Would it be acceptable to legalise smoking for children? How about drinking?
We recognise that both of those are harmful to children, although at least in the case of alcohol we accept a morally and legally grey area where parents may provide some safe guidance for older children. Still, we also accept that ultimately they should be outlawed.
So, why are so many conservative commentators up in arms about the Albanese government’s recently-passed legislation banning social media use for children? Stephen Berry in Good Oil calls it ‘fascism’.
Yet we know that social media is incredibly harmful to children’s mental health. Like tobacco companies in the 1950s, social media companies like Meta have done the research – and tried to hide it. They know how harmful their products are for children, and yet they continue to market them to children, openly.
Why on earth would we let them get away with it?
Australia’s social media ban for children has made headlines around the world, as articles questioned how it could work and whether similar laws would be introduced elsewhere.
The legislation passed through the Senate on Thursday, and while it still faces one final vote in the lower house to approve amendments, that will be a formality.
Of course the ban will be difficult to implement. Anyone who’s experienced trying to ban kids from accessing social media in school knows how devious the little bastards can be. Yet, kids still persuade adults to go into shops and buy cigarettes for them. No one questions the law against it, though.
Certainly, many people support the laws.
Blick, the Zurich-based newspaper and news website, on Thursday splashed an interview it had done with Australian Communications Minister Michelle Rowland.
It cited a survey claiming 78 per cent of Swiss think children aged 16 and under should not be able to access social media […]
Last year, France introduced laws that banned children under 15 from using social media without parental consent, and President Emmanuel Macron has urged the European Union to adopt similar policies.
Leaders in Denmark and Norway have also spoken in support of Australia’s laws.
The news wire agency Reuters interviewed young people all over Europe about the developments in Canberra.
One, a 20-year-old waiter in Rome named Pietro Migliaccio, said “it’s an initiative that makes a lot of sense in Australia and one that we should bring here to save the next generation”.
Some of the bill’s opponents make the best arguments for it.
Greens senator David Shoebridge warn[ed] “children from rural areas and the LGBTQ community” would be harmed under the laws.
Translation: How will we groom the kids, now?
“It would be quite challenging because I’m used to my phone already and I use it quite a lot as well,” Year 8 student Roman Kandelaki said.
“Without my phone, I feel different, I don’t feel the same, I feel like I’m a different person.”
Which sounds to me exactly the reason you shouldn’t have one, sonny.
Oddly, the laws are in line with conservative champion Ron de Santis.
Florida earlier this year imposed a ban for children aged under 14 from using platforms like Instagram and TikTok and additional restrictions on kids aged 14 and 15.
Of course, this is the Albanese government we’re talking about, so there’s good reason to suspect that even a good idea will be botched badly, or enacted with malign intent. That doesn’t mean it isn’t still a good idea.
It’s also true that parents should take more responsibility for their kids’ media consumption. Which is true, but ask any parent who’s ever had a teenager sneak off to a piss-up how feasible that is. Hell, ask any one who was ever a teenager and snuck off to get shit-faced at a party.
In Britain, in fact, some parents are giving it their best shot.
Multiple parents from schools in St Albans, south-east England, have signed a pledge not to give their child a smartphone before that age.
One of those parents Jessica Pyne says it’s collective action she and others had been desperately waiting for.
“Nobody wants their child to be the odd one out, everybody wants to fit in particularly at that tender age, so if everybody is holding off until 14, then the expectation has shifted,” Ms Pyne said.
The campaign has been running for six months and makes a distinction between smartphones and simple phones, which can be used for communication but don’t connect to the internet.
So children and parents can still contact one another immediately, should the need arise. It’s just that the kids’ brains won’t be rotted by witless “influencers”.
Executive head teacher at Cunningham Hill Schools in St Albans Justine Elbourne-Cloud says […] increased access to smartphones outside of school is impacting student performance in the classroom.
“Over the last few years, what we’ve really noticed is the attention span of our children getting less and less,” she said.
“It’s now called the ‘TikTok brain’, the idea that children have such a short attention span that trying to be in a classroom teaching everything has to be quick-fired and moving on because they can’t swipe teachers, they can’t swipe the classroom, but they have to stay focused."
Even as an adult, I can testify to the effect. It takes an often conscious effort to give up the doom-scrolling in exchange for something requiring deeper focus, such as reading a book. But as an adult I’m also luckier in that reading is a habit of a lifetime, acquired in a childhood without smartphones.
If only today’s kids could get such a chance.
