Young millennials and Gen Z have fully immersed themselves in social media and digital revolutions. Here, young millennials are known as the Facebook generation and iGeneration, while Gen Zers are recognised as digital natives. Digital activities have become an integral part of our daily lives.

Being digitally proficient and active has many upsides. For example, our professional efficiency and productivity have boosted, especially in the AI era. We are also able to use different social media platforms to virtually connect and interact with others, regardless of geographical location and time zone differences. Yet, as I addressed in some of my publications as a researcher and author, social media and digital engagement are a double-edged sword.

In the digital age, young millennials and Gen Z are known as the sad generations with happy photos. We selectively present the positive sides of our lives on social media and, very often, we may fake our personas to earn “likes” and recognition from others. Social media viewers subsequently develop envy and depression, as they misleadingly believe many others on social media are doing much better than them (socially, professionally, and academically).

Worse still, social media platforms, led by TikTok and YouTube Shorts, are criticised for causing children and teenagers to become digitally addicted—compounding their mental health costs chronically. Therefore, many policymakers have called for social media detox. Social media detox means taking a break from social media to improve mental health.

Australia pioneers the movement of social media detox. As of late 2024, Australia enacted legislation effectively banning children under 16 from using social media platforms, requiring companies to take reasonable steps to prevent underage accounts through the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024, which amends the Online Safety Act 2021; meaning there is a legal minimum age of 16 to access most social media platforms in Australia.

According to Forbes Magazine, the content creator economy is now projected to be worth $250 billion. Given the substantial financial incentives content creation and its associated social media engagement have contributed, it remains uncertain how many governments will follow Australia’s footsteps to ban or significantly restrict underage online users’ social media access. This is because such restrictions or bans will notably harm the content creator economy that has contributed largely to global economic growth.

Yet, when more children and teenagers develop social media-inflicted mental health issues, such a circumstance will certainly increase the public medical expenditure of the corresponding countries. More importantly, the younger generations will be the next faces of our labour markets. If social media-inflicted mental health issues are not contained, the long-term harms to the corresponding labour markets will be remarkable. These long-term mental health and economic costs will offset the shorter-term economic incentives the growth of the content creator economy brings.

That’s why apt policy and legal interventions in social media detox are deemed necessary and rational to ensure the sustainability of the global economy. As our world becomes increasingly digitalised, digital penetration in most developed countries reaches over 90%. Therefore, it remains uncertain how practical it is for us to partly separate ourselves from digital and social media engagement.

This is one of the pressing issues that scholars and policymakers must study collaboratively, so as to develop better policy responses in minimising the mental health costs inflicted by social media addiction.

Using social media is fine. Yet, overly using social media for an extended period of time may bring more bads than goods.