Is social media harmful to our youth? Australia sure seems to think so.

It is an ambitious social experiment of our moment in history — one that experts say could accomplish something that parents, schools and other governments have attempted with varying degrees of success: keeping kids off social media until they reach age 16.

Australia’s new law, approved by its Parliament last week, is an attempt to swim against many tides of modern life — formidable forces such as technology, marketing, globalization and, of course, the iron will of a teenager.

And like efforts of the past to protect kids from things that parents believe they’re not ready for, the nation’s move is both ambitious and not exactly simple, particularly in a world where young people are often shaped, defined and judged by the online company they keep, The Associated Press states in an article.

The ban won’t go into effect for another year. But how will Australia be able to enforce it? That’s not clear, nor will it be easy. TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram have become so ingrained in young people’s lives that going cold turkey will be difficult.

We took a look at the effects of social media on kids, and the results may not be all that surprising.

A study conducted by Yale Medicine found that over the last decade, increasing evidence has identified the potential negative impact of social media on adolescents. According to a research study of American teens ages 12 to 15, those who used social media more than three hours each day faced twice the risk of having negative mental health outcomes, including depression and anxiety symptoms.

The advisory states that other studies “point to a higher relative concern of harm in adolescent girls and those already experiencing poor mental health, as well as for particular health outcomes, such as cyberbullying-related depression, body image and disordered eating behaviors, and poor sleep quality linked to social media use.”

“What’s more, the social media algorithms are built to promote whatever you seem interested in,” Dr. Linda Mayes said in the study. “If a teen searches for any kind of mental health condition, such as depression or suicide, it’s going to feed them information about those things, so soon they may begin to think that everyone around them is depressed or thinking about suicide, which is not necessarily good for mental health.”

In addition, the excessive use of social media can harm teens by disrupting important healthy behaviors, the study reported. Some researchers think that exposure to social media can overstimulate the brain’s reward center and, when the stimulation becomes excessive, can trigger pathways comparable to addiction.

Excessive use has also been linked to sleep problems, attention problems, and feelings of exclusion in adolescents — and sleep is essential for the healthy development of teens, according to the advisory.

We aren’t advising parents to ban their kids from social media altogether, as that decision is best determined between them and their children.

However, this recent study is certainly food for thought.