... the answer is no. Australia has just imposed the Western world's first broad, age-based ban on social media use for those under 16 years of age. The ban includes several popular social media platforms, including TikTok and Instagram, while exempting a few known mainly for user-to-user functions or with restricted content for kids only.
The ban goes into effect today, and the Australian government will enforce it with fines on the platforms rather than the users:
The banned platforms are among the most heavily used by Australian teens: Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X and YouTube. They all meet a set of criteria, including that they allow users to post content, according to Australia’s online regulator, the eSafety Commissioner. Some smaller services such as Bluesky have self-assessed and will ban under-16s, too.
The companies are now required to take reasonable steps to enforce the new rules, under threat of penalty. Parents and children won’t be fined.
YouTube Kids, WhatsApp and Messenger are among platforms that won’t be restricted, though that could change if their services evolve, the regulator said.
The new ban came from a growing concern about the impact of social media on the mental health of children and young teens. Those have percolated, as the WSJ notes, for at least since the pandemic, which raised its own issues over both mental health and education for children. In a September 2021 exposé, the WSJ reported that Meta had data indicating that social media use for underage users did damage:
“Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” the researchers said in a March 2020 slide presentation posted to Facebook’s internal message board, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “Comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves.”
For the past three years, Facebook has been conducting studies into how its photo-sharing app affects its millions of young users. Repeatedly, the company’s researchers found that Instagram is harmful for a sizable percentage of them, most notably teenage girls.
“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the issues.
“Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” said another slide. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”
That may be one form of damage, but it's hardly the only one, and the worst impact may not be limited to younger users. Social media platforms amplify narcissism, and probably curate it as a deliberate design. It is easy to fall prey to Main Character Syndrome on social media platforms. That's damaging enough for adults, but that is especially seductive to people in their formative years.
These are all good reasons for parents to ban social media apps until their child or teen is mature enough to engage on them. Should governments get involved with broad-based age restrictions? That question has come up in the US at times, but not gotten very far after 1998's passage of the The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). That has more to do with data privacy than age restrictions for users, although its potential consequences have encouraged some platforms to ban anyone under 13. The penalties for violations have been steep; Epic Games paid $275 million in 2022, and TikTok another $5.7 million in 2019, both for illegal data ttrawling of users under 13. No state actively bans underage users, however.
There certainly is an appetite for greater restrictions on use. According to a Pew poll of US adults in 2023, 81% of Americans want to require parental permission for minors to create any social media account. Seventy-one percent want strict age verification before access to such platforms, and 69% want time limits for minors. As these numbers suggest, support for such measures is bipartisan, and roughly similar regardless of political affiliation. Interestingly, a plurality of US teens favor parental consent (46/25), a majority favors age verification (56/16), while time limits produce a virtual tie (34/36).
Pew never discussed an outright ban in the US with its respondents. Perhaps that's because the First Amendment might make that difficult or impossible, or just that it hadn't entered the Overton window. Enforcement will be a nightmare for the Australian government too, and that reality undoubtedly weighs on the rational options for child and teen safety. Perhaps the best lesson from this for US parents is that it doesn't take a government to ban the use of social media apps for children – it just takes parents who are informed of the dangers and engaged enough to take action, with enough courage to weather their child's indignation.
The latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast is now up! Today's show features:
- Has the Washington Post lost its way -- or has the outlet found it?
- Andrew Malcolm and I discuss their surprisingly clear and dispassionate analysis of Democrat disarray in Texas.
- We also talk about the sale of Warner Discovery and its potential impact on narrative amplification disguised as news.
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