AUSTRALIA’S SOCIAL MEDIA BLACKOUT BACKLASH SHOWS WHAT COULD BE IN STORE FOR BRITAIN
It seems possible that Keir Starmer might soon make a decision on whether to introduce a ban on social media from under-16s. Debate on the matter has raged for several years in Britain, and, in the past year, concern over children’s excessive screen time reached new heights.
In Britain, the average eight-to-14-year-old spends three hours online each day, Ofcom has found, most of it on Snapchat and YouTube. Experts warn of long-term risks – from mental-health issues to loneliness, sleep deprivation, disrupted learning and the dangers of speaking to strangers online.
Yet despite this apparent sense of urgency, and while several countries have considered banning social media for younger teenagers, none had taken the step of enshrining it in law. Until Australia took the leap just before Christmas.
Now Downing Street has indicated it will not stand in the way of a Conservative amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, currently working its way through the House of Lords, that will pave the way for a similar ban.
Announced to much fanfare, Australia introduced its groundbreaking prohibition of social media for children under 16 on December 10. The legislation placed the onus on tech companies to stop younger teenagers from accessing platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, or face fines of up to A$49.5m (about £25m).
In some respects, the ban can be said to have been a success in its own terms. Earlier this week Meta said that in the first week of its operation, it had blocked around 550,000 accounts on its social media platforms, including 330,639 on Instagram, 173,497 on Facebook and 39,916 on Threads. Data from the Australian government found that more than 4.7 million accounts were deactivated within two days and, according to preliminary analysis by its eSafety Commissioner, social media companies were making “meaningful attempts” to stop underage users from having accounts.
Perhaps these numbers go some way to explain why our Prime Minister appears to have had a change of heart on the matter, as signalled to Labour MPs on Monday night, having previously been sceptical of such a measure. In an interview with The Observer late last year, Sir Keir was clear that he remained “personally” opposed to a ban, arguing it was “more about how you control the content that children can see”.
The Prime Minister will also be aware there is strong support for such legislation across the country. A YouGov poll in December last year found 74 per cent of people supported a ban in the UK and more than 100,000 people have written to MPs calling for the measure as part of the Smartphone Free Childhood campaign. The NASUWT, one the country’s biggest teaching unions, also weighed in behind the campaign in the past week.
Yet, back in Australia, it remains early days and opinions on the measure remain deeply split. The legislation has been slated by civil liberties groups as an affront to free speech, an attack on young people’s rights and an invasion of their privacy. Others have warned the ban could have mental health consequences, depriving vulnerable younger teens from contact with others. Many parents and academics share the view that the ban is, as one put it, “toothless”, and fear it is likely to have unintended consequences, making it more difficult for teenagers to communicate with their friends online and pushing them towards unregulated platforms or other shadowy corners of the internet.
“We all know from experience as teenagers ourselves that when your parents say you absolutely can’t do something, the reaction it sparks is that you tend to go the other way,” says Nicola Conville, 53, mother to a 15-year-old daughter and a 12-year-old son in Sydney. “In an ideal world, we should have programmes that educate teachers and students on safe social media use, and the government should crack down on the tech giants and predators – they need to be kept in check, not the kids.”
Of course, no one is more put out – apart from the technology companies, perhaps – than teenagers themselves, who woke up to find themselves booted off the platforms they use to connect with their peers and the world. One teenager, 14-year-old Jacinta Hickey, described the ban as “insulting”. “I’m definitely mature enough to distinguish right from wrong and to know what’s good and bad for me,” she said.
“Where we live now, everybody’s very scattered. So it’s not always possible for children to just, you know, knock in next door or call in on the street,” says Conville. “So the way they communicate is through social media, whether that’s Discord or Snapchat or whatever. Taking that away is taking away a really important form of communication for them.”
Another Sydney mother, Lesa Mulholland, 58, has never been worried about her son using social media. “I think it’s awesome for him. He’s a smart kid, he’s an educated kid, we talk about stuff. I know what he’s doing there. I trust him, he trusts me.” But she is worried about the wider health implications of social-media deprivation.
“I think it’s going to be more damaging than parents realise, particularly if they’ve got kids who are really addicted to social media and have real issues socialising,” she says. “They’re going to have a big problem if they just completely remove social media without managing the kids’ mental health.”
And her 15-year-old son, Ethan Wright, doesn’t believe it’s “tenable” and thinks the age limit of any ban should be lowered: “At 14-15 you can have a job, two jobs. You can do stuff like that but you can’t go on YouTube, TikTok or talk to your mates on Snapchat. I just find that wild.”
Already, young people have found ways around the ban: by using virtual private networks (VPNs), asking relatives to circumvent age-verification technologies and, in some cases, resorting to a mask or drawing on facial hair. One 13-year-old has been proudly bragging about how she used a photo of her mother to hack the system, and Ethan says his friends have easily found ways to game it. Far from prompting parents and young people to reflect on the harm social media can cause, the ban risks turning it into the ultimate forbidden fruit.
Two Australian teenagers have even launched a legal challenge against the government, with the campaign group the Digital Freedom Project, for infringing on what they see as a “constitutional right”. “We will be invisible with this ban,” says Noah Jones, 15. “We won’t be able to share our views and opinions, and we won’t be able to hear others’ views and opinions, political or just about anything.”
His co-plaintiff, Macy Neyland, said the ban was “like Orwell’s book 1984 and that scares me… we shouldn’t be silenced.”
Jones and Neyland are not the only young people to feel that this legislation is a draconian move that, with echoes of the Covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, curbs their freedom and could similarly damage the capabilities and development of children. In August this year, the Australian Human Rights Commission made a submission on the bill, arguing it could negatively impact “rights to freedom of expression, access to information, education, health, privacy and participation in cultural and social life” and called for “less restrictive alternatives” to be considered.
Prof Amanda Third, from Western Sydney University, points out that when young people have a declining faith in democracy, the ban is only likely to make them more isolated. “We’re taking their key way of engaging as citizens… right at a time when actually we need to be thinking about how to better engage them. I think this is a real travesty,” she says.
“I think children and young people primarily go to social media to connect with peers they know face-to-face. It’s developmentally appropriate that they look for that kind of connection. We don’t provide a lot of other spaces for children to connect with each other, so they have increasingly turned to digital technologies to facilitate that connection.
“We’re potentially pushing them into darker, less well-regulated spaces where we can’t see them.”
The ban has, of course, been welcomed in some quarters. Prime minister Anthony Albanese heralded it as a “reform [that] will change lives.” It is popular with many – but not all – parents. And even among supporters, the way the ban has been implemented has been questioned. Maree Sortino, a 47-year-old mother of two in Melbourne, thinks the longer you can keep children off social media “the better”. But she feels it has been “rushed”.
“The government has provided so-called resources, but they’re nowhere near supportive enough,” she says. “I feel like the education part of it is lacking. They’re not showing parents how to deal with these issues or how to help kids through it.”
She adds: “As much as we don’t want to admit it, a lot of these kids do have a reliance on social media. What we know about cutting someone off cold turkey is that there can be repercussions from a mental-health perspective, and we’re talking about kids who are already going through hormonal changes.”
And it is telling that some of the foremost experts on the internet and digital ethics describe the ban as “too blunt an instrument.”
“What it does is put a giant gate in front of social media and say ‘Don’t open it for an extra three years,’” says Prof Tama Leaver, head of the department of internet studies at Curtin University in Perth, who describes the ban as “hopelessly naive”. “Blanket bans in this context can’t really achieve much. We know young people are incredibly agile online, and we know it’s more than likely they’ll find ways around it,” he adds.
Indeed, on the day the ban came into effect, December 10, the three most downloaded apps on the Australian app store were copycat social-media platforms exempt from the rules: Lemon8, an app owned by TikTok’s parent company ByteDance; Yope, which is similar to Snapchat; and Coverstar, a video-sharing app marketed at children aged nine to 16.
Meanwhile, it won’t actually address the issues social media can cause. “A great example is that a lot of Australians hoped and believed this legislation would somehow address the challenge of cyber bullying, which we know is quite a significant problem,” he says. “It probably won’t meaningfully be reduced because yes, there are some platforms – Snapchat, TikTok and others – that will be unavailable to young people. But platforms like WhatsApp, other messaging platforms and gaming platforms are exempt from this legislation. So quite naturally, any bullying behaviour will simply shift from one platform to another.”
Prof Jeannie Paterson, a co-founding director of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Ethics at Melbourne Law School, agrees. “Like many academics, my objection [to the ban] is really that we need a digital duty of care – we need more in terms of care and privacy protections,” she says. “Like many people, I’m concerned that without those safeguards, we’re really just touching the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the harms of social media to children and young people.”
“We’re taking an age and saying, ‘Well, at that age you can’t be on social media’, and then after a certain age it’s back to a free-for-all. I think we should be protecting young children, as they have no reason to be on social media. But I’d like a more nuanced approach for older children who are learning to navigate the world and wanting to connect with others online.”
For Erica Cicanese, a 41-year-old mother of two (a 13-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter) the ban undoes much of the work she has done to teach her children how to use social media responsibly. “We had really clear rules around social media, really clear ages of when they were allowed to take certain steps,” she says. “So we were managing, easing them into the environment… which I’m now not going to be able to do, and they’re just going to be thrown into the deep end at 16, whereas they were getting some parental guidance before.
“My son’s turning 14 in January. He’s going to have full access over his bank accounts, he can go in and take all of his money out. He can have a job and pay taxes, but he’s not allowed social media,” says Cicanese. “I have a problem with what their future is going to look like, because everyone uses social media.” For better or worse, she says, “it’s an integral part of society.”
Additional reporting by Sarah Goff-Tunks, Orlando Sagar and Erin Hee in Sydney
2026-01-16T13:25:47Z
