Meta’s landmark $17 billion settlement in the United States this week added momentum to a swelling global effort to curb children’s social media use. About 40 countries are debating, proposing or implementing limits on access to such platforms for young people.

Under the settlement, Meta agreed to strengthen its age verification tools, expand parental controls and impose other curbs to features that stoke mental health concerns.

The wave of regulatory activity across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas against social media companies has been driven by worries that their products harm children. Supporters of the curbs have pointed to addictive design features that hook young brains and to the proliferation of harmful content despite existing safeguards.

But the bans come with problems of their own. In Australia, the first country to enforce one, the measures have so far failed to keep children off social media. Critics have also said that the bans limit freedom of expression and create privacy issues around age screening.

Despite these issues, initiatives to limit children’s access to social media have expanded. Here are the points of contention in the push for such restrictions.

Do the bans work?

By the most obvious measure, no. Early evidence indicates that social media bans for children in countries like Australia, Indonesia and Malaysia are ineffective at keeping young people off the platforms. Children have generally been able to maintain access by using technical workarounds like VPNs or fooling age verification systems. Some governments have said that social media companies are not enforcing their bans.

In Australia, where a law is meant to have excluded children under 16 from some platforms since December, the government said that more than 80 percent of children who were surveyed reported using at least one age-restricted service three months after the ban started.

Some Australian parents spoke approvingly of the ban all the same, saying that it empowered them to better guide their children’s activities. It could prevent younger children from joining the platforms, they said, even if it does not stop those who are already on them.

Indonesia, which in March began imposing its ban for children under 16, has faced hurdles in getting major tech companies to comply with its age verification mandate. Malaysia, which started enforcing its own version in June, has also experienced friction with social media companies.

Experts at the University of Newcastle in Australia said that the country’s policy had not led to a substantive change in daily use among children. But the full effects of the legislation might take years to materialize, they said.

“It takes time for policy implementation to stabilize and for impacts, particularly on well-being, to emerge,” said Luke Wolfenden, a professor of behavioral science at the university.

Do the bans infringe people’s rights?

Human rights groups and privacy watchdogs say they do and have generally opposed the bans.

Lisa Dittmer, a researcher at Amnesty International who focuses on children’s digital rights, said last month that the organization viewed a ban recently proposed in the European Union as a “temporary measure at best.” She has argued instead for changes to the addictive designs of social media platforms.

Amnesty International’s executive director for Indonesia, Usman Hamid, said that the move there to ban social media access for children deprived tens of millions of people of vital channels for communication, information and self-expression.

“With this blanket ban, it will be increasingly difficult for children to express their views on government policies that directly impact their human rights,” he wrote in a statement.

More than half of the U.S. and Australian children surveyed last year by the Family Online Safety Institute, an international nonprofit group, said they were worried a social media ban for children would disconnect them from their friends and support systems. Less than 40 percent of children supported a ban, compared with more than 50 percent of parents, the group said.

Privacy watchdogs have also said that age verification systems undermine anonymity online and involve gathering sensitive data, which can be stolen or misused.

But the curbs’ proponents have said that such restrictions are necessary. Meutya Hafid, Indonesia’s communications minister, said that the country’s policy was a needed response to the risks of children’s exposure to pornography, cyberbullying, internet fraud and digital addiction.

“Children may complain, and parents may be confused about how to deal with their children’s complaints,” she said in March. “However, we believe this is the best step the government can take in this digital emergency.”

Are the bans targeting the right thing?

Critics say they do not, arguing that age-based restrictions leave untouched the underlying design of social media platforms.

The harms children face online stem from addictive features like infinite scrolling, video auto-play and constant notifications, said Volker Türk, the United Nations’ high commissioner for human rights, in a video posted online in May.

He called for compelling tech giants to redesign their platforms rather than limiting access to them. Experts said such measures would conflict more directly with the business models of social media platforms, which rely on user engagement to make money.

Proponents of bans believe that stemming social media use would be a circuit breaker for its unhealthy influences. They often cite data publicized by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services showing that children and adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of poor mental health outcomes.

But other research has failed to establish a causal relationship between heavy social media use and children’s mental health issues. A study published in The Journal of Pediatrics in 2023 suggested that excessive social media use could be a symptom, rather than a cause, of poor mental health.

The researchers linked the rise in children’s mental disorders to declining chances to “play, roam and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults,” they wrote, rather than to screen time or social media use itself.