YouTube CEO Joins Tech Leaders in Limiting Youngsters’ Social Media Entry

YouTube’s CEO Neal Mohan is the newest in a line of tech bosses who’ve admitted to limiting their youngsters’s social media use, because the harms of being on-line for younger individuals have grow to be extra evident.

Mohan, who took the helm of YouTube’s management in 2023, was simply named Time’s 2025 CEO of the Yr. He mentioned in an interview with the journal that his youngsters’s use of media platforms is managed and restricted.

“We do restrict their time on YouTube and different platforms and different types of media. On weekdays we are typically extra strict, on weekends we are typically much less so. We’re not good by any stretch,” Mohan mentioned in a single TikTok video posted by Time Journal on Thursday.

He pressured “every thing carefully” is what works greatest for him and his spouse, and that extends to different on-line providers and platforms. Mohan has three youngsters: two sons and one daughter.

Specialists have continued to sound the alarm on how extreme smartphones and social media use has harmed youngsters and youngsters. Jonathan Haidt, NYU professor and creator of “The Anxious Technology,” has advocated for youngsters to not have smartphones earlier than the age of 14 and no entry to social media earlier than the age of 16.

“Allow them to have a flip telephone, however keep in mind, a smartphone is not actually a telephone. They might make telephone calls on it, however it’s a multi-purpose machine by which the world can get to your youngsters,” Haidt mentioned in an interview with CNBC’s Tania Bryer earlier this 12 months.

This week, Australia turned the primary nation to formally bar customers underneath the age of 16 from accessing main social media platforms. Forward of the laws’s passage final 12 months, a YouGov survey discovered that 77% of Australians backed the under-16 social media ban. Nonetheless, the rollout has confronted some resistance since changing into legislation.

Mohan mentioned in a extra intensive interview with Time on Wednesday that he feels a “paramount accountability” to younger individuals and giving mother and father larger management over how their children use the platform. YouTube Youngsters was launched in 2015 as a child-friendly model of the Google-owned platform.

He mentioned his objective is “to make it simple for all mother and father” to handle their youngsters’s YouTube use “in a approach that’s appropriate to their family,” particularly as each mother or father has a special strategy.

A number of tech bosses have taken an identical strategy. YouTube’s former CEO Susan Wojcicki, additionally barred her youngsters from searching movies on the app, except they have been utilizing YouTube Youngsters. She additionally restricted the period of time they spent on the platform.

“I permit my youthful children to make use of YouTube Youngsters, however I restrict the period of time that they are on it,” Wojcicki instructed CNBC in 2019. “I feel an excessive amount of of something shouldn’t be an excellent factor.”

Invoice Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder, is amongst the tech titans who’re in opposition to permitting younger individuals an excessive amount of display screen time. With three youngsters, now adults, Gates brazenly talked about not giving them cell telephones till they have been of their teenagers.

“We do not have cell telephones on the desk once we are having a meal, we did not give our youngsters cell telephones till they have been 14 and so they complained different children bought them earlier,” Gates mentioned years in the past.

In the meantime, billionaire Mark Cuban would even resort to putting in Cisco routers and utilizing administration software program to observe which apps his youngsters have been on and shut off their telephone exercise.