Australia's ban on social media for teens is a mistake

Last week, the Australian government passed a law aimed at banning children under the age of 16 from using social-media platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and the network formerly known as Twitter (but not, somewhat surprisingly, from YouTube). A press release quoted the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, as saying that "we know social media is doing social harm," that the government wants Australian children to "have a childhood," and wants parents to know that the government is "in their corner."

Laudable statements, perhaps, but saying that "we know social media is doing social harm" to teens is stretching the case more than a little, as I wrote in a recent issue of The Torment Nexus. And some child psychologists and other experts in the use of the internet by teenagers say Australia's law — and other similar laws either in place or being considered in the US and around the world — could not only fail to have the effect their proponents expect but could backfire badly.

As Casey Newton notes in his Platformers newsletter, a number of states — including Utah, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Ohio, Tennessee — have recently passed laws requiring teens to get parental consent to use social-media platforms, while Florida has banned accounts for children under 14 (some or all of these laws are currently on hold due to legal challenges, which I will get to later). In addition to those laws, France now requires parental consent for children under 15 and social platforms are required to verify the ages of their users (according to the French National Commission for Technology and Freedoms, more than half of children aged 10-14 use social media sites like Snapchat and Instagram).

A number of countries including Norway are said to be considering similar laws against teen social-media use, either in the form of a requirement for parental consent or an outright ban.

Techno-panic

As Bloomberg noted, these laws have been sparked in part by a techno-panic, but also by a series of unfortunate incidents, including a 16-year-old boy whose social-media account contained a number of videos discussing death and suicide and who stepped in front of a train in New York, or a 15-year-old schoolgirl in Australia who suffered from bullying on social media and then hanged herself in February 2022. These kinds of cases, and others like them that have occurred over the past several years, have had far more impact on both parents and legislators than all the research that has been done into the links between social-media use and teen depression and suicide, which is a lot more inconclusive than statements like Albanese's might suggest.

Last year, the Surgeon General of the US released a document warning about social media and the mental health of young users, which has been used by many as evidence that there is a significant and proven problem with social media and teens. The report refers to "increasing concerns among researchers, parents and caregivers, young people, healthcare experts, and others about the impact of social media on youth mental health," and a "growing body of research about potential harms," and also discusses what it calls "ample indicators that social media can have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents."

Despite these statements, however, the report also notes that "we do not yet have enough evidence to determine if social media is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents."

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Leaping to conclusions

In an attempt to draw a bright line between social media and teen depression or suicide, some (either deliberately or unconsciously) wind up distorting the results of existing research to fit the conclusions they would like to reach. As Newton noted in Platformers, Andrew Przybylski, a professor of human behavior and technology at the University of Oxford, co-authored a study on the effects of social-media use on young people, which was cited by the government of Australia in support of a ban. But Przybylski says the government misinterpreted his study, which found that young people "respond to social media differently based on various personal and environmental factors." Przybylski said it was frustrating to see "nuanced scientific findings oversimplified to support binary policy positions."

In my recent piece on the techno-panic over social media and teen mental health, I referred to an article in The New Yorker that interviewed distraught parents and relatives of a number of young people who had killed themselves, including a girl whose social feeds were full of people talking about eating disorders and death and who ultimately committed suicide. The article talked about rise in the rate of deaths by suicide between age 10 and age 24 in the US since 2007, and the fact that 53 percent of Americans believe that social media is responsible for this increase. Only after dozens of paragraphs about the topic — more than three quarters of the way through the article — did the writer admit that research "has failed to demonstrate any definite causal link" between smartphones or social-media use and depression, anxiety or suicide.

Some of you may be thinking that, even if the research is inconclusive, the dangers of social-media use are so serious that a ban on teen access to these services is worth it. Some of my friends who have children in their teens have said almost this exact thing to me when the subject of the Australian law came up. But there are a number of reasons why I, and a number of experts, think this is the wrong approach. Two members of Australia's human rights commission described some of those reasons in a letter of dissent they wrote, pointing out that social media can help vulnerable teens in many cases, and also that even teenagers have free speech rights:

For children in marginalised, remote, or vulnerable situations, social media offers a lifeline. It connects children with disability to peers, resources, and communities they may not otherwise access. It helps LGBTQIA+ youth find acceptance and solidarity. It can improve access to healthcare, particularly for children seeking mental health support. These digital spaces can educate, inform, and remind kids who feel isolated — whether physically or emotionally — that they are not alone. Children and young people have rights to access information and to freely express themselves as they develop and form their identities. A social media ban directly threatens these rights.

Teens also have free speech rights

The Australian human-rights commissioners' argument also helps explain why so many of the similar laws proposed by US states have been held up by the courts. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has called Utah's proposed social-media access law "an unconstitutional mess," saying it infringes on the free speech and privacy rights of all residents of the state, since it would require anyone using social media to prove that they were over the age of 18, by submitting a government ID document or their Social Security number. Australia's law faces a similar problem: how do companies guarantee that no one under the age of 16 is using their services? The Australian government essentially just waved its hands and said figure it out.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation noted in a statement about the proposed federal Protecting Kids On Social Media Act, banning children under 13 from having social media accounts is "a massive overreach that takes authority away from parents and infringes on the First Amendment rights of minors." Even those under 13 have a constitutional right to speak online and to access others’ speech via social media, the organization pointed out, something that the Supreme Court has upheld in a recent ruling. As FIRE noted in a statement, the highest court has made it clear that restrictions on teens' access to online content is legally permissible only in "relatively narrow and well-defined circumstances," which a blanket age-gated ban likely doesn't satisfy. In fact, a federal court called Utah's law a "breathtakingly blunt instrument."

As Australia's human rights commissioners pointed out in their statement, social-media use can have a positive impact for some teens, including those that are struggling with anxiety, depression, and other mental-health issues. I noted in my recent piece in this newsletter that some researchers believe that when studies indicate a link between social media or smartphone use and mental-health issues, it is evidence “not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers.” A number of psychologists have said there is just as much evidence that social media has positive effects as that it has negative effects.

Risks vs. harms

A researcher who has spent decades studying the way that teens use the web and social media, danah boyd (who chooses to spell her name without using capital letters) wrote recently that while social-media use can be risky for teens, so can just about everything else they experience at that age, most of which we don't really legislate:

Can social media be risky for youth? Of course. So can school. So can friendship. So can the kitchen. So can navigating parents. Can social media be designed better? Absolutely. So can school. So can the kitchen. (So can parents?) Do we always know the best design interventions? No. Might those design interventions backfire? Yes. Does that mean that we should give up trying to improve social media or other digital environments? Absolutely not. But we must also recognize that trying to cement design into law might backfire. And that, more generally, technologies’ risks cannot be managed by design alone.

Fixating on better urban design is pointless if we’re not doing the work to socialize and educate people into crossing digital streets responsibly. And when we age-gate and think that people can magically wake up on their 13th or 18th birthday and be suddenly able to navigate digital streets just because of how many cycles they took around the sun, we’re fools. Socialization and education are still essential, regardless of how old you are. As I’ve argued for over a decade, the internet mirrors and magnifies the good, bad, and ugly. This includes bullying and harassment, but it also includes racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, and anti-trans attitudes. I wish that these societal harms could be “fixed” by technology; that would be nice. But that is naive.

Social-media bans will do little to help

An overview of child online safety laws prepared by the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill stated that while the impetus for these laws is well-meaning, the assumptions behind it need to be questioned. "Mental health and well-being is complicated, and tied to many different social and contextual factors," the paper said, and solutions that exclusively focus on technology address only a very small part of this picture. "The granular debate over the evidence linking smartphones and social media to youth well-being distracts us from the real difficulties faced by young people," it added. Online safety laws, it said:

Pose enormous potential risks to privacy and free expression, and will limit youth access to social connections and important community resources while doing little to improve the mental health of vulnerable teenagers. Ultimately, [such laws are] an attempt to regulate the technology industry when other efforts have failed, using moral panic and for-the-children rhetoric to rapidly pass poorly-formulated legislation. [Such bills] do little to curb the worst abuses of technology corporations, and enable an expansion of the rhetoric that is currently used to ban books, eliminate diversity efforts in education, and limit gender affirming and reproductive care. While we recognize the regulatory impulse, the forms of child safety legislation currently circulating will not solve the problems they claim to remedy.

Reports like the one from UNC Chapel Hill and observations like those from danah boyd make the point that while we all want to do our best to help teens navigate the tricky waters of adolescence, and particularly the chaotic world of social media, outright bans are not only unconstitutional — since they infringe on teens' free-speech rights — but are a blunt instrument that likely won't do much to help the problems we are concerned about. Instead of pinning all of the anxiety and depression and suicidal impulses that a teen might feel on Twitter or TikTok, perhaps it would be better to look at the world around them, and see what changes we could make that would make more of a difference.

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