To celebrate the start of a nationwide ban on social media for kids under the age of 16, the Australian government lit the Sydney Harbour Bridge with the slogan Let Them Be Kids.
As of December 10, younger teenagers in Australia can no longer make accounts on popular social-media sites, including Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, and Twitch. The minister for communications’ rule for the ban defines a social-media site as one that primarily exists to encourage interaction among users and allow them to post their own content. (By this definition, so far, Pinterest, the super-popular chat site Discord, and the online game Roblox, though they have social features, are not included.) Social-media companies are required to make “reasonable” efforts to keep people under 16 off of their apps, and they face hefty financial penalties for noncompliance.
The government’s argument for the ban has been clear: Getting kids off of social media will make them healthier and happier. Explaining the law in a June speech, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant mentioned many of the things parents worry about their kids encountering online—grooming, cyberbullying, graphic violence, sexualized chatbots, deepfake revenge porn. She also spoke to a more general dread about what social media may be doing to young people. Parents, she said, have been rightly concerned about “algorithmic manipulation” and “predatory design features” that “encourage compulsive usage.”
Australia is the first country to take such sweeping action, but many countries, including the United States, are considering age-gating social media in similar ways. “We know the world will be watching,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in a September speech at the United Nations.
That’s true. But what will other countries see? The problems that the Australian government is trying to fix are well recognized: Parents and educators worry that social media pulls kids away from schoolwork, outdoor play, sleep, and their friends, while making them more susceptible to various dangers, including anxiety and depression. Less clear, though, is how Australia will know whether the ban works.
Inman Grant’s office has appointed a scientific advisory group that will evaluate the effectiveness of the ban over the next two years. It will be led by Jeff Hancock, the head of Stanford’s Social Media Lab, but its specific plans for studying the ban have not been released. Susan Sawyer, a professor in the pediatrics department at the University of Melbourne and an adolescent-health researcher at Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, is part of the group, and she told me that it will likely be a few months before details will be made public.
Sawyer said that she was glad the government was investing in a robust evaluation of the ban. She also acknowledged that the task may be daunting. “I have very publicly described this as a social experiment,” she told me. “Children’s current exposure to social media is a social experiment, and the response that the Australian government is taking is a further social experiment.”
The challenge is how many variables are at play. Researching the ban’s effects will not be as easy as having the teens of the recent past serve as a control group for the teens of the near future. There are not even clear bounds around those groups. Think about the 15-year-olds in Australia right now. Some of them have already spent a lot of time on social media and are now being forced to take a break for a short number of months before their birthday. Some of them weren’t on social media before. Some of them will circumvent the ban and stay on social media.
I asked a few researchers not involved with the advisory group how they would start if they were given the task of studying the ban’s effects. Everyone I spoke with told me that the first thing they would want to know is whether the ban succeeds at the basic goal of getting kids off of social media. (The eSafety commissioner’s office has promised data on this before Christmas.) Social-media companies have been allowed to devise their own age-verification strategies, and X has reportedly entrusted the task to Grok, its, uh, mercurial AI. Kids who are motivated to get around age filters may come up with many clever and technologically savvy ways to do so, or they may just ask their parents for help. Although recent polling indicates that the law is supported by a majority of Australians, fewer than a third of parents said they would fully enforce the ban with their own kids.
The next step would be looking for changes. “Some things you can measure pretty easily in the short term,” Jeff Niederdeppe, a communication professor at Cornell specializing in public health, told me. If kids’ sleep patterns became different, or if they started spending more time doing the things adults want them to do—going outside, hanging out with friends in person, studying—those would be relatively straightforward to track. Other changes would be harder to measure, he said. Suicides, for insance, are statistically rare, so correlating them with other trends is notoriously difficult. Anxiety, depression, and even school performance will take much longer to study, and it will be harder to tie them directly to the ban even if they do change.
Niederdeppe wondered whether data the government collects will be tied to individuals—whether you’ll be able to compare Kid A’s well-being at Time 1 and Time 2—or whether they will have to be analyzed at the group level. Ideally, he said, you’d want evidence that the kids who were using social media the most before the ban were the ones who saw the most change in their behavior or health afterward. He was also unsure how researchers might go about comparing Australian teens with some kind of control group, saying that country-to-country comparisons are imperfect. “What’s a comparable group to Australia?” he asked.
Candice Odgers, a psychology professor at UC Irvine, also mentioned country-to-country comparisons as a problem. Odgers has studied several of the big questions around kids and social media, and has often challenged the idea that there is a scientific basis for the current level of concern. “Kids in Norway differ from kids in Australia for all kinds of reasons,” she told me. “I hope that’s not the pathway people go, but I fear it will be.”
If the ban were to have the major positive impacts that many hope it will, proving it would take years. Odgers believes there is a risk that people won’t wait. She worries that politicians and other adults are going to “declare victory based on anecdotal evidence alone,” the way some have with recent phone bans in American schools. Anecdotes still count for something, but both she and Erin O’Connor, an education professor at NYU, also mentioned the need to look for unintended effects of the ban—a boomerang situation where forbidding social media makes it more alluring or causes more conflict and distrust between kids and parents, or a mix of effects, where it helps some groups while harming others, such as LGBTQ teens who may rely on social media for types of connection they lack in their daily life.
Many people might reasonably argue that the dangers of social media are so apparent that it becomes pedantic, even irresponsible, to delay action while waiting for scientists to settle their arguments. Yet the Australian government has presented the case for its ban as evidence-based. The tension is that the scientific evidence of a pervasive public-health problem caused directly by social media is nowhere near as strong as the popular feeling about its obviousness. Those dangers are difficult to evaluate clearly now; it will only be that much more difficult to evaluate how well they’re combatted by any one intervention.
When Sawyer, of the eCommissioner’s advisory group, explained her understanding of the science around kids’ mental health and social media, she said that the effect sizes that most researchers find are “modest,” although she cautioned that most data are, by nature, out of date by the time they’re published and that the effects could have gotten stronger as the internet has continued to evolve in bizarre ways. Still, she added, she would not say that there is evidence that social media has caused a public-health crisis, and she would not guess that the ban could actually fix it. “I would not be suggesting that any ban on social media is going to be a silver bullet,” she said. “It’s potentially part of a solution, but only part.”
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