Australia’s ban on social media for children under 16 has triggered predictable reactions. I guess it's pretty dependent on how absolute your views are about government interference. If you believe the state should never intervene in individual lives, then the ban feels totalatarian, and usually I'd agree.
You know, laws like compulsory seatbelts and bike helmets were met with outrage when introduced, yet they dramatically reduced deaths and injuries. The reality was simple: people weren’t reliably protecting themselves or others, and intervention worked. Few today would argue those laws were a mistake. But other laws, like gun laws - well, in light of the horror of this week's Bondi massacre, we can see there's a bigger picture that's more complex. I mean, do guns kill people or do people kill people? Do we blame the gun or the political circumstances and divisions within our societies that give rise to such hate?
Yes, I used AI for this. Because some tech has it's very valid uses.
When it comes to our kids, most of us accept that protection sometimes requires limits - we allow them freedom, but teach them boundaries so they don't get hurt. We're horrified when systems fail to protect kids from abuse, neglect, or exploitation. Yet somehow I'm hearing that social media is a children's right. I feel uncomfortable with that. I know that some parents are pretty attentive to screen time, but even then, many kids are exposed to porn, violence, cyberbullying and relentless body-image pressures amplified by platforms like TikTok and Instagram. We're seeing the consequences and they're well documented: anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm, and suicide. We wouldn't let kids absolute freedom in, say, a dangerous city at night, and if we did, we probably need to check our ability to keep our kids safe.
Yes, these issues existed when I was young. I was bullied. I struggled with body image. But home was a refuge, a safe spot, my bedroom a place where the outside world stopped. For kids today, there is no such boundary. The internet lives in their pocket.
As a teacher, I’ve watched the impact unfold in real time. Attention spans have collapsed. Sustained reading feels impossible for many students. Studied novels become shorter, easier, because 'real' literature is never going to be read - at best, they'll be reading study guides or watching youtube summaries. Being “online” has replaced curiosity, boredom, and imagination. For boys, the rise of the manosphere has offered belonging at the cost of misogyny and radicalisation. I’ve seen content so extreme normalised that students genuinely can’t see the harm - for example, last week Jamie came home to say that boys in his year 8 class had screen savers of a cartoon guy fucking a pig. I know, right?
Of course, banning social media won’t fix everything, and kids are already finding loopholes, including parents logging in for their kids. Online aruments revolve around parent responsibility, children's rights, government surveillance. Will we have to give our ID to Facebook to prove we are 18? If that happens, I'm definitely out.
I'm glad to see a lot of teenagers admitting they want limits. They know how this relatively new tech damages their mental health, their sense of self. Even older kids are saying they wish the ban was around when they were younger. Maybe they too would have a chance to grow brains that weren't hijacked, like ours are, by algos. They'll be able to play, read, imagine, develop resilience before being thrown into the digital shit show.
But there's something else really interesting about this. Even if it doesn't work, what's really fascinating about it is that we are starting to resist the behemoths that have kidnapped our lives. Should, we are asking, companies like Meta have that much control over political and social landscapes? Do we want their algorithms to brainwash our kids and indeed us? Where do the boundaries lie between our personal freedoms and our digital ones? What dangers do we face online? How much should tech companies be responsible for the safety of their users?
Who should control our digital lives? How much control do we actually have?
With Love,
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