Australia's social media ban for under-16s: Better ways to help young people
Fourth in a series
This is the fourth in a series discussing the Australian legislation banning people under 16 from using social media. The first post is here the second is here and the third is here
I’m writing from the perspective of a longstanding user of new media and also as someone with personal experience of dealing (not very successfully) with problems of under-16 screen addiction. On the other hand, I’m not a technical expert so I may get some details wrong. I’ll be happy to accept correction on these points
Responses
In previous posts, I’ve argued that the ban is unsupported by evidence and unlikely to resolve most of the problems commonly linked to social media. I want to turn to some positive alternatives. These alternatives are much more difficult and expensive than ramming a largely symbolic piece of legislation through Parliament. On the other hand, they might actually work.
In this post, I will focus on measures to deal with the problems faced by young people today. In previous posts I mentioned bullying, screen addiction and political apathy/disillusionment.
Bullying was a problem long before the rise of the Internet and mobile phones, and is, I think, handled better now than when I was young. At that time, the expected response for boys was either to fight back, or to suck it up. Seeking any kind of support from teachers or other authority figures was a recipe for disaster. And as far as I can remember, the possibility of bullying by girls wasn’t even admitted. Now we have a much stronger social consensus against bullying, even if a lot more could be done.
Screen addiction is not entirely new, but has certainly got worse since computers and phones became ubiquitous. There’s a related problem of school refusal, worse since the Covid lockdowns, but not primarily due to them. At least in my experience, finding help with these problems is difficult and there’s no systematic policy response from governments. Banning phones in school hours is probably a good idea as regards screen addiction but obviously won’t help with school refusal. A more promising idea is to provide phones with limited access. But what’s needed is a proper evidence-based policy
Source: Ecohappiness Project [1}
Finally, to the extent that a social media ban keeps young people away from political information (and misinformation) it’s going in the wrong direction. We should be giving 16-year-olds the vote right now, and look to lowering the voting age even further. It’s absurd that 10-year olds can be held criminally responsible when 17 year olds can’t even vote on what laws should be made. Even with the current voting age, trying to restrict access to political information for people who will be voting within a couple of years is silly as well as undemocratic.
In the final instalment in this series, I’ll be looking at how to deal with the bigger problems of dealing with social media platforms like those of Meta and Musk.
fn1. I’d like opinions on the illustrations I’m using. The layout for Substack encourages but doesn’t require images
I found todays on an image search and pasted it in, without worrying about any copyright issues. In other posts, I used images generated by CoPilot.
So, I’d be interested in readers’ thoughts on what I should do about images. Options are
Prefer images sourced from Internet
Prefer AI-generated images
Either/both as at present
No images
Substack only offers binary-choice polls, so please respond in comments.
Follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon
Read my newsletter
Some young people have problems with the Internet. But most seem to thrive on it--at least my own teen boy. He leads an active social life on the screen, and can handle both bullies and disinformation with aplomb. (His reaction to disinformation is very teenager--he laps the stuff up, the better to laugh at it. In heavy sarc font: "Andrew Tate is my hero!")
Hi John,
Apologies for the belated reply, but I hope that this comment finds you still.
Your series here is brilliant. I fully support your working and your findings - especially the need for complex, evidence-based policy making that works (rather than simplistic solutions designed to fail), and our need to lower the voting age.
I also have some comments:
1. My preferred way of thinking about what social media could be is a digital 'public space'. It should be a public square where everyone is welcome, where everyone should be safe, and where we can express ourselves to discover all that we share and hopefully help resolve the things that we disagree upon. That's why I'm fundamentally opposed to the social media ban - we need to ensure our physical and our digital spaces are safe enough for kids - not to exclude kids from spaces that are unsafe for them and unsafe for adults too.
2. It seems that the main problem is that social media in its current form is a profit-seeking venture offered by private platforms. The ideal solution is some kind of open public platform that is designed to serve people's interests rather than profit interests. On this note, I was incredibly impressed by Audrey Tang & Glen Weyl's Address to the National Press Club:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llCLEddz9E4
3. The other part of the problem why kids are on their devices so much is that the physical environment isn't safe enough. Our walking to school rates have plummeted, the #1 cause is road traffic safety concerns, and this problem is exacerbated by parents' individualised responses that involve driving kids around more. We need collective solutions instead - making streets safer and healthier for everyone, and especially so that kids can have the rights and the freedoms to move around that older generations of Australians have had. (Declaration: this is in my line of work and advocacy.) A 'healthy streets' policy applied at all levels of government would really help, as would other policies that invite kids to meet up physically more often - free public pools, mountain bike tracks, Scout groups and other such youth clubs, etc.
On images, I've found the images in this series to be quite jarring. (Not just the one in the 3rd article with the phantom hand on the left!) They were jarring because they all portrayed the problem of social media, and yet the problem with the social media *ban* is that it fails to consider the positive aspects of connectivity and expression. So the images of sad teens were all pandering to problem, and that worked against what you were trying to say.
So for feedback, I don't mind real or AI images. Having an image of some kind does help though. The most important thing is that the image is a thought-provoking scene that complements your argument.