Social media ban for minors: a computational analysis of media coverage in Europe and beyond

This study examined global media portrayals of social media bans for minors, focusing on dominant narratives, framing dimensions, and persuasion techniques. We compiled a multilingual dataset of 10,509 articles from mainstream media and unverified online sources published between 1 January 2024 and 15 March 2025 in 24 EU languages, Arabic, Chinese, Georgian, Russian, and Ukrainian. Using sentence-embedding-based clustering and machine learning to identify and analyse framing dimensions and persuasion techniques, we found that non-EU media relied more heavily than EU sources on politically charged framing and loaded language. Policy Prescription and Evaluation was the most common framing dimension, while Doubt was the dominant persuasion technique. A bivariate analysis of standardised residuals showed that Policy Prescription and Evaluation framing paired with Doubt was the most common combination. The analysis also revealed an “institutionalist top-down” reporting pattern in mainstream media, linking Political framing with Flag Waving persuasion. Unverified sources adopted a “populist-alarmist” approach, pairing Security and Defense framing with Appeal to Values persuasion and thereby revealing a security–value connection. Overall, this study shows how social media bans for minors are represented in Europe and beyond and supports evidence-based youth-protection policy.