Inside Australia’s world-first teen social media ban

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The origin story has several authors. Jonathan Haidt has a best-selling book Anxious GenerationThis gave concerned parents an intellectual framework for their discomfort. South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas’ wife reportedly gave him Haidt’s book and called for action.

There was also the bipartisan political consensus that emerged when the then opposition leader, Peter Dutton, promised to ban social media for under-16s within 100 days of his election, forcing Labor’s hand. Plus the sustained media campaign, highlighted by News Corp’s “Let They Be Children” campaign, that has amplified the voices of bereaved parents with the kind of focus that transforms the political climate.

“I can’t think of another example in Australia’s recent parliamentary history where a policy with such a profound impact has been rushed through with so little consultation,” said a Canberra lobbyist. Australian Financial ReviewI am speaking anonymously.

But for Charlotte Mortlock, chief executive of Hilma’s Network and a long-time advocate of algorithm reform, speed was necessary. “Things were at such a dire point, and the influence of social media was so harmful, especially for children, that we didn’t have enough time to try different things,” he explains in this piece.

“The algorithm was so addictive and so bad that I don’t think we had a choice.”

Revelations by Frances Haugen, in the so-called “Facebook Files” that revealed how Meta knew its platforms were harming young people, changed the reckoning. Haugen himself offers cautious support for Australia’s approach.

“I’m excited to see Australia take the lead in countering big tech,” he said in this byline.

“I believe it is possible to design healthy social platforms for young teens, but until major platforms take seriously the public health concerns they pose to the world’s children, taking a step back and choosing to age-limit social media is a practical way to press for change.”

Emma Mason, whose 15-year-old daughter Tilly died by suicide following online bullying, has told her story perhaps 500 or 600 times. From the USA, Denmark, England, Japan and Germany to prime ministers, bureaucrats and journalists. He addressed the United Nations in September. “I’m very proud to be an Australian, to be in a country that says, ‘It’s over, you’re not going to make any money off our children,'” he told News Corp.

Like Australian Financial Review “The messages cannot be more powerful than those of parents holding their children’s ashes,” he said this week.

woman in the hot seat

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant did not devise this policy, but was given the impossible task of implementing it.

“I didn’t expect to become a public figure,” he says in a candid interview days before the ban came into force. “I took this job as an opportunity to really make a change.”

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The Commissioner spent 22 years in the tech industry, including Twitter (now X) in the exciting post-Arab Spring years.

“I joined Twitter in 2014 because I truly believed in the power of social media to speak truth to power as the great equalizer,” he recalls. But disappointment came quickly.

“After two years, I could no longer defend their safety record because I saw how horribly vulnerable communities and women were being targeted.”

Now he finds himself enforcing a law that even his own children oppose. Inman Grant’s twin 13-year-old daughters had a few things to say during a video call with this masthead

“This is so stupid,” someone says. “What’s the real use of it? How do we meet people? Where am I supposed to follow my fascination with celebrities?”

Grant admits the questions keep him up at night. She recognizes that there are children, especially from diverse, disabled or LGBTQI+ communities, who feel more at home online than in the real world.

“It’s a way to find their tribe and really be themselves,” he admits.

“The goal is not to disconnect children from communication, creativity and connection, but to keep them away from harmful and deceptive design features that will connect them.”

New research from Monash University has found that almost four in five Australian adults support the ban, but support generally increases from younger age groups to older people. Research team leader Professor Mark Andrejevic said that despite the flaws in the law, people are realizing that big tech is exploiting children for its own benefit.

“This ban targets a handful of powerful overseas platforms that make money by tracking young users to attract their attention and spice it up with ads,” he said.

“They are using increasingly powerful algorithms to determine how best to capture and leverage young people’s attention. This is a timely intervention in an increasingly unregulated digital environment.”

Circuit breaker or blunt instrument?

Supporters of the ban frame it as a “giant circuit breaker” — a term Albanese commonly coined — that will give developing minds a respite from algorithms designed to exploit their vulnerabilities. Grant describes platforms that use “harmful and deceptive design features” that create “powerful forces that children cannot see, let alone combat.”

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It highlights some truly worrying evidence: an eSafety survey found that 96 per cent of 10 to 15-year-olds have used social media, seven in 10 have seen harmful content online, half have been cyberbullied and nearly a quarter have been sexually harassed.

But critics argue Australia is treating the symptom, not the disease. D., a postdoctoral researcher in adolescent brain development at the University of the Sunshine Coast’s Thompson Institute. Taliah Prince uses a tree analogy. “Cut off the branches as they separate from the root?”

More than 140 academics specializing in child welfare and technology signed an open letter opposing the ban, saying it was “a very blunt instrument”.

“The ban does not serve to improve the products that children will be allowed to use,” the letter states. While signed out, kids will continue to access YouTube, play on Roblox, use WhatsApp, Discord, and new platforms coming next week.

YouTube’s situation reflects one of the cruelest ironies of the ban. Before today, responsible parents could choose between stripped-down YouTube Kids or full YouTube with restrictions by linking kids’ accounts to their own. They can monitor viewing habits, limit screen time, and pay to remove ads. Under the ban, children can still watch YouTube, but they cannot have accounts. Parental control is gone. Restrictions have been lifted. Children are now forced to watch unfiltered, untargeted, unwatchable content. With ads.

Grant argues that YouTube must create a safe experience even if it can’t make money from millions of underage users. But the example points to a key criticism of the ban: It targets services based on their type of content distribution rather than potential harm. Platforms primarily geared towards gaming or messaging are exempt, even platforms like Roblox that appear to have the same problems as Facebook. YouTube and Reddit are also included, despite how differently young people use them than TikTok.

Sydney IT consultant and father-of-four David McKinney said this aspect of the social media ban felt like punishment, despite creating carefully monitored accounts that allowed his children to enjoy ad-free football highlights, Minecraft videos and audiobooks. Accounts were cut overnight.

“I’m trying to be responsible and manage what kids watch, and the government has taken away my ability to do that,” she said.

Grant said he tried to get a harm-based framework that would allow him to differentiate between platforms but was rejected. Instead, he was given a clear “sole and essential purpose” test. “It’s a bill of age,” he says. “This is not a well-rounded security bill.”

The Teach Us Consent campaign suggests a different solution: requiring platforms to offer an “opt-in” feature for algorithms, giving users the autonomy to turn recommendation engines on and off at will. Instead of banning children from the dinner table by leaving the poison in the soup, they say “fix our food.”

Where from here

The next few months will be critical. Grant issued information notices to the platforms, requesting basic data on underage accounts. Independent evaluations involving 11 academics will follow the results. Legal challenges are also on the horizon: The Digital Freedom Project has launched a Supreme Court lawsuit arguing that the law violates the implied constitutional right to political communication, and Reddit has filed its own Supreme Court challenge.

Meanwhile, thousands of young users have fled mainstream social media sites for less prominent sites like Lemon8 and Yope; Some of these have also made their own assessments and will start blocking at under 16s. VPNs and other tools are being marketed to children as ways to potentially get around the ban, and the world is watching to see how effectively the government can get around all this.

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The risk, some critics warn, is that the government will declare victory and move on, leaving the algorithmic machinery that radicalizes adults and children alike completely untouched. Mortlock is cautiously optimistic that won’t happen.

“I actually hope it’s almost the opposite; we’ve become the world leader in social media and we’ll want to continue that,” he says.

“We shouldn’t stop there because social media is so manipulative that it affects not only the brains of children but also adults.”

So what will happen in the space where social media used to be? Are kids trading Snapchat for WhatsApp and TikTok for Roblox? Are we moving to less algorithmic platforms that still have to find a way to pay the bills? The honest truth is that no one knows if this will work. Australia is running a massive social experiment on one million young people, with the whole world watching.

Grant describes this as “creating a giant circuit breaker and adding friction to the system.” The bet is on fragmentation: As kids disperse to smaller platforms, they won’t reach the critical mass that makes TikTok and Instagram so powerful and dangerous.

Facebook whistleblower Haugen says we shouldn’t let perfection get in the way of goodness.

“The government is setting reasonable expectations that this is not going to be perfect from day one,” he said.

It definitely won’t be perfect. It’s not like that anyway. If the ban doesn’t work, these business models will continue to exist unquestionably. But if so, Australia will have proven something very important: Democracies can still control tech giants, even if their market capitalizations are larger than our GDP.

Either way, we’re at the beginning of an answer.

If you or someone you know needs support, call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636.

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