Abstract：Social media brings faceted risks——including extreme content, social interaction anxiety, digital addiction, and privacy exposure——to children who are in a critical stage of rapid growth and change. In response to these challenges, a global legislative wave has emerged seeking to prohibit or restrict children’s access to social media platforms. While specific measures vary across jurisdictions, social media bans universally concentrate on three core dimensions: content risk prevention and control, age verification mechanisms, and platform responsibility enhancement. These legislative initiatives reflect a paradigm shift in digital governance from “content regulation” toward “systemic risk governance”. However, they share a fundamental presupposition that “usage inherently equals harm”, overlooking the contextual dependency and individual variations in social media’s impacts. Practically, such bans confront significant efficacy challenges including limited behavioral intervention effectiveness, technological defects in age verification systems, and insufficient family cooperation. Meanwhile, the bans may also bring negative effects such as rights deprivation and exacerbated privacy vulnerabilities, as well as obscuring deeper structural contradictions including inadequate parenting practices and insufficient social support systems. Therefore, protecting minors from social media harms should transcend solely reliance on banning policy. Instead, we need to establish an ecological protection framework through collaborative governance among government entities, platform operators, families, and educational institutions: at the educational level, advancing critical digital literacy education to cultivate children’s autonomous judgment capabilities; at the social level, fostering supportive developmental environments that satisfy children’s legitimate social interaction and expressive needs; and at the institutional level, strengthening platform accountability by reconstructing the “duty of care” system to prevent and even eliminate social media risks at the product design process of social media.
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