PRIME Minister Anthony Albanese has promised to introduce legislation by year’s end to ban children under the age of 16 from accessing social media nationwide.
Real Talk co-founder Paul Ninnes said social media was the single most important factor in the mental health decline of young people, especially girls, and any ban for children was a positive step.
When he heard about the policy announcement, Mr Ninnes said he was in disbelief.
He said he was glad to see it happening, excited too, while “a little bit sceptical” at the timeline and ability of the government to pull it off.
“I would just say this – any conversation about this is helpful,” he said.
“So even if nothing happens, which is what may be the end result, a conversation about this in the media helps parents recognise the harms of social media.”
The harms, he said, were extensive.
He said American psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s research in his book The Anxious Generation showed a direct, proportionate link between social media use and declining mental health.
Mr Ninnes’ team at Real Talk go into schools to do presentations and programs that help young people learn about healthy attitudes towards sex, love and relationships – and part of that is social media use.
His experience at those workshops showed young people were aware their own social media use was problematic.
He said they often self-reported misuse and addiction in his workshops.
He said young people self-reported feeling angry when they were unable to view TikTok or Snapchat, feeling anxious without their devices with them, and losing track of long periods of time scrolling through video feeds.
Self-awareness, he said, grew over the course of their secondary schooling too, with most Year 9 to Year 12 students more aware of their problematic behaviour than their younger peers.
“They are aware, but they don’t know how to break it because it is super stimuli and their brains can’t cope with the kind of stimulation they get when they’re young,” he said.
Mr Ninnes said regardless of how the government chose to implement the ban, any implementation would have some effect and any effect would have positive outcomes.
He said age verification software already existed on gambling sites and it was getting “easier and easier by the year” to implement these safeguards.
“Age verification is going to be an ongoing saga for decades to come,” he said
“So the sooner we put in place policy and practices around age verification, the better.”
He said the government could not keep up with everything Silicon Valley was producing, but they could keep up with the basics.
“And it’s my opinion that just because you can’t do a perfect job, or just because you can’t solve every problem, that shouldn’t stop you from tackling the vast majority of issues,” he said.
He said teenagers would find a work-around for the age verification, but said no parent would suggest “not clearing a field of land mines” because you could only clear up 95 per cent of them.
“Let’s help as many (young people) as we can, and prevent harm to as many as we can, even if it’s imperfect,” he said.
He said it was also unfair that governments should have to implement these bans when the social media companies themselves knew their product was harmful.
“The classic test case here would be smoking, and the producers of cigarettes having to warn people (about the dangers of smoking),” he said.
“I suspect that in the future, social media companies will be held more and more responsible as a result of litigation.”
Mr Ninnes said there were things parents could do now to help keep their children safe online too.
“The best way for parents to keep children safe online is through a multi-layered approach, starting with fostering an internal filter for young people and then providing safeguards at many different intervals and layers,” he said.
His organisation, Real Talk, calls it the E-Safety Onion and you can learn more about it on their YouTube channel.
