alt Hacker News> I will absolutely be barring my children from [drugs]. I fully expect them to use it or similar sorts of stuff behind my back, but that's okay. It will then be hidden and scarce, which limits the overall negative consequences it can have.
If you make a simple substitution, it becomes clear that "limits the overall negative consequences it can have" in no way logically follows from "behind my back" and "it will then be hidden". Draconian bans are, simply put, extremely lazy parenting, and not only lazy, but ineffectual. All the more so when it's something as relatively innocuous as social media, where your children will be actively shunned by their peers and come to resent you while still finding ways to use it. If you want good outcomes for your children, play an active role in their life and guide them positively instead of thinking you can just say "don't do X" and that will magically be the end of all problems.
In a country where it is banned, there will be no 'normal' social pressure to use it. There might be some fringe pressure to use it, akin to drugs in countries where such is banned, except probably far less. Drugs are at least enjoyable, while basically everybody rates social media as a cancer - especially children, yet they continue to use it through a mixture of addiction and learned dependence.
And no the effects are not "relatively innocuous." It's having a catastrophically negative effect on children, especially girls. Rather than cherry picking one of the zillion studies to support this I'll just link to a search [1], because the evidence is not ambiguous.
[1] - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=effects+of+social+media...