Australia’s move to keep kids off social media is worthy of emulation

Technology companies are mandated to take “reasonable steps" to prevent under-age users from using social media services or risk being fined $32 million. The bill was backed by Australia’s main opposition party, the Liberal Party.

It is 60 years since Donald Horne, an academic, called Australia “the lucky country", a phrase intended as an insult. Instead, on every visit, I find a pragmatic and sensible country, relative to the thoroughly polarized US and UK.

This past week saw calm responses to a freak electricity blackout in Sydney, and then, in the field of cricket, there was the always classy Pat Cummins’ refusal to reflexively axe members of his team after a thrashing by the Indian team.

Critics of the social media bill will point out that enforcement is likely to prove, well, impractical. Certainly, deciding on what form of identity will serve as proof-of-age will be complicated by the need to protect the privacy of citizens.

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Yet, the common-sense approach taken by Australian politicians of all stripes in acknowledging the damage social media does to young children is worth emulating. One need look no further than The Anxious Generation, a recent book by New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

It documents how rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide among American undergraduates rose sharply in the decade between 2010 and 2020; anxiety by 134% and depression by 106%. Haidt places the blame squarely on the increased use of smartphones since then.

In Haidt’s telling, the reason exposure to social media of teens and preteens needs policing is straightforward: “While the reward-seeking parts of the brain mature earlier, the frontal vortex—essential for self-control, delay of gratification, and resistance to temptation—is not up to full capacity until the mid 20s, and preteens are at a particularly vulnerable point in development," Haidt writes.

“As they begin puberty, they are often socially insecure, easily swayed by peer pressure, and lured by any activity that seems to offer social validation." I happen to be a gay man who has never had any interest in having children, but several passages in this riveting book gave me the chills.

As Haidt points out, we don’t allow children to buy alcohol or tobacco or visit casinos—all three admittedly easier to police than access to the world wide web—so why would we allow unrestricted access to social media?

To take just one seemingly harmless example, the selfie, which has harmed young girls’ sense of self-esteem disproportionately. Haidt notes “the increasing prevalence of posting images of oneself, after smartphones added front-facing cameras (2010) and Facebook acquired Instagram (2012), boosting (the practice’s) popularity."

Many among Gen Z, the generation born between 1997 and 2012, became the first casualties: “Succeeding socially in that universe required them to devote a large part of their consciousness—perpetually—to managing what became their online brand."

Instead of spending time enjoying necessary unstructured play time with their peers, more and more children (and adults) spend their time online on social media. Negotiating differences on the playground or in less rule-bound games and benefitting from face-to-face camaraderie turns out to be a key foundational skill for children that helps in their social development.

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Except when governments such as Australia’s or the UK’s move to police them, tech entrepreneurs are brazenly direct about the spell they are casting on us. Asked to name his top competitor, Netflix chief executive officer Reed Hastings said it was sleep.

Similarly, by billboarding likes, shares and retweets, Facebook and other social media companies created “a social-validation feedback loop… exactly the kind of thing a hacker like myself would come up with because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology," as Sean Parker, a senior executive at Facebook, is quoted as saying almost a decade ago.

Australia’s social media ban on children under 16 should make adults sit up and pay attention to the damage social media is doing to the fabric of society. The polarization of politics worldwide and the swing right in countries as disparate as the US, the Netherlands and Germany is one sign of this. The toxic quality of much of the discourse on X another.

Billionaire Elon Musk’s outsized role in the US election and his elevation to head a Department of Government Efficiency heralds an era of governance by tech oligopolists that even great novelists could not have dreamt of.

Musk has recently taken aim at the British government, calling it a “police state" because the Labour government has prosecuted and jailed people who spread hate speech online during riots in the UK earlier this year.

It is abundantly clear that so-called Tech Bros are not shy about throwing their weight around. More governments, like Australia’s and the UK’s, urgently need to find ways to discipline them.

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