The industry and academics speak: Is banning kids from social media a workable solution?

After the federal government and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese proposed an age-based ban on children accessing social media, most likely to be based around the age of 16, we heard from politicians from across the political spectrum.

Largely, most were supportive of the move, but some stood out as thinking a lot more needed to be done.

Today, however, we’re turning to people who are far closer to the issue than most politicians, and the views are, for the most part, vastly more negative.

Professor Amanda Third
Co-director at the Young and Resilient Research Centre and Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University

The idea of banning social media for young adolescents is very seductive, especially for parents, who often feel overwhelmed by the task of managing their children’s social media use. Parents really need support to address their concerns and to find ways to ensure their children can be safe online. Moreover, bans compel platforms to shift into compliance mode rather than focusing on building optimal digital environments. While tighter regulation is necessary, I’m concerned that bans are very difficult and costly to enforce, and that those resources are better invested in building better digital environments for children and educating them and their families.

Importantly, bans are unlikely to keep our children safer and may indeed risk exposing them to additional harm by creating environments that prevent them from seeking help when they need it. Bans are unlikely to help those children who are most vulnerable online, which, research shows, are those who are already most socially marginalised and often don’t have the support of trusted adults.

Professor Sue Nichols
Professor in Education Futures at The University of South Australia

While no one would oppose attempts to protect children from online harm, the current debate largely ignores the experiences of children, as revealed in recent research. Two studies, undertaken in Australia and the UK, involving children in grade 5, found that the main reasons children engaged with digital apps were to stay in contact with family and friends and to co-participate in play and recreation.

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Without being prompted, children volunteered their awareness of risks and their strategies to ameliorate risks. These included: avoiding the use of social media apps (often following parental advice); using these apps but restricting their creation activities to the draft functions; setting access to “friends”; quickly exiting online games if approached by a “random” [user]; balancing online activities with other experiences such as outdoor play; ensuring that an older family member was participating online with them.

A far more diverse and numerous array of apps was used across the cohort than the social media apps getting the most attention. Children were acquiring skills and knowledge through their use of digital tools outside of school that they were not experiencing in the classroom (a gap likely to grow with the restriction of online digital devices in schools). And children in some cultural communities were making a significant contribution to their parents’ understanding of the digital world, which was appreciated by parents.

Associate Professor Tauel Harper
School of Media and Communication at Murdoch University

The government’s decision to raise the age of social media access to 16 makes some sense considering the wealth of evidence that social media use is harmful to people, particularly adolescents. The major social media platforms have been engineered to be compelling, addictive and banal.

There is plenty of evidence that excessive social media use has negative effects on mental health, body image, socialisation, and sleep patterns. There are safe ways to use social media, but at the same time, the large platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and Facebook are not designed to be safe. While, of course, there will be issues with the efficacy of this move, and it may not be the job of the government to police media use, there is a clear justification for the ban from a pure health perspective and, hopefully, such a move will place pressure on social media companies to design their platforms to be a healthier experience for all of us.

Professor Daniel Angus
Professor of digital communication in the QUT School of Communication, director of QUT’s Digital Media Research Centre, and chief investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society

The Australian federal government’s reckless decision this morning to impose an age ban on youth using social media – before the joint inquiry into social media in Australia has even issued a proper interim report from hundreds of expert submissions – shows utter disregard for evidence-based policy.

This knee-jerk move undermines the joint inquiry and deliberative democratic principles and threatens to create serious harm by excluding young people from meaningful, healthy participation in the digital world, potentially driving them to lower quality online spaces, and removing an important means of societal connection.

It also means that very large online platforms are going to be let off the hook in making necessary and long-overdue reforms to the quality of content on their platforms, as this simply places a leaky gate at the door rather than improving what’s on the other side. No doubt this populist policy will sell well with older demographics, but it’s a misguided distraction from the necessary structural reforms that would provide long-term benefit to youth in this country.

Martin J. Kraemer
Security awareness advocate at KnowBe4

Legislated age limits for movies, online content, alcohol, and tobacco are by no means foolproof but they are a deterrent, and, most importantly, they provide an essential framework around which to educate and build a culture of safety among communities and families.

The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that children who have access to smartphones, particularly social media, are experiencing negative impacts on their development in ways we’ve not seen in generations prior. Social media is leading to increases in cyber bullying, higher rates of mental illness, and poor social, physical and academic development.

The number one thing we teach is the importance of the human factor in all forms of cyber safety. It is a wonderful thing to see federal and state governments across Australia coming together to recognise the issue so people can be guided by a common approach.

We would like to see the legislation include mandated digital literacy training programs as part of the standard curriculum, including education about privacy and cyber security with an emphasis on online risks, how to protect personal information, and how to navigate digital spaces safely. This should happen across all age groups.

We would also like to see government-led campaigns to educate parents who face a tricky battle against strong-willed tweens and teens. Big tech and social media have evolved faster than parents have been able to act. Parents need more support, including clear guidelines on the best ways to monitor and restrict their kids’ screen time and content.

Big tech will resist change, so schools, government and law enforcement will need to work together to decide on appropriate education, cyber monitoring and recourse for offenders, and remain active and extensive in how they police it.

Mark Jones
Senior partner at Tesserent

The tech giants definitely could enable some sort of functionality on their platforms to enable this, but there are different ways of implementing it.

It could be simply a check box, or it could be more complex in terms of verification, which means uploading sensitive information potentially to the site – raising privacy concerns and security concerns.

The implementation costs and how that’s going to be implemented is definitely something else we need to consider.

We’ve already seen how the big tech giants respond to federally imposed fines. So there’s probably not much we can do in terms of a way of lobbying them to do things. They’re already trying to do what they can. They probably need to do more around the moderation of content, and control how their platforms are used, and managing things [in] that way.

Unless there’s a significant push globally, I don’t think there’s going to be many state governments that are going to change the requirements of these tech giants given the role that they play in society.

John Pane
Chair, Electronic Frontiers Australia

Albo is like a bouncer making a big show of checking IDs at the main gates of a festival with knee-high fences. All it would actually change is adult behaviour, and that’s the real target – habituating Australians to something they would otherwise resist.

Abandoning parents to easily-circumvented state age-gating is no real improvement on just telling them that all they need to do is limit time spent online, which they’ve been hearing for 20 years now. Neither helps them understand how to make difficult decisions about content exposure [nor] how to talk to their kids about what they do see.

Alyssa Blackburn
Program manager, information management, at AvePoint

The Australian government’s proposed social media ban for children under 16, while well intentioned, is fundamentally flawed from an IT and cyber security perspective. Social media is deeply ingrained in daily life, and children are often more adept at navigating it than adults. Moreover, efforts to block access will likely fail, as children can easily bypass age restrictions by using parents’ accounts, falsifying information, or employing techniques we haven’t even considered yet.

Rather than enforcing an outright ban, the focus should be on holding technology and social media companies accountable for making their platforms safer. Companies should improve systems to detect underage users, swiftly remove harmful content, and ban bad actors.

As a parent, while I understand the urge to protect children from the risks of social media, I believe it’s my responsibility to guide my children, set boundaries, and ensure they understand how to navigate online spaces safely. While I support the government’s efforts, a collaborative approach involving both regulators and parents would be more effective than an outright ban, which may prove unenforceable and counterproductive.

David Hollingworth

David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.