedia, despite the features of its editing process, is not a mainstream social media platform. Even on YouTube, you’re typically not scrolling through your friends’ feeds. And not being separated was possible before smartphones too: by meeting up in person :-)
Thanks, thats a good arguments. As usual, any world issue is more complex than you think and don't have binary black and white solution.
Late upd: now my kid will be prohibited by law to use any site that belongs to "social media" or have "social media" elements.
social media ≠ internet ≠ social chat
and with that, I am surprisingly fine with this.
edit: and I say this as someone who was one of the first proto-influencers at fourteen.
Excellent. I hope this spreads to rest of Europe. I would take it further: I don't think children should be allowed to have personal smart phones at all. Perhaps not even computers anymore these days.
There was a time when the harms were not that great, but those times are permanently over.
Social media bans are always thorny; I agree with the idea behind it and you really should as a parent limit their internet activity in general to build good habits. But governmental intervention rarely works out well when it comes to the Internet.
This statement doesn't help either:
If we're being honest, most social media isn't "bad". It really comes down to the big ones ran by algorithms designed to maximize engagement. Literal drug dealers of the digital era. If more places were like Tildes there would be few issues in engaging with them. Or at least, no more issues than any act of having peers forced to interact in school for 7-8 hours a day.
(but then again, would Tildes still have these norms if it was the size of any "ban-worthy" media? quite the conundrum...)
The other ambivalence around this is that these initiatives rarely address the real issues. Conviniently mentioned here:
I always imagined Denmark as a very "accessible" city, so this was a bit surprising to hear. But I would not be surprised of this statistic if it's similar in he US. Here, we made everything hostile to loitering, charge to participate anywhere and are charging more and more, and kids who can't drive have no safe way to get to a town square and hang out. Add in how more 2 income households have busy parents who can't drop their kids off on demand and we have a recipe for the stay-at-home teen holed up in their room.
No surprise this ends with kids communicating in the last "free" way possible through the net, or at least cheaply through game lobbies in the case of teeenage boys. Much of society took away all the traditional options we thought of as "teen spaces" 30-40 years back. But I don't see too many initiatives to properly "bring back" community. No building, only restricting whatever is left. No wonder Nepal's generation simply rebelled in retaliation; it takes you back to an old African proverb:
Didn't mean for this to get so negative. But I just hope this is the start of an initiative to really "rebuild community" and not the end.
This is a very interesting point you brought up IMO. I agree with the facts of the argument, but I’m not sure I’d reach the same conclusion: It essentially boils down to whether social media would have had such a massive spread and usage numbers globally today if it weren’t for algorithmic, personalized content suggestions, for which, while it is extremely difficult to answer, I’m gonna wager slightly towards a “no”…
It's still worldwide instant communication, so I think it's popularity would still be there, because there's intense demand for that.
Would it be anywhere near as sticky or profitable without all the dark arts developed over the 2010's? Not by a long shot. But I'll admit that at that scale even the purest algorithms and best faith moderation may not prevent many of the effects we see today. Especially in the classroom. Kids in general simply have less self control to moderate any behavior, even if it's not egging them to consume more.
Fair enough, but instant messengers already do worldwide instant communication… So I’d feel like in that scenario, WhatsApp-style apps would just dominate while Instagram-like… would not have grown as rapidly instead of both existing, you know?
We had Usenet and forums before more modern social media, we have discord now. IMO it was more the news coverage of things like Myspace and TheFacebook and the accessibility of them that led to them blowing up. Something would have shown up, it's just a matter of "what". Once you have the Internet speeds to share pics you want to share them. Maybe in that AU we're all on Flick(e?)r