This social-media ban for teens infantilises us all

There are good reasons to be concerned about children’s social-media use. Time spent online leaves less time for hanging out in the real world. Algorithms can magnify a child’s darkest thoughts: those who worry they are too fat or the wrong gender find they are bombarded with images of people with anorexia or undergoing surgical transition. On top of this, there’s the pervasive sense that everyone else is having fun without you and the potential for online bullying. Catty classmates are no longer left behind at the end of the school day, but travel home with children via group chats and messaging apps.

For all these reasons, governments around the world are looking to crack down on children’s access to smartphones and social media. China was first off the mark. It imposes strict limits on screen time as well as demanding platforms heavily filter content. France is trialling a ban on phones in schools. Britain’s Online Safety Act aims to ‘make the UK the safest place in the world to be a child online’. It compels social-media companies to enforce age restrictions and prevent children from accessing harmful and age-inappropriate content. Now Australia is looking to go one further. Having recently implemented restrictions on mobile-phone use in schools, it now plans an outright ban on all social-media platforms for everyone under the age of 16. Prime minister Anthony Albanese said: ‘Social media is doing harm to our kids and I’m calling time on it.’

Australia’s proposed legislation, much like the UK’s Online Safety Act, promises to fine companies that fail to safeguard children (there will be exemptions for those that create ‘low-risk services’ deemed suitable for kids). Critics contend that such a ban won’t work and that tech-savvy kids know better than adults how to circumvent filters and age restrictions. This might be true, but it both misses the deeper problems and ignores the attraction of bans to governments like Albanese’s.

In every single instance, restricting children’s access to the online world paves the way for greater restrictions on adults. Already there is concern that Australia’s restrictions will compel everyone who uses social media to prove their identity in order to verify their age. One group warns that the proposed law ‘represents a significant expansion of digital identity verification in social media, building on existing biometric-age estimation and document-based verification technologies’. Registration jettisons the anonymity which has, sadly, proved necessary for people to be able to post truths online, such as ‘women are adult females’, without losing their livelihoods. Attempts to control access to social media for children will inevitably end up restricting the free speech of all Australian citizens.

It’s not just free speech that’s at stake but adult authority, too. Just as adults are in charge of what children see and do in the real world, so adults need to be in charge of what children get up to online. But, crucially, it is parents, not government ministers, that would normally set rules for children about behaviour in the home and it is teachers, not global tech companies, who should dictate what happens in the classroom. Government-imposed bans on social media remove power from parents and teachers to decide what freedoms children are allowed online. They place it instead in the hands of government ministers and lawyers. Parents and teachers then become as beholden to following the rules as children are. Adult authority, as a whole, is dealt a fatal blow.

For many governments, the desire to impose more restrictions on the internet has grown significantly since Elon Musk’s takeover of X and Donald Trump’s election victory. Just this week, Peter Kyle, technology minister in the UK Labour government, announced that an Australian-style social-media ban for British children is ‘on the table’. Labour has also signalled its intention to strengthen the already stringent Online Safety Act. Liberal elites clearly see free speech as a threat to their authority.

For this reason, further restrictions on online speech will almost certainly be cheered on by the great and good. An Australian contributor to the Guardian argues, only half tongue-in-cheek, that a ‘social media ban for everyone is in the national interest’ (my emphasis). ‘With its incentivised extreme opinions, polarising confrontations, news-as-clickbait formats and entertainment spectacle’, she warns, ‘it can be a very short “for you” recommendation walk from fluffy cat videos to tradwives, Elon Musk and white supremacy.’ As their recent flounce off X reveals, little disturbs the global elites more than the plebs freely sharing opinions online.

There is some dissent within Australia’s liberal elite, however. Some fear that banning teens from social media entirely will make them harder to reach and influence with woke messaging. For instance, over 100 Australian academics have criticised the ban as ‘too blunt an instrument’, while a cross-party parliamentary committee calls for greater regulation instead. Similarly, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, wants LGBTQ+ or First Nations teenagers who, apparently, ‘feel more themselves online than they do in the real world’ to have continued access to government-approved messages. In other words, Andrew Tate videos are out, but advice for gender-confused teenage girls on how to bind their breasts should be readily available.

On the surface, the debate about social media and children may appear to be about child protection, but it is really about restricting everyone’s access to content that elites consider politically objectionable. In Australia, not even the ban’s critics are arguing for unrestricted internet use for adults.

The dangers of this ban are all too clear. We need to leave parents and teachers to protect children – and to trust adults to judge for themselves what to view online.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. She is a visiting fellow at Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Hungary.