Debra Soh is a sex neuroscientist and the author of The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths about Sex and Identity in Our Society.
The next time you find yourself in a crowded public place, look around and count the number of people who aren’t on their phone. You’ll probably be able to do so without using all the fingers on one hand.
Smartphones, and the associated hellspawn that is social media, have rewritten our social norms and the rules around human engagement. But in Australia, a landmark bill, introduced last week by the country’s communications minister, seeks to reverse this course of fate for the next generation.
The new law would ban social media usage for kids younger than 16, with the aim of restoring childhood to that of a simpler time, when likes, follower counts and judging people by their avatar alone didn’t yet exist. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat could be fined up to A$50-million ($45-million) for violating this legislation.
The bill has exceptions. Messaging apps and online games deemed educational, for instance, won’t be affected by these age restrictions. Even still, the bill has proven controversial. Elon Musk, the owner of the social media platform X, posted that the bill “[seems] like a backdoor way to control access to the Internet by all Australians.”
The bill doesn’t specify how age assurance will be monitored, but it seems every Australian, regardless of age, will need to provide verification to use affected sites. Because this involves collecting sensitive information, some fear digital IDs will be around the corner, which would enable increased surveillance and authoritarian control.
Critics also fear that the pretext of child safety could be a way to justify censoring unpopular yet truthful information and to silence political dissent. These concerns have been raised with Canada’s own Bill C-63.
People have every right to be skeptical. But governments are already basically capable of monitoring everyday citizens’ social media activity. For those who are truly worried about their privacy, unless their income depends on it, nothing is forcing them to log onto these platforms.
Meanwhile, the real consequences of allowing kids to roam freely on the Internet, fending for themselves, have been well-documented. A 2023 Gallup poll found that the average teen spends at least four hours per day on social media. In addition to algorithms that push age-inappropriate content involving pornography, violence, drug use and self-harm, many reports have shown that social media has facilitated cyberbullying and the sexual exploitation of minors.
Using social media is associated with a long list of mental-health issues, including depression and psychological distress in adolescents. For girls, social media has transformed the teenage years, already a popularity contest rife with gossiping and backstabbing, into a freely available 24-hour cycle of social comparison and the cruelties that can come with that.
Image-based platforms have been particularly detrimental to teens’ perceptions of their bodies. Young girls’ feeds are perpetually flooded with so-called “aspirational content,” featuring influencers warped by beautification filters, extreme weight-loss strategies and unnecessary cosmetic “tweakments.”
Media literacy has primarily targeted female users in hopes of preventing them from being sucked into the cultural abyss. Though the same pathological trend of adhering to unrealistic body goals has manifested in boys, too – in the forms of disordered eating and abuse of anabolic steroids, among other issues – that remains mostly unaddressed.
More than half of Gen Z (who are between the ages of approximately 12 and 29) is plagued by anxiety daily. This phenomenon has been attributed to a variety of factors, including being raised by overprotective parents and undergoing social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. But being hyperconnected digitally has exacerbated the problem by removing the unpredictability and the honing of social skills that come from face-to-face interpersonal interactions. One way to undo this damage is by encouraging children to form friendships the old-fashioned way: in real life.
Precocious kids will devise workarounds to age-restriction bans; I once believed they were futile. But discussions I’ve had with parents and young adults have changed my perspective. Even if some kids do manoeuvre around these obstacles, the reality that social media isn’t good for them will remain. They aren’t emotionally equipped to deal with this level of toxicity, particularly when their brains haven’t completed developing. VPNs aren’t a reason to throw up our hands. Children deserve protection from repercussions that they can’t adequately anticipate or understand. It’s a tricky balance, but dismissing guardrails outright isn’t the answer.
For optimal mental and physical health, Canadian guidelines recommend that recreational screen time should be limited to two hours per day for children, and three hours per day for adults. Considering that roughly 40 per cent of Canadian adults struggle to stay under this limit, how can we expect kids to do better, without serious intervention?