Short-form video addiction is undermining US society and power

Comparing approaches in China, Russia, and Australia

This analysis, co-authored with my colleague Samantha Wong of the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, examines different approaches to short-form videos across China, Russia, and Australia.

Short-form video addiction is undermining US society and power

The U.S. education system is struggling to adapt to profound technological changes in artificial intelligence (AI) and short-form videos. Failing to get technology education right will hold decades-long consequences for millions of American children and their families – and the future of American power.

U.S. technology policy should closely examine comparative approaches in Australia and China, especially regarding children’s use. Beijing is restricting children’s access to short-form videos within China while allowing nearly unrestricted access abroad. Russian law discriminates against foreign platforms – including China’s Tiktok, interestingly – but imposes no limits on domestic alternatives. Meanwhile, Australia’s social media ban for children under 16 is a bold approach that societies concerned about children’s mental health, especially the acute risks facing young girls, should emulate.

China is limiting short videos

Beijing restricts short-form videos within China – including on Douyin, owned by ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company – without constraining this content abroad. Chinese authorities require Douyin to enforce a “youth mode,” which limits users under 14 to app usage for just 40 minutes a day; it also prevents these users from accessing the platform between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. every day. Furthermore, authorities have targeted content on Douyin that violates the government’s “code of conduct”, including by suspending high-profile luxury social media influencers. In one instance, Beijing censored a user known as “China’s Kim Kardashian”, to discourage conspicuous consumption and materialism. Though the suspension aims to promote values aligned with Beijing’s priorities – and discourages discussion of inequality – it also removed aspects of social media that often foster insecurity among young users.

Similarly, Beijing has introduced strict regulations on the amount of time children can spend playing computer games. In 2021, the government implemented rules limiting children to just three, one-hour play sessions between 20:00–21:00 on Fridays, weekends, and public holidays, although there are limited extra slots around Lunar New Year. Even during long holidays such as the Lunar New Year break, Tencent Games, one of the world’s largest video game companies, limited Chinese children to only 15 hours of total gaming time over the month long holiday period. These measures aim to encourage children to focus more on their studies, reduce excessive screen time, and avoid addiction.

These restrictions reflect Beijing’s view that “excessive gaming” and use of social media can lead to addiction and promote harmful values. Not unlike the rest of the world, the addiction to these digital platforms have also led to a decline in mental health amongst Chinese youths. Beijing has viewed this as a priority and established bootcamps and clinics for those with online addictions, offering therapy and training to help children overcome their dependencies. According to an official government report released in 2024 on China’s gaming industry, these measures were a success, with 24.9% of Chinese youths played online games for more than three hours a week, which is a decrease from 37.2% in 2021.

While such policies are easier to enforce in an authoritarian system where the state can compel companies such as Tencent to comply with government directives, similar measures would be far more difficult to implement in democratic societies. Additionally, many children still find ways to bypass these restrictions such as by using their parents’ accounts, with a quarter of China’s 200 million youth internet users exceeding the gaming time limits in 2024. Additionally, no data were available for mainland China in the latest 2022 Program for International Students Assessment (PISA) data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), due to COVID-19 restrictions, making it difficult to assess real-world impacts.

While difficult to prove, these regulations nonetheless may improve student life outcomes by curbing excessive screen time and making unrestricted access significantly more difficult.

Russia: ban foreign platforms (including TikTok), elevate Gazprom’s VKontakte, eschew restrictions

Russia’s approach, meanwhile, prioritizes information control over youth welfare or other long-term priorities.

Since passage of a domestic “fake news/discrediting the army” law in March 2022, Russia has effectively banned or severely restricted several foreign platforms, including Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram — and TikTok. Rather than run afoul of Western sanctions or risk a reputational blow in larger, non-Russian markets, these platforms pragmatically refused to comply with Moscow’s content demands in the wake of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The domestic content law allows users to view only old content from Russian creators while blocking new uploads and international videos. Additionally, rather than implementing screen time restrictions, Moscow has instead promoted domestic platforms like VKontakte (VK) and its short-form video feature VK Video. The Kremlin has also aggressively throttled YouTube content, deliberately slowing speeds to near-unusable levels and driving users toward domestic platforms.

Unlike China’s comprehensive restrictions on screen time and gameplay, Russia has implemented relatively weak protections for children online. VKontakte, the state-controlled domestic social media giant (it is majority-owned by Gazprom and its affiliates) lacks many youth protection features found in China. VKontakte Video (which hosts long-form video, as well as short-form videos under VK Clips) only added a “Kid’s Mode” in October 2024 and a “Children’s Profile” in April 2025, depending on the source. Conversely, the standalone VK Clips app has no publicly-documented controls on highly-addictive vertical, short-form videos shown to children. Indeed, Russia’s 2010 Federal Law 436-FZ – passed before the advent of smart phones – focuses on banning harmful content like violence and extremism. Russia does not appear to have any limit on screen time for children and weak privacy protections. Alarmingly, in September 2024, the full names, and profile pictures of more than 390 million VKontakte (VK) users – many of them presumably children – were leaked online.

Although Russia has joined many countries in banning cell phones from schools and is belatedly adding “Children’s Profiles” to social media accounts, policy prioritizes information control and surveillance over youth mental health. Moscow’s social media choices demonstrate its limited ambitions and capabilities and showcase the Kremlin’s lack of long-term vision and indifference to the Russian people’s welfare.

Australia’s social media delay will likely benefit children – especially girls

Australia provides a useful case study for how democracies can incorporate technologies in education. After extensive consideration, Canberra is imposing limits on children’s use of social media. On December 10^th, 2025 Australia will set a minimum age of 16 for any child seeking to access social media platforms. This decision comes on the heels of persuasive cross-country, longitudinal research from Jonathan Haidt and others linking spiking adolescent depression and anxiety rates in the 2010s to smart phones and ever-greater exposure to social media. Other countries, including France and New Zealand, are also considering social media delays for children.

Social media delays for young children are long overdue. Children have become more unhappy in recent years while test scores are falling. Both trends coincide strongly with the rise of smart phones and social media, a platform to which children are uniquely vulnerable. The prefrontal cortex, which influences impulse control and self-regulation, is not fully developed until the mid-20s, making children more sensitive to dopamine reward loops of likes, comments, and notifications.

Young girls are disproportionately at risk to social media. Only 34 percent of U.S. high school girls reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” in 2009 – amid the greatest financial crisis and recession since the 1930s – but that number jumped to 47 percent in 2019, before the pandemic. Now, over half of all high school girls in America report experiencing persistent sadness or hopelessness. While there are undoubtedly many reasons for this trend, including a greater societal willingness to talk openly about mental health, it is yet another indicator linking smartphones and sadness.

Australia’s social media delay aims to check an avalanche of AI-enhanced social media content that could be particularly toxic for young girls. Consider the saga of social media influencer Mia Zelu, who went viral after posting pictures courtside at Wimbledon. The one catch? Mia Zelu isn’t real and the photos were fake: she’s AI-generated. While Zelu’s anonymous creator(s) disclosed her artificial nature, the incident underscores blurring lines between reality and AI-enhanced social media. If adults can’t navigate this dynamic, how can we expect children to do so?

The next wave of AI-driven social media content will likely be vastly more destructive than before, if left unchecked. Young girls and young boys implicitly compare themselves to one another, with research finding social media use is linked to upward social comparisons, or the general impression that others are better off. What happens when young girls and young boys begin to compare themselves not even to each other, or to other humans, but to realistic-seeming AI digital characters that are literally without flaws? While Australia’s social media delay will not end upward social comparisons – a practice as old as the hills – it might curb some of the downsides.

There are risks of a social media delay for children going too far, of course. Democracies must balance some of social media’s deleterious consequences – especially for children – with civil liberties and free speech concerns. Additionally, enforcing a social media pause will prove challenging. Even in China, a quarter of children circumvented strict controls and played online games for at least three hours, according to an analysis amplified by China’s National Press and Publication Administration. Implementation of any social media delay across democracies will undoubtedly prove messy and require fine-tuning, iteration, and comparative learning.

Still, the short-form video status quo is unacceptable and undermines constitutional democracies in the competition against systemic rivals. Mounting evidence suggests short-form video and smartphone uptake drive worse mental health and cognitive outcomes among children and reduce literacy and numeracy scores among adults. Furthermore, social media platforms could be used to monitor or manage mass opinion – or microtarget key users via deniable algorithmic changes. This threat is especially true when non-transparent algorithms – such as TikTok’s – are maintained in China under the watchful eye of Chinese security services. Indeed, under Article 7 of the PRC’s 2017 National Intelligence Law, all organizations and citizens shall “support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts.” If left unaddressed, short-form video platforms, and especially those answerable to Beijing, may insidiously damage the long-term cognitive and mental health of citizens across constitutional democracies.

What the US and other constitutional democracies can do

Short-form videos are an increasingly important element in determining the foundations of national power, but there is significant evidence the technology is making younger people unhappy while degrading literacy among youth and adults. The U.S. and other countries should examine China’s and Russia’s own approach towards TikTok/Douyin. Namely, why does the Chinese government impose restrictions on TikTok within China but enable the application to have weaker default settings and easy overrides for children in other countries? Why does Russia, fearing foreign influence, impose greater restrictions on TikTok than most democracies?

The U.S. and other democracies should adopt Australia’s approach of delaying young children from accessing habit-forming social media platforms. The choices America makes on technology education will reverberate for decades and hold profound societal and geopolitical implications. Limiting short-video platforms and delaying social media for children will help ensure a happier society and a stronger country.

Joseph Webster is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center and the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative. He also edits the independent China-Russia Report. Samantha Wong is an assistant director with the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub. This article reflects their own personal opinions.