A year ago climate activist Anjali Sharma found herself walking between politicians’ offices in Parliament House — a university student on a mission for greater climate action.
If you trace back the path that led her to those halls, it all began with an Instagram account she started as a 13-year-old.
Feeling disillusioned by the news and with a curiosity about climate change, Anjali began creating infographics designed to educate other young people like her, disengaged from mainstream media and feeling a gnawing hopelessness about their future.
The followers quickly rolled in, and before she knew it, she was posting to 12,000 followers in between high school classes. Back then, each follower, each like, was an “adrenaline hit”, she says.
“As a young person, my attitude to the news was that it just felt so distant, so otherworldly,” she says. “Whereas social media was my community.”
Anjali Sharma with independent senator David Pocock at a press conference at Parliament House last year. (AAP: Mick Tsikas)
This week the government — with the support of the Coalition — passed laws that will make it illegal for 13-year-olds like Anjali was back then, to start Instagram pages, or TikTok accounts, or access a myriad of other social media platforms that have become the scaffolding to how so many people experience the world.
There is no exemption for kids who have accounts before the rule changes come into force, nor for those whose parents to allow them to use the platforms.
Australia is now in unchartered territory — no other nation has successfully implemented an outright ban on children and teens under 16 accessing social media, with some international media describing the laws as a “test case” for the rest of the world.
“I’ve met parents who’ve had to bury their children as a result of the impact that social media has had, as a result of bullying, and we need to do something about it,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told Insiders on Sunday.
“This is world-leading legislation, I assure you, the whole world is watching.”
With all eyes on Australia, the big questions now are whether the government of the day can pull it off before the laws come into force in a year, and perhaps more importantly, whether it will make it easier to be a kid — or if it will make it worse.
Will a ban help or hinder?
Untangling the influence of something as pervasive as social media on something as intangible, subjective, and ever-changing as mental health was never going to be easy.
It’s well known that social media can be a nasty place. Where bullying in the schoolyard can spill into phones and out into a teenager’s every waking moment, dangerous ideas about body image can germinate, and predators with more sinister intentions can lurk.
It’s these things that keep parents up at night — and what the major parties have seized upon to justify their policy. Opposition communications spokesperson David Coleman, a father of two, was emotional as he described it as “one of the defining issues of our era” earlier this week.
“Every parent worries about this. We worry about what our kids are seeing. We worry about what they’re exposed to on platforms like Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram. And we’re right to worry about them,” he says.
Coleman, who was behind the Coalition’s call for an age limit in June, told the lower house the data is clear; the mental health of Australian children, especially girls, has “deteriorated badly over the past decade”.
“Some people say that the precise correlation between the rise of social media and the rise of the mental health crisis amongst Australians is just a coincidence. That argument should be treated with the absolute contempt that it deserves.”
But what about the teenagers who find joy in sending memes to their friends, who build communities online, and who have spent their lives communicating through a screen and don’t know any different?
The prime minister has repeatedly drawn comparisons with the widely accepted minimum drinking age — minors may want to drink alcohol, but it doesn’t mean that they should.
Meanwhile, some experts have tried to quantify the impact of social media on young people, including a British longitudinal study of 17,400 young people referenced by Communications Minister Michelle Rowland in Question Time last month.
The Oxford University study, published in 2022, found girls experience a negative link between social media use and life satisfaction between 11-13 years old, and boys when they are 14-15 years old.
Professor Andrew Przybylski, who co-authored the report, said more data on young people’s social media use was needed, stating: “It’s not about social media being good or bad, it’s about what young people are up to.”
According to Susan Sawyer from the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, there are limitations to what the currently available data can tell us.
“I think the research isn’t helpful in this regard, to be honest,” she told a rushed, half-day Senate hearing into the bill this week, after being asked whether the positives of social media are outweighed by the negatives.
“We really don’t have the evidence to be able to very clearly come down one way or another,” Professor Sawyer said.
She explained that while there was a “potential” for harm, she also stressed “the extent to which young people’s ways of making meaning in the world and connection to society is increasingly online”.
“As I see it, if we had our time again, we might have put some, if you like, bans in place sooner where there were social expectations,” she says. “It is very hard to take now those rights or expectations away from young people.”
For this reason, along with representatives from Headspace and anti-bullying organisation Project Rockit, she stressed the need for a balanced approach.
Psychologist Danielle Einstein, who has supported the push to raise the minimum age, took a stronger stance. “I do not see any benefits for mental health in social media. I’ve looked really hard at the evidence,” she says.
“Even if there were to be some, I think they are far outweighed by the disadvantages.”
What young people think
Anjali is under no illusion that social media is entirely safe for young people, or anyone else. Running a page dedicated to climate change meant she experienced some of the well-documented toxicity earlier than most.
But she worries about the teenagers who won’t have the chance to find their people online, as she did, and whether a craving for connection will push them underground into spaces that are even less safe.
She also worries about what the ban will mean for young people’s participation in politics. It was through starting her Instagram page that she became involved with organising the School Strike for Climate — a mammoth event that brought an estimated 300,000 Australians onto the streets five years ago and made headlines around the world.
She believes none of that would have been possible without social media.
“That’s how we reached people in our generation and that’s how we let them know what we stood for and that there’s a chance for people who care and think in similar ways to get involved,” she says.
“There’s a big barrier for young people to get involved in activism because there’s this belief that young people aren’t smart enough and don’t know enough. But social media was about meeting people where they were.”
The government, with the support of the Coalition, has passed laws that will make it illegal for children and teenagers under 16 to use social media. (ABC News: Luke Stephenson)
Five years later, kids are still getting political on social media. Part of the conversation is now ironically about whether they should be allowed to remain on the very platform on which they are having the debate.
On TikTok — one of the banned platforms particularly popular with young people — comment sections are full of hundreds of teens, or at least it seems, lamenting what’s coming.
Some incorrectly fear they could be jailed for breaking the rules. Under the laws, the onus is on tech companies to take “reasonable steps” to prevent under-16s from accessing the platforms, not on the users themselves.
Others say it will destroy their lives. “Sounds like dystopia tbh”, “we live in a dictatorship”, and “this is a big joke” are some examples under a video with almost 9,000 likes.
Some platforms that technically fall under the new definition of an age-restricted social media platform will be exempt from the ban, including messaging apps, gaming sites, and platforms whose main purpose is for health or education. Youth-focused platforms, like YouTube Kids, are also carved out, along with platforms that don’t require users to log in.
“We’re not banning the internet, but this, for a majority of young people, knowing how they engage with online spaces, is akin to banning the internet,” Lucy Thomas from Project Rockit told the Senate hearing.
Nicole Palfrey, from Headspace, pointed to conversations with young people who declared they’ll just go around the ban. “Our concern is that it will drive them into unregulated spaces that we’ll then be spending a lot of time and energy on, and that the eSafety Commissioner will be very hard-pressed to keep up with regulating and staying across,” she says.
But Dr Einstein offered an alternative picture — Young people want to get off social media, they just don’t know how.
“When I speak with young people at schools, they ask me, ‘What’s your opinion, Dr Einstein? I want to get off it, but how can I? Everyone else is on it. That’s how we communicate.’ They want the change,” she says.
Concerns over ‘rushed’ legislation
Even politicians and experts who say they, in theory, support some form of limit on who can use social media question why it had to be rushed through in the final parliamentary sitting week of the year, forcing any deep examination of the laws to be cut short.
The committee’s report notes that nearly all 102 published submissions expressed concern over the “extremely short” consultation period.
The bill was introduced to parliament on Thursday last week and was referred for a Senate inquiry the same day. Submissions to the inquiry closed on the following Friday, a three-hour hearing was held on Monday, and the report was tabled on Tuesday.
It passed parliament two days later, at the end of a mammoth day where the government rammed through more than 30 pieces of legislation.
“It would be nice if we had more time to think about the nuance … None of us are naive enough to think there’s all good or all bad,” Nicole Palfrey from Headspace told the hearing.
The Greens and some crossbenchers raised similar concerns in the lead-up to the Senate vote late on Thursday night.
Coalition senator Richard Colbeck was one of a handful of opposition MPs who broke with their party to speak out against the bill, before abstaining from the vote.
“The concept of excluding an entire segment of our population from a form of communication just doesn’t sit well with me,” he told the upper house on Thursday night.
“I respect the arguments of my colleagues who think we should be doing something, and clearly we should be doing something, but this is not the way.”
