Make Social Media Work For Us

Governments are doing bans on social media for young people around the world. Australia has one, the UK is going to have one (maybe) and others may well follow. This article explains why this is a bad idea. You could also just scroll down for some really good advice about how we can make social media work for us.

Social media bans (like all bans) don’t work because people find workarounds: cracks in the system. In Australia they already have. So the problem is that people are going to use it but without the support systems we have in place now. When we ban things, we think that we are making people safer but we’re not. The reason why is because people feel shame about doing a bad thing. This prevents them from talking about what they see. Shame also prevents people from seeking help if they’ve been harmed or have seen something potentially harmful.

Everyone understands that there are positives and negatives to everything: opportunities and risks. If you ban something you don’t get the risks but you also don’t get the opportunities. These opportunities include, learning about the world and ourselves, connecting with others, having fun, that kind of thing. Opportunities also include learning how to use social media and how to make it work for us. If we can’t use the tools, we can’t practice, and if we can’t practice we’ll never master it.

Closing down another youth space

One of the reasons that the ban is wrong is that it is closing down yet another space for young people to hang out. In the UK, since 2010, successive governments have cut £1.2 billion from the youth services budget. Back in the day you will have had a youth centre near you, I know because I used to work in them: that’s how I got my start in sex and relationships education. Youth services are just part of how young people got pushed out of public life. So when laptops and phones come along it’s no wonder that young people will use them.

Instead of banning young people from using social media, they should make social media better. They should be forced to employ human moderators, who are paid well, to make sure that people post according to the rules. The companies should treat us with more consent, to actually to give us the freedom to choose to agree to see, watch, or read something. If we want to stop, they should make it easier for us to do so by (for example) abolishing infinite scroll, asking us if we want to keep going, remind us how long we’ve been on there, and stop pestering us about what we’re missing out on.

Crucially this would be better for all of us. As with all moral panics the people with more power project their anxieties about the new thing onto people with less power (called ‘social capital’). This has been true from music, cinema, radio, TV, to horror films (‘video nasties’ was the thing when I was a teen), computer games, wrestling, porn, and social media.

I hate big tech

I just wanted to say that really, but before social media platforms were bought out by like four guys they were better. When they were trying to provide us with a service that was good it was good. Sadly they were doing this in order to capture us, so that they could then dis-invest in the quality of the service and make as much money as they could. A process which Cory Doctorow describes as ‘enshittification’.

Sidenote: google search did this too, deliberately making search harder to find useful things, which affects how many of you find this website from google nowadays. So please bookmark BISH, or put it in an RSS feed, or subscribe and get an email everytime I post something here.

So governments could take back the power of the big tech companies and make them work for us. For example, if governments made it legal to jailbreak or modify phones and apps, this would break the power that the tech giants have over us in months. We’d be able to make social media run exactly how we wanted it to. There’s also nothing to stop governments from bringing back various version of the French Minitel, state regulated or state owned platforms allowing people to talk to each other online.

Okay this has been a bit too much of a rant and I much prefer to give advice, so let’s get on with that. Although you can’t jailbreak apps there are lots of things that you can do already which will make them a bit easier to use. You might already have your own hacks and tips too (please comment below, I moderate every comment before it goes live). I’ll give you a few of the little technical things that I do next, but then I’ll give you some really great advice based on Solution Focused Brief Therapy.

Technical hacks

You probably know more of these than me and we’re probably not using the same platforms (bring back Bebo).

Try a computer. If you have a laptop, or access to a laptop, see if you can look at your preferred social medias on there. The apps are much better at luring you in to keep scrolling and I find that phones are more passive than computers with keyboards.
Change the algorithm. On Instagram, on phones, you can click the logo at the top and it will offer to show you your ‘following’ or ‘favourite’ accounts. So you can more actively follow people you want to see, rather than just being bombarded with different things that you haven’t asked for. On Instagram (at time of writing) you can also look in the settings to see what Instagram is telling you you are interested in and can change that a bit.
Actively tell them what you like and don’t like. Also take advantage of the ‘I want to see this / I don’t want to see this’ on any app you’re using. Keep reporting harmful content and please tell someone who you know will support you.
Make lists. On Twitter (when I used to use that) and now BlueSky, you can make lists of accounts you like to follow. This means even though you are using them passively, you are at least actively choosing who you passively want to read (if that makes sense).
You can kind of jailbreak things. If you have an Android phone you can install apps from F-Droid (for the time being), you might find ways of looking at social media on there where you have more control over what you see. There are also some browsers which also help with this and help prevent pop-ups and ads (and which are private and open-source).
Go to people’s accounts. Get to know who is worth hearing from when you want to know about something and go and see what they say. For example, when all this stuff about the social media ban was kicking off last week I knew I had to see what various academics I trust had to say about it. I’ll link to some of their work below btw.
Have a particular quest. Instead of passively scrolling, use your tech to learn more about something. This morning I wanted to find out what the half-time punditry at the 1966 World Cup Final was like, so I went looking in various places for it. When I couldn’t find anything after 15 minutes I gave up.
Set a timer. On my phone there’s a setting where after a few minutes it tells me how long I’ve been using an app for. You could do that, or just use your phone’s timer, or a kitchen timer? Give yourself 15 minutes, what will you find out in that time? What did you learn?
Toilet books / magazines. In my flat ‘checking my correspondence’ is a euphemism for having a poo and reading my phone. We could just go back to ‘rawdogging’ a poo (probably healthier tbh), or reading a toilet book or magazine (Red Pepper is in my loo). There’s a really great bit by Stewart Lee about ‘toilet books’ – I can’t find it online but you can. A quest!

A lot of this boils down to how we can be more in control over what we are doing. This study¹ is interesting because it asked what young people do to help to regulate their own use of social media and it found that there are ‘reactive’ and ‘proactive’ strategies that people use. The above is a mix of those.

Your best hopes

Now here’s the Solution Focused Brief Therapy² bit. This is all about your best hopes coming true, what that will look like, and how far you’ve come already. I’ve done this in my article about how to feel a bit better, in this one about how to make friends, and this recent advice article for a woman struggling with masturbating too much. I’ve been trained in it and I use it for myself and with paying clients. So have a go at doing this below.

Let’s say that your best hopes here are that you will make social media work for you. That you will be active and make good use of it and will then put it down. You will be in charge of it from now on.

Imagining your preferred future

Now imagine that while you are asleep later, a remarkable thing happens. Your best hopes will become realised when you wake up. You will wake up tomorrow in your preferred future where you make social media work for you: you’re the boss of it in your life from now on. What will be the very first thing you will notice that told you that this remarkable thing has happened over night? No-one has told you, but you know something is fundamentally different: what will you notice? How will you know?

Just as you are opening your eyes, thinking about waking up, what will be the very first thing you will notice? What will be happening in your body? How about your emotional state? What thoughts will you have? What will you be doing? As you start to move around, maybe getting out of bed, having a pee, getting a drink or breakfast, what will you notice? What will be the tiniest first sign of your best hopes coming true?

What will you and others be pleased to notice?

Who will be the first person who will notice you tomorrow? What will be the very first thing that they will notice about you that told them that something was different? How will they respond? What will they say? What will they be thinking? How will you respond to that? What will you notice about them?

As you go about your day, what will be some of the tiny little things you will notice that something big has happened? If you say, ‘well I won’t be …’ instead see if you can notice what you will be doing instead? What difference will this be making? Again, think about your body, your emotions, thoughts, and what you are doing. What differences will you be pleased to notice? What difference will those differences make?

Now imagine an exact time and place in your head in as rich detail as you can. Let’s say that you are opening up your phone or laptop. What will be the very first sign that you are now in control, your social media is now working for you. What else will you notice? See if you can list 10 different things you will be pleased to notice here. Now break those down into tiny bits and see if you can list another 10 things. What else will you be pleased to notice? Let’s say that other people notice you, what will they notice that told them you were in control of whatever you were doing? What else? How will you respond?

You will have decided how much time to spend and you will have put your device away. Looking around, what will be the very first thing you will notice around you? What else? As you’re coming back to where you are, notice what is happening with your feet, your shoulders, your neck, your head. Consider whatever senses are available to you: what will you see, hear, smell, feel, taste even? Try to describe the vibe in as much detail as it’s possible to imagine.

As you go about your day you will have used social media at various points, but you will have been in control each time. What difference will this have made? What will you have been pleased to notice throughout your day? How about other people, what will they have noticed about you? Check in with how your body will be feeling. What will you notice about your thumbs, fingers, hands, wrists?

References and further reading

I hope you’ve found this useful! Here are the references and some further reading. Remember to comment below if you have any hacks on how you make social media work for you.

Brevers, D., & Turel, O. (2019). Strategies for self-controlling social media use: Classification and role in preventing social media addiction symptoms. Journal of behavioral addictions, 8(3), 554–563. https://doi.org/10.1556/2006.8.2019.49 ↩︎
de Shazer, S.; Dolan, Y.; Korman, H.; Trepper, T.; McCollum, E.; Berg, I.K. (2007). More Than Miracles: the State of the Art of Solution-focused Brief Therapy. New York: Routledge. ↩︎

Also these articles from leading academics on media, young people, and social media are great

This one by Professor David Buckingham called Ten Arguments Against a Social Media Ban is great

This consultation (pdf) on what has led to the social media ban for under 16s is worth reading. It shows that parents and teens are much more aligned on the kinds of measures that would actually work for all of us. Not just a blanket ban

This one by Phil Burton-Cartelege called Authoritarian Babyism is excellent.

The Good Law Project have this called Social media: Don’t ban children, fix the platforms

This academic paper by Dr Caroline Are (et al) is helpful on why social media is particularly important for queer young people

Professor Sonia Livingstone has this excellent quote in this article “Why would we go for the simple solution of just banning children from a digital world, and why would we not then implement the thoughtful child rights’-respecting solution [of making it safer online], which would be better for children and for everybody?”

Also if you want to get off US Big Tech then Paris Marx has this great blog

Enshittification by Cory Doctorow is a really helpful book too. See if your local library has a copy?

If you want to hear me rant about this I was delighted to appear on the Podcasting Is Praxis podcast.

© Justin Hancock, 2026 Find out more about me and BISH here. If you’re an educator, head to my website BISH training, to find out about my resources for SRE and training for practitioners.

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BISH is run by me, Justin Hancock. I’ve been a trained sex and relationships educator since 1999. I’m a member of the World Association for Sexual Health. As well as BISH I also have resources, a podcast, and a coaching service for over 18s, as well as some of the best RSE teaching resources around. Find out out about my other work at justinhancock.co.uk. My work has featured (positively) in the media, like the BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, Sky One, and Novara Media.

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Why the social media ban is wrong