Imagine: you’re 15 years old. You’re old enough to get a job. You’re old enough to go to jail. But you’re not old enough to go on Facebook.
That seems to be the vision championed by almost every state premier and now the prime minister, who are calling to bar children under 16 from social media.
What initially seemed like a shortsighted idea floated by Coalition MP David Coleman appears to have gripped the political imagination. It’s not just harmful online content that spreads, it’s also bad policy ideas.
Proposals to ban or limit children’s access to social media aren’t new. Florida has passed one of the most restrictive social media bans in the United States, but even theirs only goes up to 14. Taking a different tack, British campaigners are calling for special mobile phones without social media apps for under 16s. More generally, fears about the impact of technologies upon young people go far back into history.
In Australia, we’ve had this debate before. In 2021 the former Coalition government drafted a bill that would have required platforms to verify the age of their users and obtain parental consent for those under 16. Research conducted afterwards found that parents and carers were initially enthusiastic about the prospect of stronger laws to help protect their children, but this quickly deflated when they learned of the measures that would be needed to actually enforce it, such as providing identity documents to platforms or third parties, increased app tracking and monitoring, and ongoing age-verification – which could possibly include a face scan.
Now there’s a growing movement calling to prevent under 16s from accessing everything from LinkedIn to YouTube. But just like in 2021, what these petitions – and indeed the politicians endorsing them – don’t reference is the range of technical implementation challenges and privacy and digital security risks that could come with them. Requiring children to provide more data to platforms is at odds with calls for online child safety.
Even if all this privacy-invasive tech was implemented, tools like VPNs render most barriers easily bypassable. Anyone who thinks a teenager won’t find a way to get around such a system is kidding themselves.
And for all this discussion about protecting children and young people, where are their voices in this conversation?
While it can be tempting to portray social media as the harbinger of all social woes, research with teens paints a more nuanced picture of adolescent online life, with a vast array of experiences and attitudes. Young people are not a monolith. Even research by the eSafety commissioner – who is tasked with children’s online safety – has noted that children’s experiences online can be both positive and negative, and that a quarter of children who turn to the internet for support do so on social media.
At the risk of being yet another adult weighing in, children and young people ought to be able to participate in modern life, much of which happens on social media. Attention should be directed towards dismantling corporate surveillance and targeted advertising, which are detrimental to online safety and participation. A key way to do this is to challenge digital platforms’ data-extractive business models through robust privacy reform, but this has languished on the sidelines for years. Politicians wishing to improve online safety need to get serious about privacy.
Many young people rely on social media to forge identities, find communities, access support and express themselves. For young LGBTQ+ people, online spaces can be a lifeline – especially in a political landscape where physical spaces continue to exhibit hostility and homophobia, such as attempts to ban queer books in libraries. I and others have written about the experience of growing up queer and relying upon online social spaces for our safety and wellbeing.
Research conducted by the Young and Resilient Research Centre – which prioritises meaningfully engaging with children – notes that while negative experiences on social media do occur, many young people see the online world as a safe haven. They resist adults’ depictions of social media as entirely bad, resent being told what the issues are rather than being listened to, and feel a disconnect with adults’ perceptions of their online worlds.
Proposals to ban access to social media ignore the experiences of young people and steamroll over this complexity. This holds true to other research which suggests digital policy reform regularly omits the perspectives of children and young people.
Online harms and social media are understandably emotive topics but our current debate is too focused on adult fears rather than children’s lived experience. Much of the research that actually talks with young people identifies how they would like to be supported to navigate online interactions safely, not to be told to avoid them entirely.
Too often online safety policy has been about political point scoring rather than actual harm reduction. We need leaders who are thinking meaningfully about addressing pressing digital issues and listening to those they seek to protect.
• Samantha Floreani is a digital rights activist and writer based in Melbourne/Naarm
