Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s proposed social media ban for young people may be popular, but it’s likely to do more harm than good.
Labor and the Coalition have backed the proposal, with Labor claiming it will introduce a bill before the end of the year.
It is a popular idea. An August YouGov poll found that 61% supported banning under-17-year-olds from social media platforms.
Albanese said the ban is necessary, because parents are “worried sick” about what their children might encounter online; he said he wants to get young people “off their devices and onto the footy fields, swimming pools and tennis courts”.
“Social media is causing social harm,” he claimed.
But, according to the American Psychological Association, social media could not be deemed as “inherently beneficial or harmful to young people”.
The impact of social media platforms on young people’s mental health has been put forward as one of the key reasons for a ban.
But University of Oxford research shows that Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat have little impact on mental health.
It showed the correlation is more likely the reverse — that those with poor mental health seek out social media for comfort or distraction.
Worsening mental health among young people is more likely related to rising inequality, cost-of-living, family violence, concerns about climate change and declining trust in institutions.
In fact, social media has proven to be a valuable resource for delivering mental health support, through online resources and platforms.
Social media has been shown to be an important lifeline for connecting LGBTIQ people to support networks, particularly in rural areas.
It is also one of the main places young people access news. A survey conducted in June last year found that 37% of children and 63% of teenagers went to social media for their news.
The corporate media’s failure to accurately report on Israel’s genocide in Gaza underscores social media’s important role in cutting through the institutional bias.
In addition, as young people turn away from the major parties, limiting access to news and information may be an added benefit for Labor and the Coalition.
While children as young as 10 can be locked up and harmful gambling advertising is allowed to continue, it is hard to take Labor’s supposed concern seriously.
It’s worth considering how such a ban would be achieved.
The government is currently trialling age-verification technology that, if successful, would provide the ability to keep young people off social media platforms.
Britain has recently introduced age-verification laws that include “digital identification”, using facial recognition technology, credit card checks and allowing banks and mobile providers to confirm whether the user is an adult.
Does anyone trust that this information will remain private?
Data breaches, hacks and leaks have plagued governments in recent years, impacting millions of people. Age-verification data would be another juicy target for hackers.
Of course, there are many issues with social media platforms: Big Tech’s predatory algorithms create addictive patterns and encourage people to spend more and more time on platforms.
Digital Rights Watch (DRW) said Big Tech’s business model is for children to accept that surveillance is the price of participation in online life.
It means that young people are growing up in digital spaces that are “designed for endless engagement, rather than meaningful connection, because this serves the business model by creating more valuable advertising space”, DRW said.
There are also real concerns about young people accessing sexually explicit content, being targeted by predators and being exposed to bullying, hate speech and extreme racism and misogyny online.
But a blanket ban will not work. As eSafety Commissioner Julie Grant said, we don’t fence off the ocean, or keep children out of the water, to teach them how to swim. A similar approach is needed to ensure online safety.
There is no escaping the fact that we live in a world where online platforms play a massive role in our lives, from education to work to socialising.
Labor’s talk about banning social media lets Big Tech companies off the hook. They must be forced to uphold the safety, wellbeing and autonomy of children. But Labor’s promise to amend the Privacy Act to outlaw data accumulation on a mass scale has been left in the too-hard basket.
Young people need access to online spaces without mass data harvesting and other predatory practices, but this requires taking back control from Big Tech, not prohibition.
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