Welcome to The Friday Fight. Join us ringside for our new weekly debate series where we invite two writers to make their case on a hotly contested topic.
In our inaugural debate we are tossing up the question: should children under the age of 16 be banned from using social media? The idea has bipartisan political support with backing from both Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton, but has been question by experts.
In the affirmative corner we have Charlotte Mortlock, former political reporter and founder of Hilma’s Network, which aims to get women into the Liberal Party. And arguing the negative, Crikey’s very own associate editor Cam Wilson.
Before you can understand why the campaign to ban under-16s from social media is misguided and harmful, you first need to know why we’re having this debate right now and who gains from it.
We could go all the way back to 1941 when paediatrician Mary Preston wrote in the The Journal of Pediatrics that half of the American children she had studied were severely addicted to “movie horrors and radio crime”. Or perhaps to the many other technological moral panics about the novel, the newspaper, the television and the video game throughout history.
Instead, let’s start in 2024. This year, New York University professor, moral psychology academic and, notably, a man with no published research on teen social media use, Jonathan Haidt, published The Anxious Generation, which has been credited with kicking off a global movement by linking youth mental health problems and social media.
Note that I said “linking”. While there’s been an increase in US teen girls’ depression and suicide rates over the past 20 years, it has not been proven that social media is the cause. This relationship may in fact flow in the other direction — young people having mental health health issues might drive them to social media — if the two things are linked at all.
This is one of the many issues raised in critiques of Haidt’s book, which has been accused of cherry-picking data and choosing flawed studies. University of California psychological science professor Candice L. Odgers, who has researched children’s and adolescent health for the past 20 years, was published in Nature saying that Haidt’s thesis is not supported by science. The good news for Haidt, Odgers wrote, is she expects the book will sell a lot of copies because it tells “a scary story about children’s development that many parents are primed to believe”.
Experts — like, the experts who have dedicated their life to this topic — have generally warned that, at the very least, there is no conclusive evidence that social media is to blame for young peoples’ poor mental health. Between things like rising inequality, high rates of family violence, climate change, crumbling trust in institutions, and COVID-19 disruption, just to name a few, there’s an embarrassment of riches for why young people may be increasingly unsettled by our world.
What the research shows, according to Australia’s own internet safety regulator, is that there are both benefits and risks when it comes to young people being online. Because of the mixed evidence regarding harm, not to mention the potential for positive impacts for groups like LGBTQIA+ and First Nations young people, eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant passed up an opportunity to push for a ban. Instead, she compared social media use to learning how to swim, arguing that we don’t just fence off the ocean until then day when we toss our children in.
And yet we see attention-seeking campaigns pushing for a ban by citing cherry-picked experts rather than people who’ve actually studied this specific issue. News Corp’s Let Them Be Kids has quoted a doctor who specialises in the psychiatry of the elderly and an academic whose research focuses on rat brain chemistry.
Here’s a question: why 16? What evidence supports this age? Why not 18, the age of adulthood? Why not tie it to the age of criminality, which is as low as 10 in parts of Australia. Seems weird that we’d send kids to jail but not let them use TikTok.
Enter politicians, stage left, who are more than happy to throw their support behind an issue that’s supported by two-thirds of Australians, costs nothing to do, and gives them an opportunity to act tough against the unpopular big tech giants.
Except a ban isn’t tough. You know what is? Nuanced policymaking. Coming up with laws and regulations that force tech companies to protect children and hold them to account when they don’t.
I am not writing this to defend social media companies. They haven’t done enough to protect children, they’ve dodged responsibility, all to sell a few more ads. But a ban is the easy way out for politicians and for tech companies. It’s actually more of a headache for them and a win for us to force these companies to serve the best interests of children — and, who knows, maybe these changes might benefit adult users too?
The reason that this debate is so important and infuriating is because of the space it takes up. Every minute and word used on chasing our tails over evidence-free, moral panic bullshit, instead of the real reasons why our children are unwell and unhappy, is a minute and word wasted.
But, hey, at least they sold a few books, got a few clicks and won a few votes, right?
Do you agree with Charlotte or with Cam? Should we ban under-16s from social media, or do we need to take a different approach? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
