Australia Does the Social Media Thing Every Country Should Be Doing
As a general rule, Australia’s government isn’t very good at getting things right.
You’ll remember, of course, that it went a bit overboard on the whole COVID-19 response (even the ex-deputy health chief, Nick Coatsworth, admitted as much last year). Then, earlier this year, the nation elected Anthony Albanese — the man who tried to introduce a referendum (defeated in 2023) to Australia’s constitution recognizing indigenous Australians — as its prime minister.
But, as the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Wednesday morning, teenagers in Australia under the age of 16 woke up to discover that they’d been transported back to the ’90s — or at least something closely approximating that golden age before the advent of chronic social media use. Suddenly, they couldn’t check in with their friends on Instagram and TikTok or binge on YouTube Shorts for hours on end. (READ MORE: Parents Have Everything They Need to Keep Their Children Safe Online)
If you’ve ever tried to take a drink away from an alcoholic or a phone away from the orneriest member of your household (probably your teenager), you’ll know exactly how it went. Within hours, the affected teenagers were posting triumphant videos to TikTok, bragging about their ability to circumvent the new system. One imagines that those who haven’t yet figured the system out are currently bemoaning their boredom while their brains desperately try to figure out where to get their next hit of dopamine.
The whole point of passing the Online Safety Amendment a year ago was to attempt to address the mental health crisis teenagers are experiencing as a result of their online interactions. As Pari Esfandiari noted in the Hill a year ago (when the act passed), the Australian government was especially concerned about “cyberbullying, addiction, and exposure to harmful content.”
Those are rather vague terms, so, to put adolescent social media habits into perspective, here’s how that actually breaks down for kids:
According to a recent Pew Research study, among teenagers between 13 and 17, some 15 percent confessed to using YouTube “almost constantly,” while another 39 percent reported using it “several times a day.” TikTok was no better: 16 percent of the same age group used it almost constantly, while 34 percent used it “several times a day.” All that translates to an average 4.8 hours of social media use (primarily on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram) for U.S. teenagers, according to the American Psychological Association.
What, you ask, are these kids looking at all day? Sure, there’s probably a bit of Dude Perfect in there, but they certainly aren’t stopping there. A recent study conducted in the United Kingdom found that the average teenager is first exposed to internet porn at the age of 13 and that some 70 percent of kids between 16 and 21 said they’d viewed that kind of content via the internet. A study in 2022 found a similar trend in the U.S., where 71 percent of teenagers admitted to intentionally watching porn within the span of the last seven days. (READ MORE: Gen Z in the Age of Digital Polyculture)
So Australia is taking the initiative and kicking the kids off social media.
Of course, the law isn’t perfect. As one teenager told the Wall Street Journal, teens who don’t pass new facial scan technology designed to detect users’ ages “are just going to scan their older brothers’ faces … That’s all you gotta do.”
Then, because this is Australia and its government is, in fact, run by leftists, there are some pretty clear ideological biases evident in the apps that are banned versus those that are not. For instance, a 15-year-old can still access Bluesky, but not X (although, to be fair, X does have a bad habit of accidentally exposing minors to pornography at the highest rate of any social media site).
So, yes, there are issues with implementation, but it’s the principle that matters.
We all know social media is bad for us. The younger, less mature, less mentally developed the user, the more susceptible he is to the dopamine drip being offered via the screen in his pocket. Parents know that. The teenagers in question know that. Political commentators know that. Nevertheless, kids are still on social media.
Maybe having the government regulate social media use is less than ideal, but it’s better than having no one do the regulating.
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