Sweden should introduce a minimum age of 15 for the use of social media, a government-appointed commission recommended on Tuesday.
Several European nations are seeking to rein in children’s use of social media after Australia took the lead with a world-first ban on under-16s in December last year.
“The reasons for introducing an age limit nevertheless outweigh the benefits of continued free access to this type of media,” Swedish investigator Lisa Englund Krafft told a news conference with Social Affairs and Public Health Minister Jakob Forssmed.
A ban can be formulated in a way that the platform companies would be responsible for the task of age verification, she said.
In Sweden, there is currently a limit of 13 years for when children must have parental consent to create accounts on social media.
“We are losing an entire generation to endless scrolling,” Forssmed told the press conference. “Screens and social media and their impact on the health of children and young people is one of the biggest challenges of our time.”
In neighbouring Norway, the government said in April it plans to submit a bill to parliament by year-end on banning social media use by under-16s.
