The Australian government has proposed a ban on social media for all citizens under 16. Citing the success of recently introduced restrictions on mobile phones in Australian schools, the prime minister announced the ban by declaring that it’s “doing harm to our kids and I’m calling time on it”.
Yes, the American Psychological Association has found that teens with the highest social media use rate their overall mental health as poor or very poor. Yes, research from the University of Cambridge shows that social media does not mitigate adolescent feelings of loneliness or isolation overall – rather, reports suggest online exposure can increase the prevalence of suicidal thoughts in the young. We’ve known for years social media use is related to poor body image and negative self-esteem, and encourages addictive behaviours. Locally, we’re confronting toxic online influencer culture mobilising kids to harass and abuse their teachers. Cyberbullying, cyberstalking, catfishing, dog piling, trolling, deepfake porn and doxing exist as concepts because social media culture has spawned them.
Even so, there are politicians and media voices critical of the government’s proposed legislation. I am one of them. It’s not because I share the politics of, perhaps, disinformation-curious fringe identities who yearn for unrestricted access to youthful minds. It’s because I personally resent only kids under 16 being spared. I think it’s in the national interest to ban social media for everybody.
I say this in the specific wake of reading a piece in the Guardian this week, where Sydney psychologist Amanda Gordon explained that the shared Australian end-of-year exhaustion isn’t just about overwork, or run-up-to-Christmas social and family anxiety, or cost-of-living pressures and economic stretch. Concurrent to these eternal adult challenges, we’re living with a relentless bombardment of provocative social media-borne bad news draining our emotional capacity to navigate everything else.
Gordon is hardly the first to point out that the furious inputs of social media have a psychological impact. Author Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus devotes a whole book to explaining how scrolling, snapping, sharing, liking is reshaping the very framework of human consciousness.
But I read the burnout piece on the way home from a doctor’s appointment where I learned a set of medical symptoms mimicking cancer resulted from stress. For the first time in my life, I tangibly have meaningful work, well-managed healthcare, a stable relationship, lots of good friends, a secure roof over my head and carer commitments at zero. So I was obliged to deduce: months of pain and sleeplessness, tension and terror might – just might – result from the unending, enraging alerts and alarms with an End-Times vibe from what my husband calls “the black box of doom” in my hand.
I study and write about disinformation. I know that negative campaigning sticks in the minds of people because we’re evolutionarily hard-wired to pay more attention to threat. It is why it’s in the interests of anyone selling anything to find a way to keep the customer angry and frightened all the time.
With its incentivised extreme opinions, polarising confrontations, news-as-clickbait formats and entertainment spectacle, social media is that way. The old TV newsroom adage “if it bleeds, it leads” was about securing eyeballs in terror that could then be lured towards the purchase of comfort objects for sale in the commercial break. The difference today is that the news and the ads are often slyly indistinguishable and the comfort objects offered for instant purchase can be anything from sweatshop-made shoes to pro-rape misogyny. It can be a very short “for you” recommendation walk from fluffy cat videos to trad wives, Elon Musk and white supremacy. Thirty-six per cent of Australian schoolboys find Andrew Tate “relatable”. How do you think a Romania-based accused sex-trafficker even got in front of them?
This isn’t to opine for some lost, golden past – like those curiously anonymous “nostalgia” Facebook pages that insist happier, carefree times existed before, you know, women got management promotions and queer content was allowed on TV.
If Gen X remembers the 1980s as a time of innocence, it’s because contemporary news about nuclear brinkmanship, guerrilla war, massacres, stagflation, shuttered industries, race riots, authoritarian takeovers, plagues, devastating fires and extreme weather events – all of which were happening at the time – were contained to broadcast schedules and newspapers, not beeping their arrival into the same place as your mum trying to plan a family barbecue and where your friends gather to talk shit on Friday night.
That a discussion about state intervention is even happening is because the bro-owners aren’t ever going to volunteer to regulate the content, because unregulated content is the real product they sell. In the meantime, Carole Cadwalladr had an unmissable article recently about how to resist the social and political reach of a tech “broligarchy” who’ve made billions building social media’s Anxiety Industrial Complex.
All of it is good advice and every sensible person should adopt it post-haste, yet I promote it knowing full well my own struggle to use social media safely. I understand the counter argument against the ban – that we shouldn’t exclude kids from an experience that builds connections and community, facilitates activism and is a safe place to explore alternative points of view. These were all the reasons I embraced the platforms, and how I justify to myself staying on them.
But I challenged myself to honestly remember a time when I had ever ended a social media session, short or long, in a better mood than before I’d started scrolling.
And I couldn’t.
Can your kids? Can you?
• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
