Debate: social media should be barred for under-16s

Advanced

8 min

A policy debate. You are defending an age bar; your opponent works on child online safety and thinks the bar is the wrong tool.

An advanced-level session of about 8 minutes. 3 rebuttal rounds against an opponent. Each round runs up to 75 seconds.

Every challenge to this motion arrives as a particular fifteen-year-old — one for whom the bar looks either pointless or unjust — and you have to answer about that person without giving up the line that makes a bar a bar. Defending an age limit means defending the same limit in every hard case, out loud, one case at a time. The second difficulty is that your opponent wants the same outcome you do. There is no villain to argue against, which removes the easiest kind of speech from the table and leaves you defending a mechanism: what the bar does on the day it takes effect, who carries it out, what happens at the edges. Describe the harm at length and you have spent your time agreeing with the room. What does the rule change that the alternatives do not?

Angles worth taking

Decide before you speak what the bar actually stops: accounts, recommendation feeds, or all access, and then hold that definition.
Say who enforces it and at what cost, because a rule with no named enforcer lets the whole argument restart.
Concede the hard cases openly; the teenager who loses a support group is real, and pretending otherwise costs you credibility.
Argue from what a rule makes the default rather than from what it makes impossible, since defaults are easier to defend.
Keep returning to a comparison with what happens now, because the question is never whether the bar is perfect.

Who is in the room

You play

A student defending the motion

You speak with

A child-safety researcher who argues that an age bar is unenforceable, drives teenagers to unmoderated platforms, and lets parents and platforms off the hook

Ready to speak?

Free to start. You need a TalkDrill account to speak — reading this page does not.

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The format

The motion you defend

Under-16s should not be permitted to hold social media accounts.

Rebuttal rounds

Time per round

75 seconds

Modes

Learn (guided) · Mock (exam-real)

How a roleplay session works

Read your brief

Your role, the situation, and what a good outcome looks like. The counterpart has their own brief, and you do not get to read it.

Open the conversation

You speak first in most scenarios. How you open sets what you can ask for later, which is most of the exercise.

Handle the turn

Somewhere in the middle it stops going your way — a refusal, a counter-offer, a rebuttal you did not prepare for. That moment is the scenario.

Read the report

Outcome, the phrases you used and the ones you missed, fluency and clarity, and the specific line worth rewriting.

What you're scored on

Across every roleplay, the report looks at the same four things — because they are what makes a real conversation work or fail.

Your objective

Defend a hard rule against the argument that it is unenforceable and pushes teenagers somewhere worse.

Task outcome

Whether you got what the brief asked for: the refund, the extension, the concession, the point conceded.

Appropriacy

Whether the register fits. A complaint that is too soft gets nothing; the same complaint too hard gets a manager and no refund.

Recovery

What you do with the unexpected turn — repair, rephrase, push back, or stall. This is where most of the marks move.

Delivery

Fluency, pronunciation and pace, judged in conversation rather than in a prepared monologue.

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