EU Human Rights Chief Correctly Says Social Media Bans a Human Rights Issue

Government censorship has gotten so out of control, that whole age groups are being censored outright. This is being called out by the EU.

Social media platforms are communication platforms. Being able to communicate at all is a human right. Regardless of your age, you do have rights in a free country. None of this should be rocket science, yet there is no shortage of people who would look at those three accurate statements and say, “Yeah, but”.

That “yeah, but” is often proceeded with false claims of mental health and social media. Often, free speech opponents will say that social media is like smoking or drinking. ‘You wouldn’t give minors cigarettes or get them to drink alcohol, why would you expose them to something like social media?’ they might argue. The problem with that argument has always been that this is a false equivalence. You ingest alcohol and you inhale cigarette smoke into your body. It’s an actual substance. If you try to go without cigarettes after getting addicted (a very easy thing to do), then you’ll experience very real withdrawal symptoms where the chemistry in your body is demanding you consume even more cigarettes. Social media contains no such chemical reaction from the human body.

Even if you still insist that the addiction qualities are still there, then you also have to admit that watching television is also just as highly addicting and dangerous. Talking to other people is also highly addicting and dangerous. Listening to music is highly addicting and dangerous. Same with watching movies, plays, reading books, and a whole lot more. Ultimately, it’s a complete nonsense argument and science has long dismissed these claims of social media being inherently dangerous and addicting, but for the people continuing with this cult-like mentality, the evidence and logical thinking simply doesn’t matter and they are on this self-made crusade to “save the children” and anyone who says otherwise is evil, amoral, and probably “working for Meta”. No amount of explaining how things work in the real world is ever going to change their minds about this whole thing.

The problem is that the people who refuse to acknowledge reality are the ones writing the laws. In their minds, banning younger people of society from social media is not only an important goal, but a moral imperative. As such, this mass government censorship is not only seen as not a threat to some, but seen as a saviour for society in general. In fact, it was only yesterday we were noting that Greece was moving forward with their own censorial social media ban laws, falsely arguing that it is a matter of public health among other things.

At the end of the day, governments are passing mass government censorship laws that violate basic human rights. Younger people are on social media platforms finding communities of like-minded individuals. The best case scenario is that those younger individuals are being ripped away from their own communities and losing their rights to speak their minds on a medium of their choice. That is a plain as day human rights violation and, recently, I spotted a report about the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe, Michael O’Flaherty talking about this very issue. From Politico:

European countries should not rush into social media bans for children, human rights adviser Michael O’Flaherty told POLITICO.

Such bans are neither “proportionate nor necessary,” said O’Flaherty, the commissioner for human rights at the Council of Europe, the continent’s top human rights body, adding that there “are other ways to address the curse of abusive material online.”

The debate on how to protect children from the harms of social media “goes straight to bans without looking at all the other options that could be in play,” he told POLITICO. Restricting access to social media presents “issues of human rights, because a child has a right to receive information just like anybody else.”

O’Flaherty’s concerns come amid live discussions on the merits and effectiveness of bans in Europe. Australia became the first country in the world to ban minors under 16 from creating accounts on social media platforms like Instagram in late 2025, and Brazil moved forward with its own measures last week.

“We have a very piecemeal enforcement of the Digital Services Act and the other relevant rulebook right across Europe. It’s very much dependent on the goodwill and the capacity of the different governments to be serious about it,” he said. Governments have “an uneven record” in that regard, he said.

EU countries must make sure they have exhausted all other solutions before heading for the extreme measures of bans, he said. “I don’t see much sign of that effort.”

He is absolutely right. What measures have government taken in this regard beyond robotically saying “social media BAD” and “Ban younger people from social media!”? Are there specific kinds of content that are actually on the platforms that are of concern? What measures have been taken to go after that content?

At most, I’ve seen the sledgehammer approach of vaguely saying “harmful content” and pushing online harms bills. This is by no means a serious attempt at tackling whatever issue that these lawmakers are seeing and, instead, showcasing lawmakers simply demanding that platforms wave a magic wand and making “the bad stuff” go away. The thing is, different people have different notions of what constitutes as “harmful”. Some people will view content talking about LGBTQ+ content as simply “bad” content. Others will see people talking about video games and consider that “bad” content. What gives such people the authority to designate such material as “bad”? Yet, in some cases, this is what such government censorship is really aimed at.

Legally speaking, lawmakers can’t target LGBTQ+ content specifically, so the workaround has always been to just put out a vague label of “harmful” and just hoping that all that stuff goes away through a legal loophole. At the end of the day, though, this is a human rights violation. In fact, I’d argue it is just as much of a human rights violation as banning people from communicating on social media platforms. You are curtailing people’s ability to speak. Whether that is the removal of said speech or the removal of people from accessing said speech, it’s all censorship just the same.

What is sad is how often this basic truth gets lost in these debates. Instead, it is often blotted out with wild claims and conspiracy theories about how social media is inherently harmful and misleading people into believing that just instituting mass government censorship is the only solution on the table when, in fact, you are talking about a massive violation of human rights and dressing it up as a health issue. I can only wish that O’Flaherty’s comments reach more people, but given the firehose of propaganda and misinformation about this these days, I worry that such reasonable voices will get drowned out.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.