The MedicalXpress report on the Frontiers in Developmental Psychology review correctly flags the absence of any randomized controlled trials (RCTs) testing social-media restrictions in adolescents under 16, yet understates the evidentiary asymmetry between policy claims and available data. The reviewed experiments, all conducted in adults, comprise small-to-moderate samples (n=20–143) and yield 40 % null or iatrogenic outcomes on loneliness and life satisfaction; none meet CONSORT standards for preregistration or long-term follow-up. Large-scale observational work such as the UK Millennium Cohort Study (Orben & Przybylski, Nature Human Behaviour 2019, n=12 000+) finds associations between social-media use and well-being that shrink to near zero once time-use diaries replace self-report, illustrating how measurement error inflates apparent harm. A separate 2018 RCT restricting Facebook for one week (Hunt et al., Journal of Social & Clinical Psychology, n=143 undergraduates) produced only transient mood gains that dissipated by four weeks, underscoring dose–response fragility. Enforcement technologies flagged in the Frontiers piece—selfie-based age estimation—carry documented disparate-error rates exceeding 15 % for darker skin tones (NIST IR 8280), raising equity concerns absent from most legislative debates. Schools’ reliance on the same platforms for extracurricular coordination implies that successful circumvention will simply remove safety filters, a scenario never modeled in existing trials. Without under-16 RCTs or even well-powered quasi-experiments, claims that bans will improve population mental health remain extrapolations unsupported by the peer-reviewed record.