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In June, then British prime minister Keir Starmer defended a social media ban for children under 16 years old against criticisms that they would simply circumvent it. He stated that it would be “utterly ridiculous” to stop banning alcohol sales to children just because “a teenager managed to get a drink somehow.”
Starmer is one of many leaders to compare the regulation of alcohol consumption to that of social media use. Even if the two products are very different, there may be useful lessons in looking at how countries have attempted to regulate alcohol consumption and what lessons can apply to social media.
As the Canadian government prepares to steer the Safe Social Media Act (Bill C-34) through Parliament, it’s a particularly important moment to understand what does and does not work.
No one regulation can act as a silver bullet in preventing social media harms. Bans can, and will, be bypassed. Any approach will have to combine different types of regulation to shape the systems of social media.
Four approaches, mixed results
Countries have generally taken four main approaches to reducing alcohol harm, with mixed results.
One approach is age restrictions on sales. One study examined how the minimum legal drinking age in Finland affected people born between 1944 and 1954; it found that alcohol-related illness and mortality rates were lower among those who could not buy alcohol until they were 20 or 21 than those who could buy it from age 18.
Conversely, when New Zealand lowered its minimum drinking age to 18 from 20 in 1999, road traffic crashes spiked by 12 per cent among men aged 18 and 19.
Bans on alcohol sales reduced harm but were not a panacea. Young people are already evading social media bans in countries like Australia with little change as yet in overall social media use.
A second approach is time-based bans. After the German state of Baden-Württemberg banned overnight alcohol sales from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. at gas stations and kiosks in 2010, youth hospitalizations during those hours dropped by 9 per cent, although the ban had no effect on alcohol-related road casualties.
In 2022, China took a similar approach to online gaming when it restricted the time young people could spend gaming to one hour a day on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays. However, more than 77 per cent of minors surveyed circumvented the ban, mostly by registering accounts under the names of their older friends and relatives.
In 2021, South Korea abandoned an 11-year experiment banning those under 16 from online gaming between midnight and 6 a.m. Research showed the ban had increased young people’s sleep by only 1.5 minutes on average. South Korea moved from restricting access to getting excessive gamers into support programs, such as local counselling sessions or residential recovery stays.
The third approach is banning advertising, which targets the appeal of a product rather than access to it. Lithuania’s complete ban on alcohol advertising in 2018 reduced the frequency of adolescent intoxication by 35 per cent compared to other European Union countries. Meanwhile, France’s narrower approach adopted in 1991 restricts alcohol marketing to factual information, such as alcohol content, while banning lifestyle imagery such as sports or parties.
A fourth approach is individual-focused education or public-awareness campaigns. School programs in England on the harms of alcohol consumption had only short-term effects. In some cases, alcohol companies funded the charities providing education campaigns in schools, but by using misinformation.
Similarly, young people understood and agreed with a platform-initiated media literacy campaign on TikTok, but mocked its delivery, a reminder that a platform’s own tone can undercut the lesson it is trying to teach.
Broader media campaigns did not reduce alcohol-caused accidents. Media literacy campaigns targeting young people’s social media use had the same results – they were effective at raising awareness but not at changing most people’s behaviour over the long term.
Shifting defaults, then culture
The key lesson from alcohol policy is that successful harm reduction does not require eliminating a product or achieving perfect compliance. There are three main avenues to ensure that regulation is effective.
First, targeted rapid research is needed to understand which default settings are protective rather than performative. Canada’s proposed Bill C-34 aims to restrict access to social media platforms and chatbots and force platforms to restrict the accounts of those under 16 with age-verification measures. If platforms fulfil certain safety-by-design obligations, they may be allowed to enable accounts for young people again. Research will need to test specific platform defaults against real-use data to determine which ones reduce harm, rather than relying on platforms’ self-reported metrics or defaults that look protective but change little in practice.
Learning the lessons of which approaches work is even more critical after Meta recently reached a settlement with U.S states in a lawsuit over social-media addiction claims. Meta agreed to introduce new features to restrict teenagers’ use of Facebook and Instagram to two hours a day and to ban use from midnight to 6 a.m. without parental consent. Meta also agreed to enact changes to better verify the ages of users who are under 18, to implement stronger parental controls, and additional controls on like counts and appearance filters.
Second, rather than seeking a single Big Tobacco moment, Canada should sustain these regulatory efforts over time so that safer patterns of digital use can become easier and eventually more socially accepted.
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Bill C-34 along with Bill C-36, the Protecting Privacy and Consumer Data Act, both introduced in June 2026, together would establish a new regulator for the online world. The proposed new regulator, the Digital Safety and Data Protection Commission, will offer a space for continual regulation, if properly resourced.
Finally, Canada should make public advocacy part of a broader cultural shift to redefine social norms around how we use social media. The timing is right as people are already pulling back: tech-industry parents are limiting their children’s technology use, and attitudes towards the platforms are changing. Young users even describe their generation as “the guinea pigs to big tech.”
If the barrier to change is collective rather than individual, the bigger question is: How can entire peer groups shift together, and what role should governments, schools and advocates play in making that possible?
Our collective experience with alcohol regulations could provide clues to the answers.
