Stephen Johnson | Before we legislate: Pragmatic path for Jamaica’s children online

Termario Daniels’s recent piece in In Focus, The Sunday Gleaner, “Why blocking social media won’t protect children,” is timely. As the Ministry of Health and Wellness weighs regulation for minors, his argument deserves a an answer. He grounds his case in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, a framework worth taking seriously.
He is right that a blanket ban is not a solved problem anywhere else. But that does not mean Jamaica has no path forward. Jamaica needs the right approach, built on what other countries have learned and what the health evidence actually shows. Getting this right means balancing two real concerns, not choosing between them.
GLOBAL LESSONS
Australia banned under-16 accounts outright. The results are humbling. Roughly 85 per cent of under-16s were still using social media three months later. Many stayed on their original accounts while regulators opened investigations into major platforms for non-compliance. Some caregivers report modest declines in time online. Others report teens simply moving to less visible platforms. South Korea’s gaming curfew met a similar fate, quietly abandoned in 2021 once enforcement collapsed and teens began borrowing adult identities to get around it.
Norway cuts both ways. Its mobile-free classroom guidelines, in place since 2024, show genuinely mixed results. One widely cited study found less bullying and improved grades for girls (Abrahamsson, 2024). A more rigorous analysis of the same national rollout found no significant effect on academic results or well-being at all. That split is exactly the caution Daniels is right to raise: restricting access does not automatically deliver the benefits it promises.
Norway’s forthcoming social-media law is more instructive still. It places the compliance burden on platforms, not families. Providers must verify age at login. Enforcement is anchored in the EU’s Digital Services Act, which can fine non-compliant platforms up to six per cent of global turnover. Norway is not prosecuting teenagers or going it alone against companies with no local office. After a public consultation closed in late 2025, the law will not take effect before 2027.
The United States shows what fails legally. Courts have frozen youth social-media laws in Utah, Arkansas, Ohio, Mississippi, Texas, and California, most notably in NetChoice, LLC v. Reyes, on free-expression grounds. Mandatory age-gating, courts found, restricts speech for everyone, not just minors.
There is a second, separate problem: privacy. Verifying age generally means collecting identifying data, government identification, biometric scans, exactly what a child-safety law should minimise, not multiply. That design flaw is not one country’s mistake. It recurs across nearly every verification system attempted so far. The European Union is piloting a “double-blind” age-verification system in which neither the platform nor the verifier ever sees both a user’s identity and the service they are accessing. A framework that ignores either risks being struck down or being rejected by the public it is meant to protect.
Together, these four cases point to the same lesson. Blunt bans generate headlines, not compliance. Narrower, design-focused approaches move slower but last longer. Jamaica has the benefit of watching all four unfold before writing a single clause.
PRAGMATIC PATH
Regulation aside, and this is a public-health question. Heavy adolescent social-media use is linked to anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and disrupted sleep. Physical effects include sedentary behaviour and eye strain. Much of this happens outside a parent’s view, normalised long before it surfaces as a health concern. That evidence, not headlines, is why the Ministry of Health and Wellness is involved, applying the same evidence-led caution Jamaica already applies to other public-health interventions, from tobacco control to road safety.
The pragmatic path leads with measures that restrict no one’s access and collect no one’s data. That means that school-based digital literacy, parent and guardian training, public-health messaging, and stronger reporting pathways for cyberbullying, grooming, and exploitation. These can start immediately and be enforced domestically without waiting on any platform’s cooperation.
Only once that foundation is in place should age verification follow, built with strict data-minimisation and retention limits from the outset. Enforcement should run through CARICOM, not Jamaica alone confronting companies with no local presence. That follows the same logic Norway is applying through the EU. Education first, safeguards second, enforcement last. That sequence is what makes the approach pragmatic rather than reactive.
The Ministry of Health and Wellness has completed a nationally representative study of Jamaican attitudes on this issue. Those findings will be released to inform the policy conversation once the process is complete. What is already clear is that Jamaica does not have to choose between banning outright and doing nothing or between protecting children and respecting their rights.
Daniels is right that nothing about protecting children online should happen without the youth themselves. Their doubts deserve as much weight as their support. On the substance, there is more common ground here than the current debate suggests. Neither Daniels nor the ministry is arguing for locking children out of the digital world.
What Jamaica needs now is not a verdict but a conversation, one that includes parents, educators, platforms, and young people themselves. A conversation grounded in what other countries got right and wrong, what the health evidence shows, and what a rights-respecting, enforceable approach looks like here. That conversation, not a rushed ban, is the pragmatic path forward.

Dr Stephen C. Johnson is a research fellow and senior lead author of the national survey on public perceptions of social media regulation for minors in Jamaica.