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Protecting children from social media
Australia’s new policy represents a critical step toward protecting children in the twenty-first century.
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A teenager uses her mobile phone to access social media on Jan. 31, 2024, in New York City, the United States. (Getty Images via AFP/Spencer Platt)
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ustralia has just banned children under the age of 16 from using social media. The move has met some criticism, particularly from companies like Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) and TikTok, which will face fines of up to US$32 million if they fail to keep young people off their platforms. But Australia’s new policy represents a critical step toward protecting children in the twenty-first century.
All societies, and the states that serve them, have a responsibility to protect their children from harmful addictions. And addiction is exactly what social media companies are trying to cultivate. As Facebook’s founding president, Sean Parker, revealed in 2017, the process of building the platform was guided by a simple question: “How do we consume as much of [users’] time and conscious attention as possible?” The answer these firms reached lay in “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology”: the desire for social validation.
Essentially, Parker explained, social media platforms were designed to deliver hits of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays a role in addiction, through socially validating likes, comments, views and shares. The more people engage with the platform, the more dopamine hits they receive. The result is a “social validation feedback loop” that keeps users hooked. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” the regretful Parker lamented.
Chamath Palihapitiya, another former Facebook executive whose “tremendous guilt” spurred him to speak out against social media, has an idea. “You don’t realize it,” he told an audience at Stanford in 2017, “but you are being programmed.” Deciding how (and how much) to use social media is tantamount to deciding how much “intellectual independence” one is “willing to give up.”
But many users, particularly children, are not equipped to make informed or healthy choices about social media, not least owing to those addictive feedback loops. According to the World Health Organization’s Regional Office for Europe, problematic social media use, characterized by addiction-like symptoms, such as the inability to control usage and feelings of withdrawal when not using, has risen sharply among adolescents, from 7 percent of users in 2018 to 11 percent in 2022. In the United States, the average teenager spends 4.8 hours per day on social media.
These figures imply serious risks. Adolescents who spend more than three hours per day on social media are twice as likely as their peers to experience anxiety and depression. Social media use is also associated with low self-esteem, bullying and poor academic performance. Evidence suggests that social media has been a key contributor to the uptick in suicide rates among US teens over the last decade.
The WHO has called for “immediate and sustained action to help adolescents turn the tide on potentially damaging social media use.” Even young people themselves are sounding the alarm. In early November, the youth parliament of the canton of Lucerne, Switzerland, petitioned the Cantonal Council of Lucerne to strengthen protections of social media users, not least “addiction prevention”, through “targeted awareness-raising among parents and the public.”
