Pod Notes
In this 5-part Tech Mirror mini-series, Australia vs Social Media, we’re exploring Australia’s world first online safety experiment. Across five episodes, we’ll unpack the new social media minimum age restriction law, examine the harms it seeks to prevent, consider the controversy surrounding its passage through parliament in November 2024, and try to demystify what will happen on 10th December when it comes into effect.
In this first episode, we’re going to go back to the beginning and dig into the research – and different perspectives – on the harms caused to young people by their use of social media platforms. Why are the experts divided? And does the evidence back-up the concerns of parents and young people?
The series is narrated by Tech Policy Design Institute Executive Director, Johanna Weaver. This episode features expert interviews with Professor Jonathan Haidt (social psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation), clinical psychologist Dr Danielle Einstein, Professor Amanda Third (co-director of the Young and Resilient Research Centre at Western Sydney University), Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, and Minh Hoang, member of the eSafety Youth Council.
Credits
Written and narrated by Johanna Weaver, Executive Director, Tech Policy Design Institute.
Produced by Olivia O’Flynn & Kate Montague, Audiocraft.
Research by Amy Denmeade.
Original music by Thalia Skopellos.
Created on the lands of the Ngunnawal, Ngambri people and the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation.
Special thanks to all the team at the Tech Policy Design Institute, without whom the pod would not be possible, especially Zoe Hawkins, Meredith Hodgman, and Dorina Wittmann.
Links
Tech Policy Design Institute https://techpolicy.au
Jonathan Haidt https://jonathanhaidt.com/
The Anxious Generation https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-anxious-generation-9781802063271
Danielle Einstein https://www.danielleeinstein.com/
Amanda Third https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/young-and-resilient/people/directors/amanda_third
Julie Inman Grant https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/about-the-commissioner
ABC News Breakfast (29 November 2024) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niaeYxdlvkw
‘For the good of…’ Australian Government Social media minimum age TV advertisement https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/social-media-age-restrictions/campaign
Australian Child Rights Taskforce open letter (October 2024) https://au.reset.tech/news/open-letter-about-social-media-bans/
Office of the eSafety Commissioner’s research findings summary: Social Media Minimum Age campaign (September 2025) https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/social-media-age-restrictions/campaign#research-findings-summary–social-media-minimum-age-campaign
YouGov poll (November 2024) Support for under-16 social media ban soars to 77% among Australians https://au.yougov.com/politics/articles/51000-support-for-under-16-social-media-ban-soars-to-77-among-australians
Transcript
Johanna: The Tech Policy Design Institute acknowledges and pays our respects to all First Nations people. We recognise and celebrate that indigenous people were this continent’s first tech innovators.
News clips: The eyes of the world are on Australia This morning after Parliament passed, sweeping world first laws overnight banning children and teenagers from social media. The move means anyone under the age of 16 will be blocked from using TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook. From the end of next year, the minister and I have an important announcement. Social media is harming children, social media. It’s not a ban on content. Age restrictions. The age assurance ban ban. It’s a ban on TikTok, social media. The ban ban on….
Johanna: Some people are calling it a social media ban. Or sometimes a social media delay, regardless of the name. What do these new minimum age restrictions actually mean for young Australians? For all Australians,
Welcome to Tech Mirror, brought to you by the Tech Policy Design Institute. In this five-part series, we’re exploring Australia’s new social media, minimum age restrictions. We’re going to unpack the new law, examine the harms it’s seeking to prevent, consider the controversy surrounding the law’s passage through parliament, and try to demystify for us what will happen on the 10th of December when the law comes into effect.
By the end of this series, we hope that you are both armed with information and energized to call for more action. Because spoiler alert, the job is not yet done and there is a lot that we can do together. I’m Johanna Weaver, co-founder and executive director of the Tech Policy Design Institute, an independent, non-partisan think tank dedicated to technology policy.
Before we get into the new law, we are going to rewind. What exactly are the harms that this law is trying to prevent? Are the concerns of parents backed up by the evidence? And if social media is harming young people, why did 140 experts and child’s rights advocates oppose the law? Most of us have experienced the pull of social media.
We know it’s designed to grab our attention. I speak to a lot of people and many of us see the benefits that social media brings. But most of us are also concerned about its negative impacts, and no group that I speak to is more concerned than parents.
Jonathon: There has never been a situation in which, let’s say half of the world’s mothers were afraid of a threat to their children and nobody was doing anything about it year after year.
And it turns out that the solution is actually quite doable if we do it together. My name is Jonathan Haidt. I’m a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. I’m a social psychologist who studies morality and moral psychology and why the world is going insane. But as part of that, I realized that a lot of it is due to the change in the digital environment. And so for the last seven to nine years, I’ve been really focused on the effect of technology on democracies and on children.
Johanna: In 2024, Jonathan wrote the bestselling book, the Anxious Generation, how The Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of mental illness, moral Panic, where there is often an inflated concern that a new technology is threatening. The fabric of society is not new. But John argues that social media is different.
Jonathan: We always do have to take account of the moral panic charge because older people always freak out about whatever new technology the young people are doing, and so that is something the critics say that this is just another moral panic.
But there are a couple of gigantic differences. The first is that a traditional moral panic, nothing actually happened. Maybe there was one killing, maybe some boy played video games or read comic books and got violent. Maybe it happened once and it’s reported in the news and it’s exaggerated and people freak out, but nothing actually happened.
In this case, the rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide rose very dramatically in all of the English speaking countries at the same time, and in the same way with bigger effects on girls. Nobody else can explain this. This is a catastrophe. This is the biggest drop in children’s mental health has ever been recorded.
So something big happened, and that wasn’t the case when comic books or video games came out. Another is that in a traditional more panic, the adults freak out, but the kids say, no. We like our comic books, we like our video games. But in this case. The kids themselves say, we wish it wasn’t invented. We’re trapped.
We don’t like it. We know it’s hurting us. And so if the kids are saying themselves, this is hurting us. And if the parents and the teachers are saying, we see this is hurting kids. And if the companies themselves, we have so many internal reports and internal memos and studies, they’ve done TikTok, meta and Snap.
They themselves say that they’re hurting kids and they’re trying to addict them. I think the evidence is overwhelming that social media is harming children at an industrial scale around the world.
Danielle: So I think we need to understand that the devices are portals triggering dopamine. They’re probably also triggering oxytocin and other neurotransmitters that we’re still learning about, and they’re extremely powerful.
Johanna: This is Danielle Einstein, an Australian clinical psychologist, an adjunct fellow at Macquarie University. She started her career as head of the anxiety clinic at Westmead Hospital and has worked in private practice treating young people, teens and adults with anxiety, depression, and OCD. If, for example, a teenager is using their device in the bedroom and in their bed. It becomes habitual and very hard for a teenager to resist. And what’s happened with social media in particular is that it’s got that addictive quality.
Johanna: You’ve been a vocal advocate of introducing a minimum age for social media use. What are the harms that led you to call for such a piece of legislation to be introduced or for that? Restriction to be placed on young people’s use of social media?
Danielle: Well, Joanna, there are just so many harms. It’s hard to know where to start, but let’s start with the normalizing of self-harm. Move on to being preoccupied with yourself and with what other people think of you, which is affecting self-esteem.
We can think about how it’s affecting face-to-face communities such as school communities. We’ve had a 313% increase in cyber bullying. Teachers saying that their time is being spent during the school day dealing with problems that are happening online. So what we’ve seen is at a time in life when children are still establishing their social groups, they’re unsure about where they fit in and where it’s very easy to be mean to one another.
And I guess the other part for me is that almost every aspect of anxiety is undermined by social media. And also a lot of depression and treatment of depression. So when I look at the research and the evidence, I look at it with a really clear lens of what is healthy and what is not healthy. For adolescent development,
Johanna: the Australian government agrees here’s an ad from the National Education Campaign released in the lead up to the law coming into force
Government advertisement: For the good of Kirsty. She’s 12 for the good of Noah. He’s 10 for the good of Priya and Anya, 11 and 14 for the good of their wellbeing. From December 10, people under the age of 16 will no longer have access to social media accounts. It’s part of a new law to help keep under 16 safer online. For more details and to help you prepare, go to esafety.gov au.
Authorized by the Australian government Canberra.
Johanna: So if this is about kids wellbeing. Why did over 140 academics, international experts, civil society organizations, child rights advocates, sign an open letter to oppose the law? When it was proposed last year
Amanda: it’s very clear to me and to many others who opposed the ban originally, that social media is not safe enough as it currently stands. But it’s a real question of how do you hold technology companies to account for the safety of children and young people online?
Johanna: This is Amanda third child Rights advocate and co-director of the Young and Resilient Research Centre at Western Sydney University. She was one of the coordinators of the open expert letter against the law. Now, arguments against the ban broadly fall into three buckets. The first is that the law is a blunt instrument.
Amanda: What a lot of people who oppose the ban really wanted to see was to have young people in those spaces to continue to inhabit those spaces, but for the government to develop regulation that would compel technology platforms to really design for children’s. Needs rights and aspirations.
Johanna: We will talk more about how we can compel social media companies to design safer platforms in later episodes. This is important because the second concern that critics have is that a blanket prohibition like this one doesn’t take into account the benefits that young people get from being online.
Amanda: The temptation to ban is seductive, but we. One of the best things you can do to protect children online is to strengthen their positive behaviors, their positive practices, right, their protective mechanisms, because when you strengthen the positives of their social media engagement. This helps to mitigate the negatives, right? It helps them to deal with those risks of harm that they encounter online. And so when we are looking at solutions here, we need to think not only about what we restrict, but also what we strengthen.
Johanna: On this point, despite disagreeing about the merit of the law, our experts do find some common ground here. Is Daniel Einstein drawing an important distinction between being online and being on social media?
Danielle: I think there is a difference. I think social media in particular is harmful. It is the social element. Of it, the broadcasting element of it. That’s the problem. We talk about online connection, but really what social media is, it’s the building of my digital identity through putting out my opinion, my views, my new stories, a certain version of myself, and then deciding.
That I’m good enough or not good enough based on the comments, shares and likes. So it, it makes a person who’s using it a lot, very focused on themselves and the size of their audience. And so what we’ve seen is we see less self-esteem and more fragile self-esteem. Four. Children and young people who are using social media more.
One study actually showed 58% of the group said that their self-esteem is affected by the the likes, comments shares. When you look at how much of their self-esteem is affected by their likes, comments, and shares, it’s half of the way they feel about themselves. That’s a big chunk of the way I feel about myself that is now based on other people’s reactions to me.
Johanna: Do you think there is any benefit for young people being online? Being online, yes, but that is not social media. Being on a website is fine, right? And texting someone who knows you, who’s gonna feed back to you on something that might have happened and who can give you a bit of context and a bit of help to help you think about how you might like to do things differently the next time.
That’s fine. Online connection in that way, in a specific way with people who know you one-to-one or one to just a couple. Whether value is intimacy, not size of my audience or size of the reaction.
Julie: My name’s Julie Inman Grant. I’m the Australian eSafety Commissioner and I’m coming up on nine years in the role, and our overall mission is to help Australians have safer, more positive experiences online.
Johanna: The eSafety Commissioner is Australia’s independent regulator for online safety. They educate Australians on online safety risks, help to remove harmful content such as cyber, bullying of children, adult cyber abuse, and intimate images or videos shared without consent. Julie is one of the regulators who will have to enforce this law, and we’ll hear lots from her in future episodes. But for now, where does the Office of the eSafety Commissioner fall on this question of, is social media causing harm to young people?
Julie: We’ve been tracking the interaction between youth mental health and social media for a number of years, and the simple fact of the matter is it depends on the child and their circumstances.
Social media has many beneficial impacts. So the research we’ve done with vulnerable communities, so first nations kids, kids with a disability, and those who identify as LGBTQI plus, they tell us they feel more themselves online than they do in the real world. It’s a way for them to find their tribe.
It’s like their digital lifeline, and they’re actually willing to put up with more online hate. And abuse because it is freeing to them. So that was something we wanted to make sure that we didn’t undermine, and this is why we also put forward a statement on children’s digital rights and have included young people throughout the consultation process and including testifying and providing a written submission into the inquiry and the lead up to the deliberation of the legislation.
Technology, whether it’s AI or social media or any other tool can be used as a tool or a weapon. It has benefits that we wanna harness. It also has harms that we wanna remediate. And if we’re, to be honest, this is why we were set up to harness the benefits and remediate the harms.
Johanna: If we accept that there are some benefits of social media, but also many harms. What are the arguments in favor of remediating those harms by restricting young people’s access to social media? Let’s hear what John has to say.
Jonathan: There are two principles I’d like to put forth. One is that parents can’t possibly keep their kids off of internet based applications unless they can keep their kids away from the internet everywhere, including at school, including at a friend’s house, because as as long as they can get to a browser ever, they can create as many fake accounts as they want right now, and then they can use ’em whenever they can get to a browser in the real world.
Can you imagine if we said bars and strip clubs and gambling casinos? They shouldn’t have to keep kids out. It’s the parents’ responsibility. If you don’t want your kids going to strip club, don’t let them. If a company is making money off of children. Then they have some responsibility to either protect them and since they have no interest in protecting them, then they simply shouldn’t be allowed.
They’ve worn out their welcome, they’ve completely violated our trust. They have an incredibly bad track record of dealing with kids, and now we’re about to turn our kids over to them and their AI chatbots. That’s the first principle, is that parents can’t possibly be expected to police this when companies are making money off of children and hurting those children.
Second principle is called the precautionary principle. So do we know that chatbots are gonna hurt kids? Well, actually we kind of do. We know that thousands, tens of thousands of kids will be severely damaged by this as they develop delusional relationships with chatbots. So even if you required the preponderance of the evidence, even if you said, well, is it probably gonna be bad?
Or probably beginning to, I think it’s probably gonna be bad. But with children, we don’t think that way. There’s what’s called the precautionary principle, which is unless something is proven safe. Where you don’t put it in children. And so think about the way we do drug testing. Of course, companies have to have a way of testing new drugs, but we’re really careful about it.
There’s all kinds of protections for the early people who take it, and we never test them on children first. I mean, eventually you might have to, but you would never roll. You know, you’re rolling out a whole new class of products and you’re gonna test them on 10 year olds. Without their parents’ knowledge or permission, it’s completely insane where we are.
Johanna: This brings us to the third major critique of the law. Even while accepting that the status quo on social media isn’t good enough, experts like Amanda third worry that the ban just won’t work because kids will get around it and worse that by excluding young people from social media accounts, we’re gonna push them to towards parts of the internet that are less safe.
Danielle: One of the key things here to understand is that actually social media accounts are one very important way that social media platforms target safety measures at. Children and young people. So by not enabling young people to have social media accounts, we are weakening our capacity to target those safety measures at them.
And I think the other concern was that as with all things related to restricting. Teenagers lives restrictions are an invitation to circumvent them, right? And young people are incredibly creative about the ways that they do that. Wanting to get online and use social media. I think we’re gonna face a kind of problem of circumvention and the concern amongst those who signed the letter.
Was that we would be driving young people away from social media platforms where we can see them into less well-regulated spaces that are not designed for children and therefore maybe actually accentuating some of the risks to which we expose them. For anyone thinking that it’s just the kids that will be finding workarounds to this survey.
Data from February and March this year released by the office of the eSafety Commissioner, indicates that 34% of parents report that they are likely to help their child find a way to use social media after the ban comes into effect.
Jonathan: Of course with any major change, of course there will be unanticipated consequences, and I’m sure some of them will be negative.
But what we’re facing is the biggest destruction of human capital and human potential. I mean, outside of war in modern history, what we’re facing is a catastrophe in which childhood has been taken over by a few companies. So it’s hard to imagine anything worse than what’s happening to children Now, the sheer number of kids who are sex extorted Snapchat, we know for internal records they were getting.
10,000 reports of Sextortion just from Gen Z, just in the United States. 10,000 reports, not a year, a month, every month in 2022. And there’s no sign that that’s gone down. We don’t know. So my point is the, the death toll, the suicides, the, I mean, millions of kids being sex extorted, who are, you know, shamed and crushed.
So the level of harm now is beyond description. If kids can no longer spend six hours a day on TikTok, will they use the tour browser to find snuff videos somewhere else? Some will, but the thing that I think the critics don’t seem to get is that the kids themselves say that this is hurting them, and a lot of them, most of ’em want to use it less, but they have to be on it because everyone else is on it.
Johanna: It is true that there has been strong public support in Australia for this law. U gov reported that when the law was first announced in August, 2024, 61% of Australians supported it. By November the same year, the support had soared to 77%. Many experts, myself included, questioned whether this strong support will continue when Australians are faced with the practical realities, including that some adults will need to verify their age to access social media.
Another survey from February and March this year released by eSafety shows far less emphatic support than late last year. Just 41% of parents and carers and 37% of the general public are highly supportive of the law. Now we are gonna explore public support and the vexed question of age assurance in future episodes. But for now, I wanna bring in a young person’s perspective. John is correct to say that many young people support the ban, but that support is far from universal.
Minh: My name is Min and I’m currently the community manager at Bloom. We are a youth innovation center based in wa and recently this year we launched one of the first AI incubator in Australia.
And in addition to that, I’m also the advisory council member for the ECFT Commissioner as well. I asked Min if they supported the new restrictions on young people’s access to social media. Can I just give like a very annoying answer? I, what I try to do is I try to steer away from this kind of like binary. Good, bad, yes. No.
Johanna: Now min is very clear. That they don’t speak for all young Australians, but through their work with several youth advisory groups examining tech issues, it’s fair to say that Min has been exposed to many diverse views held by young Australians. Min is particularly clear-eyed about the harms of social media, but they also paint a vivid picture of the benefits.
Minh: So social media is honestly, it’s a wonderful place, right? And young people. Learn a lot about everything about the world down from like how to play guitar, how to financial literacy. And if you scroll down, you read the comments, think the consensus is very clear. Like a lot of times, like these sort of knowledge or information are not being taught at school like at all.
And that’s a whole like separate conversation about like education, right? But. That’s the beauty of social media like this is. A platform for knowledge, for information, and just like any tools, right? Like it can be used for good, young people are incredibly informed. And I know that there’s a lot of narratives out there about like brain rocks and like this and that.
And again, that that is real. That is one of the concerns. But at the same time, I do think that this generation very different from like the previous generations because we have all of these access to information that. Like the previous generations just simply do not. And you see so many amazing social and political movements has been in fact led by Gen Z or like young people.
And it’s led by the fact that our communications tools are incredibly democratized. It informs young people and it empowers young people to actually create change. And I think that’s just so unique.
Johanna: Drawing from their own firsthand experiences and what they heard in their consultations with other young Australians. Min also has a nuanced view of the harms of social media.
Minh: So the way that I would categorize the harms for the first one would be users like generated harm. So think about like the cyber bullying, the kind of like bad behavior. That might be harmful for other people. The second one I would say is this sort of like algorithmic rabbit hole, where the contents that we consume are being pushed by all of these like algorithms that we don’t fully understand, and the lack of transparency and how they are shaping our thoughts, our concerns, our opinions, our behavior, even.
And the final harm I would say is this kind of like corporate exploitation. So think of this as like a blatant like disregard for user safety so that they can harvest more data. They can sharpen all of this, like profiling models and predictive analytics where like the users is just being reduced into numbers and another profit points for them.
Johanna: I asked Min what older people need to understand about the way young people use technology.
Minh: I know it sounds so like lame, but it is just very complicated and it’s messy. The internet or social media in a lot of ways, it’s just. An extension of life, right? And so if you think of quote unquote, like real physical, like life as it happens, it is messy, it is chaotic.
It is like just a lot of things happen, right? And so this digital replica. In a lot of ways it’s also that like messy, chaotic, and it’s nonlinear. This is why I resist so hard trying to to say good, bad. Yes. No, and what I’m trying to do really is just to bring it back to the middle point of saying. It is both good and bad.
Simultaneously. What does that mean for the way that we implement like policies or governance or safety measures and frameworks in these spaces is that it needs to be equally complicated and equally sophisticated.
Johanna: When we really dig into this few experts or even young people themselves disagree that social media has some negative impact, where the disagreement lies is in what we should do about it. Politicians, educators, parents, and communities all agree that something needs to be done. But not everybody thought that restricting young people’s access to social media was the most effective way to go about addressing this harm.
Over the coming episodes, we are gonna dig into the political, cultural, and media forces that led Australia down this particular path. Of restricting young people’s access to social media, we’re gonna ask if the policy will actually work. And we’ll speak to experts who like me, want us to demand more from tech companies and from our politicians. Next up, we explore how the social media ban became one of the hot button issues in the federal election.
Cam: It’s cracking down in big tech, something that is very popular and with the context of the election. It was a policy that allowed the government and also the opposition at the time to say. We are going to do something. We’ve actually passed a law. We’ve done it, but to kick the details down the road, I do understand that Australia is proactive in legislating, and there’s something I really like about that. But just making laws, just creating regulators, just developing other forms of regulation. I don’t think that’s good enough.
Lizzie: I don’t mean to sound cynical, but I do think there was a political imperative at play here.
Johanna: This has been Tech Mirror, a podcast brought to you by the Tech Policy Design Institute. We are based in Canberra on the lands of the Ngunnawal (Ngunawal) and Ngambri peoples. You can find information about the research mentioned in the episode in the show notes. A big thank you to our guests, Jonathan Haidt, Danielle Einstein, Amanda Third, Julie Inman Grant, and Minh Hoang.
This podcast was made possible thanks to generous contributions from government, industry and philanthropy to the tech policy Design fund, the full details of which are transparently disclosed on our website. For information about the archival audio we’ve used in this episode, please check the show notes.
The soundtrack is by Thalia Skopellos, a Sydney based artist and entrepreneur with Aboriginal and Greek heritage. This podcast was produced with the support of audio craft on the lands of the Gadigal people of the eora nation. Amy Denmeade provided invaluable research support, a big thank you also to all the team at the Tech Policy Design Institute, without whom this pod wouldn’t be possible for more information about our work.
Visit us at Techpolicy.au or follow us on LinkedIn.