Imagine if you’d woken up one day in 1985 and someone told you that in 40 years’ time every teenager in the world would carry a personalised popularity counter around with them. They would be so dedicated to the wellbeing of this popularity counter that they would bring it to mealtimes, school and they would sleep with it beside their beds or under their pillow. They would become quite angry if anyone suggested turning it off.
The gadget, housed in a shiny rectangle of glass and rare earth metals, would be designed by the world’s most brilliant engineers. They would earn enormous salaries for their ability to exploit cracks in children’s psychology to maximise their feelings of isolation and insecurity. They would do this, in part, by displaying to them and all their friends – any stranger who cared to check, in fact – how likable they are.
The popularity counter would track the number of followers they have, even calling them “followers”. It would constantly chirrup at them for attention – but no matter how hard they worked at appeasing it, it would always demand more. Over time, it would interfere with their mental health, their real-life friendships, their relationships with their family and their schooling, drain their attention spans, erode their self-esteem and expose them to all of humanity’s worst impulses.
And their parents would be largely oblivious – other than paying for it of course – because they would be so preoccupied with their own popularity counters.
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To take this thought experiment a little further, imagine you were then told one major government would eventually decide to ban the popularity counters for users under 16. Would you be surprised to learn the initiative would be greeted with widespread scepticism? Or many parents would immediately announce all the ways they were going to help their teenagers flout the ban?
It’s hard to imagine – but luckily (or unluckily) we don’t have to. The Australian government has banned the popularity counter – which we, of course, refer to as social media – for under-16s. The ban, which no one seemed to believe would actually happen until it did, came into effect on Wednesday. It means that accounts held by Australian children on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, Snapchat, Reddit, Kick, Twitch and Threads must be removed. Platforms that fail to comply are risking fines of up to $49.5 million Australian dollars (€28.3 million).
Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese said in an opinion piece that the idea was to make it easier for parents to say “no” to their children. He added, sensibly, no one expected there would be total compliance right away – in the same way as teenagers sometimes drink, but that’s no reason to make alcohol available to children.
It is just as well no one expects total compliance because, now that the ban is here, those surveys that suggested 80 per cent of parents supported it in theory are beginning to look wildly optimistic.
“I’ve shown her how VPNs work and other methods on bypassing age restrictions,” one father told the Guardian. “I’ve had to set her up with her own adult YouTube account and have assisted her in bypassing TikTok’s age-estimation and will keep doing so each time it asks.”
And already, the legal challenges have begun. On Friday, Reddit lodged an objection to the ban in the Australian High Court. The platform said although it agreed with efforts to protect under-16s, its concerns included that “this law [would isolate] teens from the ability to engage in age-appropriate community experiences (including political discussions)”.
Other objectors point out there is as yet no solid evidence to show social media harms children. There are, rightly, concerns that the alternative approach being suggested for Ireland – which would use a digital wallet linked to social security numbers as proof of age – has far-reaching privacy implications. But there’s no need for anything as contentious as a digital wallet – in Australia the tech companies will use a range of tools, including assessing how long the account has been active; whether it interacts with other underage users as well as facial or voice analysis to determine age.
We have to do something. I recently watched a video by US campaigner Nicki Petrossi who set up a test account on Snapchat for a 14-year-girl. Petrossi created the account a couple of months earlier, and hadn’t logged back in. In the video I watched, she didn’t click on anything; she simply scrolled through what Snapchat was serving her, as a putative 14-year-old girl. Video after video was shot in the same dark, moody tones and featured the same kind of sad indie folk music and the same suicidal ideation themes: “Am I actually deserving of all this pain?” “If I died would you miss me?” “If I die now, don’t post ‘wish heaven had a phone’ because I got one now and it barely rings…”
We know boys are being served a similarly relentlessly dark diet of content promoting the manosphere. We know adults use social media to make contact with vulnerable children for the purpose of exploiting them. And we know that, even at its most benign, heavy social media use is associated with a higher risk of depression.
The point of the Australian legislation, as I understand it, isn’t to try to return the country to the 1980s. It’s simply to shift the Overton window back slightly in the direction of a world when children’s lives are no longer quite so completely dictated by the popularity counter. If there isn’t a single good reason for why your child needs to be on social media other than “because everybody else is on it”, there isn’t a single good reason why your child needs to be on social media. This ban – and the ones that will hopefully follow – are simply designed to recognise that.
[ The Irish Times view on Australia’s social media move: an important test caseOpens in new window ]
