In the olden days, I sat in front of an enormous CRT monitor and waited for my 14,400-baud modem to connect. For a few hours I talked to my friends via internet relay chat (“online”). When I was finished I stood up, left the family room and hung out with my cats (“offline”).
The distinction between online and off has changed a lot since then. Relationships moved from LiveJournal to IRL. We had to use email for work. Banks closed their physical branches in favour of apps. Slowly but surely, our “online life” just became life. Society now straddles the two worlds, with the same terrible people gathering in dog parks and neighbourhood Facebook groups.
Australian governments have this week shown an almost touching naivety about this. They’re worried about young people’s vulnerability to “harmful content” – which might include everything from violence and gambling to hate speech and videos of former US presidents – and their proposed solution is to simply remove “online” from young people and thus protect them.
I’m a parent and social media strategist who has been risking her life via the internet since the 90s. My kids are chronically online, a fact of which I’m both proud and horrified.
First things first: at some level this discussion is moot. Teenagers will get around a social media ban. A huge proportion of their parents lack the technical literacy to even know what their kids are doing on their devices. Parental controls? Smoke and mirrors. A ban is merely a blip. We climbed out of windows to drink booze in a park; gen alpha will get a VPN so they can watch Crunchyroll. Who is going to stop these kids? You? Me? Chris Minns making daily house calls after dinner?
But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that a blanket ban is possible. My question to these governments is: why do you hate teenagers?
As in every generational gap since the beginning of time, kids themselves are much less worried about this than their parents. There are undeniable undertones in this proposal of “kids these days are always on their phones/have no practical skills/are rude to grownups”. The wide-eyed panic about how much time kids spend on social media is loud but not really backed by robust science.
There are issues that warrant real concern. Kids are being radicalised via extremist content. They have easy access via social platforms to porn, gambling and Alex Jones. Some platforms are gateways for predators, and the majority of gen Zers haven’t learned internet safety skills in the same way we did (through terrifying videos of cartoon cats being sucked into laptops). Cyberbullying is rife and anonymity protects the cruel.
Let’s unpack that. Australia introduced online bullying laws in 1995 – before most of us even had the internet. For all that time it’s been illegal to use it to threaten, harass, stalk, intimidate or defame someone. And, just like any ban on behaviour, people do it anyway, with varying degrees of consequence.
The platforms are doing little to stop it. In 2022 a US mother sued Meta and Snapchat for “failing to provide adequate safeguards”, which she feels resulted in her 11-year-old daughter’s suicide. That case reflects social media’s problematic foundations: dorks like me going online to make friends or viciously gossip about girls who don’t like them. The platforms determine and are hamstrung by cultural dynamics. The way they’re used is rapidly reshaped by those who use them, as they adapt the functionality to their particular social media dialect.
Unfortunately the platforms have little obligation to fix this. For example, since Elon Musk’s purchase – and then decimation – of Twitter/X in 2022, spam bots have taken over. There is less adult content in a literal sex shop. In some cases platforms encourage it. Research shows that YouTube’s algorithm, for example, reinforces extremist ideas by promoting videos from “problematic channels”. The issue here isn’t the age of the users but of the platforms’ wilful provision of harmful content and the government’s failure to hold them to account.
But there’s one other important complexity. There are myriad places young people can gather online, from Discord servers and WhatsApp groups to fanfic communities and Buffy the Vampire Slayer forums. The internet is – still – a place for like-minded people to talk to each other about common interests, to find and nurture community (even if some of them are a bit weird).
I haven’t yet mentioned my worries for my own kids, and the truth is that’s because I don’t have many. A study published in the Conversation found that while kids and parents think age limits could make the internet safer, young people see it more as something that benefits adults. And sure, their frontal cortices aren’t yet fully developed, but what the internet has always done is give kids agency.
As the adult, I’ve made sure I remain as educated as possible on the risks. I’ve taught my kids how to identify a scam, explained why porn is not real life and asked them to please not share their address with anyone. Besides, they’ve grown up with it. Hell, I grew up with it. Just as “millennials” are actually 40 years old, so too has social media existed for decades.
The government’s blanket ban doesn’t allow for this nuance. It doesn’t see the kids who live in homes where queerness is shameful, or who find respite from domestic violence, or who are simply lonely. “Online” and “offline” are not two different places; what we teach to and learn about our kids will apply to how they handle themselves in every situation in this murky, bionic existence where digital and analogue are intertwined. They depend on us for their safety – not by taking their spaces away but by making them better spaces.
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
