We Built the Algorithms Hooking Our Kids, and Now We Want to Ban Them?

My 15-year-old nephew in Akure came to visit last weekend, and for three days straight, his thumb did not stop moving. It was that familiar, rhythmic flick of the screen—up, up, double-tap, up.

When I asked him what he was looking at, he shrugged. He wasn't even smiling. He just looked... anxious. Like he was looking for something he couldn't find.

A recent Techpoint piece highlighted the quiet, heavy pressure teenagers carry on social media, arguing that crude bans and surveillance from parents or governments aren't going to solve this crisis.

They are absolutely right. But as someone who writes code and builds product interfaces for a living, I think we need to look in the mirror. We built this.

The Infinite Scroll is a Weapon

When we design software, we talk a lot about "reducing friction." We want the user to stay on the app as long as possible because our metric of success is Daily Active Users (DAU) and session length.

We implement infinite scroll so the page never ends. We build recommendation engines that feed the brain exactly what it wants to see next.

We use variable reward schedules—the same psychological mechanism that makes slot machines addictive—to keep people refreshing their feeds.

To a teenager whose brain is still figuring out identity and belonging, this isn't just a fun app. It's a digital casino where the currency is social validation.

We cannot write code specifically designed to hijack human dopamine receptors and then act shocked when a 14-year-old gets addicted and depressed.

The Sapa Gap: Real Life vs. The Feed

There is a very specific flavor of pressure that Nigerian kids face online.

It is one thing to feel inadequate watching a teenager in California post about their new car. It is a completely different kind of pain to sit in a hot room in Gbagada during a grid collapse, listening to the neighbor’s generator hum, while watching some influencer your age flaunt a lifestyle they probably rented.

The gap between the reality of the average Nigerian teenager—dealing with Sapa, poor electricity, and unstable school calendars—and the polished, curated "soft life" on TikTok is massive.

Our kids are constantly measuring their real, messy lives against a highly optimized, artificial performance.

And because they don't have the context to realize that 90% of what they see is fake, they blame themselves. They feel stuck, left behind, and anxious before they've even finished secondary school.

Fixing the Code, Not Just the Kids

The default reaction from parents and regulators is always to ban or restrict. "Put a lock on the phone." "Ban TikTok."

That is lazy thinking. It's like trying to fix a broken database schema by just hiding the error messages from the frontend. The underlying system is still broken.

If you block one app, they will jump to another. If you spy on their phones, they will just create burner accounts and get better at hiding things from you. The "No gree for anybody" spirit works both ways; kids will always find a workaround.

Instead of trying to lock them out of the digital world, we need to think about how we build the digital world in the first place.

As developers and product designers, we should start asking harder questions:

• Why are we building default-public profiles for minors?
• Can we design feeds that actively encourage offline breaks without tanking our startup's valuation?
• How do we make "friction" a feature, not a bug, when it comes to teenage mental health?

We need to stop treating user attention as a resource to be mined at all costs. Until we change the metrics we optimize for, we are just going to keep shipping products that break the minds of the next generation.