We’ve been covering Australia’s monumentally stupid social media ban for kids under 16 since before it went into effect. We noted how dumb the whole premise was, how the rollout was an immediate mess, how a gambling ad agency helped push the whole thing, and how two massive studies involving 125,000 kids found the entire “social media is inherently harmful” narrative doesn’t hold up.
But theory and data are one thing. Now we’re getting real-world stories of actual kids being harmed by a law that was supposedly designed to protect them. And wouldn’t you know it, the harm is falling hardest on the kids who were already most vulnerable. Just like many people predicted.
If you thought this was a good idea you are part of the harm against these kids, wake the fuck up and use your brain, this is a moral panic, you are hardly different than villagers yelling for a witch to be burned at the stake and you should feel ashamed of your stupidity.
Do better fediverse and if you are one of those people who casually waxes lyrical about denying kids access to the tools you use everyday because you honestly believe letting young people on social media is equivalent to giving them physically addictive drugs and that this place should have young people restricted from it because it is fundamentally unhealthy, please leave. You bring this place down and you undermine any sense of optimism about digital communities that motivates the rest of us to be here.
“The current research does not support the usefulness of banning kids from social media. Research studies do not suggest there is a correlation between time spent on social media and youth mental health. Further, reducing social media time does not improve mental health. This ban is likely to be a waste of time and resources. Further, it prevents opportunities to teach kids how to use social media responsibly. Like most moral panics, these kinds of efforts do harm in distracting us from real sources of youth mental health problems, mainly families in distress and failing schools. We have to remember we’ve been through this all before many times from video games, to rock and roll, books to the radio. These panics over media and technology never do anything to help kids.”
…
“Perhaps because of that balance and because many other factors are known to have a much larger impact on childhood, current evidence suggests very small effects at a population level when it comes to associations between social media/smartphone use on wellbeing e.g., McCrae et al., 2017; Vahedi & Zannella, 2021; Yoon et al.,2019). Note that not all the above reviews involve children. Also, that these are all reporting associations, not cause and effect.
“When it comes to the general use of social media and smartphones, the effects on mood or wellbeing are so small ‘that they require implausibly large behavioral changes to produce even minor mood shifts.’ (Winbush et al., 2025; p6)
https://news.ucsb.edu/2025/022293/brain-science-social-media-and-modern-moral-panic
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2026/01/26/social-media-age-bans-toxic-business-model/
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2026-01-23-expert-comment-under-16-social-media-ban-right-course
https://www.businessinsider.com/kids-parenting-social-media-bans-meta-2026-2
https://cacbrevard.org/should-teens-be-banned-from-social-media/
https://publications.ieu.asn.au/ie-220/article1/help-or-harm?cookies=true
https://www.humanrights.unsw.edu.au/students/blogs/australia-social-media-ban-under-16s
Why are you here then?
How the hell are you going to ban all underage people from social media, who are you going to bestow complete authority over our digital identities to and who gets the authority to decide the details of how it is done?
You are being intellectually lazy and it shows.
https://edspace.american.edu/thecfebeat/2025/01/01/the-myth-of-the-shrinking-attention-span-shed-siliman/
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Hold up, hold up.
Here are plenty of studies - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=attention+span+social+media&btnG=
Ok so let’s use that logic of who gets the authority to decide.
As a child would it be ok for you to watch porn all day? I mean what’s stopping you? The government with their R, MA, NR ratings? Why not just let children smoke? Who has the authority to question what we do with our bodies? We should be selling smokes and alcohol to minors cause why listen to anything the professionals and government says?
Why are you following those rules? That’s just being intellectually lazy since others are telling you what to do.
How does this relate to the conversation at hand?.. further do you honestly believe porn isn’t accessible to people under 18…???..???..???
What evidence do you have that letting kids access social media is equivalent to exposing them to one of the most physically addictive cancer causing agents on earth?
Let me state the obvious, letting kids smoke cigarettes would lead to many many many many MANY young people dying prematurely. What you are suggesting, cutting off young people from social media, will likely also kill kids who are ostracized in their local in-person social networks when they become desperately isolated from anyone who isn’t bigoted.
I know this seems silly to state explicitly because it is so obvious but social media does not prematurely end people’s lives by massively raising the risk of a terminal illness that can’t be cured, to equate them is an offense to anyone who has lost a loved one to lung cancer or some other health complication from cigarettes.
For starters, requiring ID verification. That is something that is very obviously easy for an adult to provide and for a child not to. At the end of the day, that will be for each individual country to decide.
Though I imagine over the long-term there will be more nuanced solutions.
The problem of people losing their cognitive abilities is far more consequential than a small group of people having a more difficult time because they don’t socialize easily. I’m just looking at the bigger issue here.
Cite your sources or don’t casually assert such claims
How about this tidbit from the article you linked in the OP? I’m guessing you didn’t actually read any of it past the headline because it certainly doesn’t say what you seem to think it does. What an intellectually lazy thing to do.
Yeah, I included that to show some breadth in my evidence, but the evidence for gaming addiction is fraught with structural issues as well. Certainly people get addicted to video games, but it is also decidedly a moral panic and thus comparing social media to it weakens the case for banning it in my opinion.
I don’t exist to entertain you, and I don’t find your ideological bent worth more of my time.
Have a pleasant evening. :)
I don’t want entertainment, I want you to think harder before you resort to kneejerk reactions and I want you to cite your sources when you make bold claims.
Giving citations is too much work for people who react based on feelings and not reality.
You mean like OP, who’s clearly having a temper tantrum calling people “fucking idiots” and telling them they need to “leave” if they don’t agree with them, all the while demanding sources from everyone while providing none of their own other than a single editorial written by a college student?