Empowered by the anecdotal benefits of school smartphone bans, politicians are now rushing to ban teenagers from social media services – but as a conga line of experts at this month’s Social Media Summit showed, the jury is still out as to whether it’s the right move.
While many students “didn’t know how they were going to get through the day without their phones being in their laps,” NSW Premier Chris Minns said while opening the Summit, the impact of smartphone bans has been “massive”, with fewer behavioural issues, fewer suspensions, higher attendance rates, and less bullying.
“We’ve seen more concentration in our classrooms and stronger connections outside it,” Minns said, arguing that despite teens’ love of technology “we’ve got the right to be suspicious of the impact social media is having on our society and our young people.
“Healthy scepticism doesn’t make you backward, or nostalgic, or some kind of modern Luddite.”
Emboldened by growing pushback against “toxic” social-media giants’ targeting of school-aged children Prime Minister Anthony Albanese recently promised to ban children under an age between 13 and 16 from social media.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton promised to raise this to 16 if the Coalition wins the election.
Amidst revelations that South Australian school children will be taught about the dangers of social media, keynote speaker San Diego State University Professor of Psychology Dr Jean Twenge, a prolific author and researcher into the link between social media and adolescent mental health, recounted the empirical trail she began to follow as she observed a surge in teenage depression a decade ago.
Satisfaction with life “had been on a slow rise since the 1970s, until it just fell off a cliff right around 2012,” she said. “I had never really seen anything like it.”
The difference she identified – 2012 was the point when smartphones became pervasive in Western countries, and a time when social media use “went from optional to virtually mandatory”– confirmed how quickly new technologies changed teenagers’ wellbeing.
“The more hours a day a teen spends on social media,” she said, “the more likely it is that they will have internalising and externalising problems, things like depression and anger.
“It is amazing how many people talk about their phones and social media using the language of addiction.”
Weighing the harms of social media
US surgeon general Vivek H. Murthy recently called for warning labels on social media platforms, similar to warnings long posted on cigarette packs.
But experts clashed about whether an age limit for social media use was the best response to the problem.
While “big tech and their shameless apologists” push back against proposed age restrictions, Dany Elachi, founder of tech-free parenting advocacy group Heads Up Alliance (HUA), argued that proposed age limits weren’t high enough.
“Those who defend the current status quo of 13 years do so without any scientific basis and have zero evidence for their position,” he explained, “and ignore or fail to recognise that we are only at 13 years because of an accident of American privacy law [the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act] 25 years ago, even before social media was a thing….. Children can’t consent to this level of harm.”
Yet while an age ban “sounds like a perfect solution, it’s not the solution because all it does it put this issue on pause,” countered Dr Joanne Orlando, a senior lecturer in early childhood education at the University of Western Sydney who has pushed for children to be educated about social media – like they are about sex – rather than being banned from it.
Orlando’s surveys have repeated confirmed that most children have no idea how social media works, with one recent study of 500 children between 10- and 13-years old finding that just 5 per cent even knew what misinformation is.
Another survey of 400 university-age students showed they knew nothing about social media algorithms.
“Whether it’s 14 or 16 or whatever the [cutoff] is,” Orlando explained, “they still don’t have the skills and knowledge they need to be able to make decisions with social media so that it’s not having a harmful effect.”
“[We assume] when they’re 16 they’ll be fine and know what to do – but that’s not how it works: they don’t miraculously develop these skills and knowledge.
“Social media literacy is about really understanding how these platforms work and how they work on us.”
Pushing back against the pushback
With a growing tide of research supporting bans – a major French government report recommended age 18 is a better limit – many will find it counterintuitive that nearly 150 Australian and international experts this month signed an open letter to Albanese arguing that bans are a sledgehammer approach to a solution that requires more finesse.
Newly released NSW Government statistics suggest that 45 per cent of children are using social media between the ages of 5 and 9, 70 per cent between age 10 and 12, and 94 per cent by the time they are 15 – yet the proportion of parents with rules and safety measures in place declines steadily as their children age.
Change will take time: “we have a long way to go before these things really start to work,” digital parenting coach and Digitalem SAS founder Elizabeth Milovidov told the summit, advising parents to trust their instincts.
“What they are doing online is similar to a lot of the things that we were doing… when we were kids,” she explained.
“Just because it is online does not mean that you don’t know how to deal with it.
“It is being present that will help them in resilience building.”
Ultimately, Minister for Communications Michelle Rowland said in addressing the summit, “no solution will be perfect, and consensus on the ‘right’ age is unlikely…. But we can’t let the ‘perfect’ be the enemy of good.”
“We need to make progress to ensure our safeguards keep improving…. Establishing an age limit for social media will help signal a set of normative values that support parents, teachers, and society more broadly.”
“It is about protecting young people, not punishing or isolating them or their parents, [and] letting parents know that we are in their corner when it comes to supporting their children’s health and wellbeing.”
