Opinion
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has announced a plan to introduce legislation into Parliament to block children from social media. The legislation is slated to be introduced by the end of 2024, but questions remain about the methods to block underage users, how they will be enforced and whether they will be effective. Director of UQ Centre for Digital Cultures and Societies, Associate Professor Nicholas Carah, shares his thoughts on issue with Contact.
The Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, and many other political leaders want to ban young Australians from social media until they turn 16.
Is that a good idea?
I mean, I get it. Many of us have a feeling that our social media feeds are a river of mind-bending, mesmerising madness. I don’t often close a social media app feeling greatly improved as a person.
But, we ought to be wary of the government telling us how we can spend our time. We need to pause because banning young people from cultural spaces is a regressive move. It is a move that distracts us from the much more important task of imagining and building forms of social media that enable young people to flourish.
We ought to be able to figure out how to build a kind of social media where young people aren’t the target of advertisers who want to manipulate their emotions, scam them, and sell them products that are harmful to their wellbeing.
A kind of social media where young people aren’t immersed in feeds designed primarily to capture their attention, where they have a meaningful stake in the quality of ideas they are immersed in.
Imagine that a bunch of creative kids make a space for themselves with what they find around them. A space to hang out, express themselves, figure out who they are. A treehouse, a bedroom of their own, a booth at the local mall. This is what many of us imagine an ideal childhood to be like. The books of my childhood are full of little spaces that young people create, often against the current – as places of refuge, exploration and imagination.
Suppose that, having crafted these spaces for themselves, things go bad. People show up who mean young people harm, they circulate ideas that are gross, offensive, that leave young people feeling ill at ease or worse about themselves and others.
What should we do in a situation like this? It seems strange to me that the answer would be to kick the young people out.
One of the most consequential changes young people have experienced over the past several decades is a shrinking of open-ended, creative, risk-taking, adventurous and unsupervised experiences.
Our concern about how much time young people spend on their phones needs to be matched by a deeper curiosity about how little unstructured time they spend outside the home, or school, or supervised activities of one kind and another.
Not all of this is bad. Young people since the turn of the century are – on the whole – drinking less, doing less drugs, having less sex than previous generations. But, we also know that they are significantly less happy than young people used to be.
Many have pointed out that this unhappiness seems to set in at the moment in the late 'noughties' when young people got smartphones with social media apps on them.
But, for a start, this is a longer story stretching back to the 1970s when childhood started to become more privatised, organised and supervised.
What Gen X experienced as children they have put into hyper-drive with their own children, and the middle-class millennials might well be on track to inventing the fully-optimised childhood.
Image: Kaspars Grinvalds/Adobe Stock
Image: Kaspars Grinvalds/Adobe Stock
Jonathan Haidt is the latest to capture the public imagination by arguing that the smartphone is to blame for young people’s unhappiness. They spend about 5 hours a day on social media and this is making their lives more sedentary and solitary. To Haidt, young people are coming of age in a "confusing, placeless, ahistorical maelstrom of 30-second stories curated by algorithms designed to mesmerise them".
The link between young people’s unhappiness and the arrival of smartphones and social media is though just a correlation, one part of a much larger puzzle.
Changes in the wellbeing of young people unfold in the competing currents of their lives becoming in one sense much more supervised and in another sense much more precarious.
At the same time young people have much less open-ended time to explore the world, they also find themselves living in societies characterised by growing inequality, less secure employment, more expensive housing, more debt and existential threats like the climate crisis. They find themselves looking at a generation of leaders who seem uninterested in their experience of the world and unable to tune into what animates their lives.
When political leaders start saying we need to ‘ban’ kids from social media so they can go outside and have ‘normal’ social relations, we need to recognise we had started keeping kids in contained bubbles before social media came along.
Within these larger currents, over the past 2 decades young people started to use social media in extraordinarily creative ways to figure out who they are. Social media platforms like Tumblr, YouTube and TikTok have been especially important for young people, whose life experiences are different, complicated and not like their peers. These social media platforms have been places to discover people who are like you or who are feeling what you are feeling when everyone around you at home, or at school, or in your neighbourhood doesn’t seem to be able to recognise your identity or experience. Young people have flourished because online they found peers who could say ‘I see you’ or who they could quietly observe and say ‘I’m OK just the way I am’.
Many of us who grew up just before social media wonder what our teenage years might have been like if we’d had Tumblr or YouTube or TikTok. The heartache it might’ve alleviated.
We can see all these complications in submissions to the Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society.
Some groups support banning young people from social media for their mental health and wellbeing and to protect them from predators, pornography and misinformation. Other groups advocate the importance of recognising the role social media plays in young people’s social networks and support, cultural expression and wellbeing.
Underneath these positions is the common ground that young people deserve spaces that are of their own making, that enable them to explore who they are, express themselves and form social bonds.
In digital societies like ours, social media is part of this puzzle. Banning kids from it would be just another move towards a fully-optimised, fully-scheduled, fully-contained childhood. We need instead to imagine childhoods that unfold in cultural spaces that reflect our shared values. One part of that is spaces where young people can be wildly inventive and creative with each other, explore their own selves, make mistakes, and nurture the kinds of lives and worlds they want to live in.
Social media is not some kind of addictive or pathological pharmacological compound. It is a social institution that has developed in a way that privileges the commercial capture and exploitation of attention. We can and must imagine it differently, and governments do have a role to play in making sure this important public institution reflects our shared values.
Of course, given their own spaces young people will do dumb things. We all have our own intimate experience of this, unless we really did spend our childhood under permanent supervision. But, there’s a difference between kids navigating the world with their peers, and kids having to do that in spaces where commercial and malicious forces are seeking to optimise and exploit their social and personal lives.
Let’s get on with the work of making cultural spaces where young people have a little more space to muck around and for no one to care too much about what happens, spaces where they can imagine their future and ours.
Who should be banned from social media? Not kids. We should ban the actors and forces that seek to harm them.
About the author
Nicholas Carah is the Director of Digital Cultures and Societies in the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, and an Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Arts. He is an Associate Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, and a Chief Investigator on ARC Discovery and Linkage projects. Nicholas's research examines the algorithmic and participatory advertising model of digital media platforms, with a sustained focus on digital alcohol marketing. He is the author of Media and Society: Power, Platforms & Participation (2021), Brand Machines, Sensory Media and Calculative Culture (2016), Media and Society: production, content and participation (2015), Pop Brands: branding, popular music and young people (2010), and the co-editor of Digital Intimate Publics and Social Media (2018) and Conflict in My Outlook (2022).
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