The United Kingdom’s recent push toward restricting social media access for under-16s has reignited a massive debate. But honestly? This conversation needs to be much larger than just apps and teenagers. The argument we usually hear is framed in incredibly simple terms:

“Social media is harmful to children, so children should be protected.”

While that sounds completely reasonable on the surface, I think that framing completely misses the deeper problem.
If something is genuinely harmful, why is our only answer to remove children from it? If the danger is real, it doesn’t magically vanish the moment someone blows out the candles on their 16th birthday. The core issue isn’t just that kids are scrolling — it’s that social media has fundamentally rewired the incentives of human behaviour.

The problem is the system itself.

“Think of the Children” — But What About Everyone Else?

Whenever a government proposes restrictions, the classic phrase “won’t somebody please think of the children?” makes an appearance. Sometimes it’s a joke, sometimes it’s a genuine warning, but it always works because protecting kids is an undeniable moral argument. Almost nobody wants to be the person opposing child safety. But we are asking the wrong question. It shouldn’t be: “Do children deserve protection?” (Of course they do.) The question we should be asking is: “Are we protecting children from a harmful environment, or are we just allowing a toxic environment to thrive while removing kids from the blast zone?”

That distinction matters.

If infinite scrolling, algorithmic addiction, outrage optimisation, and attention harvesting are the root problems, why do we look at adults and simply say, “Well, you have the freedom to choose”? We didn’t approach seatbelts this way. Nobody looked at rising car fatalities and said: “Let’s put seatbelts in the back for the kids, but adults up front can decide whether they want to risk it.” We universally recognised that the design of the environment itself was creating unnecessary harm, and we changed the design.

The Real Danger: The Attention Economy

The biggest cultural shift brought about by social media wasn’t just that more people could talk to each other. It was that everyone was suddenly drafted into the attention economy. Before the internet, celebrity was a fiercely protected, limited resource. A very small, select group of people could reach mass audiences; actors and musicians, television personalities, public figures. They lived inside a walled garden controlled by studios, publishers, broadcasters, and advertisers. The attention economy existed, but your access to it was restricted.

Then social media arrived, and suddenly, everyone had a stage. Overnight, anyone with a smartphone could become a broadcaster, a brand, or a product. And that is exactly where the problem exploded.

When Ordinary Life Adopted Celebrity Logic

To me, the most disturbing change isn’t that traditional celebrities became more powerful. It’s that ordinary people started behaving exactly like them. Our private lives became potential content. Our lived experiences became drafts for future posts. Our personalities morphed into “personal brands.”

A holiday is no longer just a holiday; it is a meticulously curated photo opportunity.

A hobby is no longer just for quiet enjoyment; it is a potential side-hustle or niche audience builder.

A personal opinion is no longer just a conversation; it is a calculated chance to go viral.

This is the real brain rot. It isn’t just that we spend too much time staring at screens. It’s that the algorithm actively trains us to view ourselves as performers.

The Algorithm Doesn’t Care About Truth

Social media platforms are not neutral, objective windows into society. They are highly tuned machines designed around a single metric: engagement. And engagement is absolutely not a synonym for value. A highly researched, genuinely useful post and a wildly inaccurate, outrage-inducing rant both generate attention. A thoughtful debate and a petty, pointless argument both create interaction. A genuine human achievement and a completely manufactured controversy both produce views. The algorithm never stops to ask: “Does this improve society?” It only asks: “Will this keep people scrolling?”

And the things that keep human beings watching are usually the things that provoke our most primal, intense emotions; Anger and Outrage, Envy and Tribalism, Fear and Voyeurism. The system rewards whatever captures attention, regardless of whether it actually deserves it. The rise of the “influencer” isn’t a cultural accident. It is the inescapable, logical conclusion of an economy where human attention is the primary currency. Think about how traditional advertising used to work vs. how the influencer economy works today.

Traditional Economy:
A company makes a product.
The company buys attention.
The company sells the product.

The Influencer Economy:
The person becomes the product.
Their lifestyle becomes the advertisement.
Their private life becomes the marketing strategy.

This is why modern influencer culture feels so fundamentally different — and often more exhausting — than old-school celebrity culture. A celebrity used to sell products. Today, people sell themselves in order to become celebrities. Some argue that social media only became a toxic wasteland because everyone finally got access to it. I think they have it backwards. Mass adoption didn’t create the danger; it merely revealed it.

When only a tiny fraction of the population could participate in the attention economy, the collateral damage was limited. But when billions of people entered the system, the twisted incentives became impossible to ignore. The platforms didn’t just connect us — they commodified our attention. And once attention became currency, society immediately began optimising itself around acquiring more of it.

If social media is harmful because of addictive design, engagement algorithms, emotional manipulation, and attention extraction, then those specific mechanisms are what we need to regulate. Don’t just remove the children from the casino. Fix the casino. Don’t just lecture people to have more “self-control.” Question why the environment was engineered by billionaires to defeat human self-control in the first place. As we debate restricting social media for under-16s, we shouldn’t just be asking, “How do we keep children away from these platforms?” We need to be asking, “What kind of society are these platforms actually creating?” Because the biggest danger isn’t that children are learning bad habits from adults. The danger is that adults have already completely surrendered to a system that teaches everyone — including our children — that being seen is infinitely more important than simply being.

And that is a much bigger crisis than any single app.