Is Australia’s Social Media Ban For Children sensible regulation or government overreach?

Breakfast with Bwana

By Anil Madan

If you take the time to search for a catalog of the ills of social media, the resulting list is long. Aside from loss of face-to-face interactions with one’s peers and fragmentation of social relationships, mental and emotional health risks include depression, anxiety, addiction, isolation and loneliness, and cyberbullying. Physical health risks come from replacing physical activity with screen time and potential sleep disruption. And, of course, there are the dangers of identity theft, fraud, scams, online predators, and invasion of privacy.

For young adults in schools and colleges, there are issues of decreased concentration and academic struggles.

But when it comes to children during their teenage years and as they approach adulthood, these concerns are heightened because there is the sense that children are especially vulnerable and parents are, for the most part, helpless to control their children’s access to social media and even more helpless to control their adverse interactions. The negative impacts of social media in this context transcend issues of mental health, concentration, social interaction, and academics, but affect development and childhood itself.

Australia has passed a social media ban, a law requiring social media companies to prevent children under 16 from accessing their platforms. Any company that fails to comply, can be fined up to 50 million Australian dollars (approximately US$3.3 million). As might be expected, social media companies complain that the rules will be extremely difficult to implement.

The ills of social media

Australia is not the first country to approach the ills of social media for children with a ban. Other countries have tried variations on a theme to restrict access by children.

France passed a law in 2023 requiring social media platforms to verify the age of each user to ensure that parental consent was obtained for children under 15. The aim of the bill was not only to reduce screen time, but to protect children from online predators, criminals, and from cyberbullying. Violations can carry stiff fines up to 1% of a social media company’s global revenue. When a 14-year-old student stabbed a school employee this past summer, President Macron announced that if the EU did not implement a ban, France would pass a law banning social media access for children under 15, and as well a law to ban sales of knives to minors. Other countries in the EU, such as Greece and Spain also want to see an EU-wide social media ban for those under 15. Similar efforts have been made in Norway and Italy.

France had already enacted requirements that porn sites verify the ages of users and deny access to those underage. In the US, the Supreme Court upheld a Texas law requiring porn sites to verify the age of users and block access to under 18.

Although a ban on children buying guns, or even knives, may not be upheld in the US due to the Second Amendment to the Constitution, some of the language in the Texas case was instructive. Justice Elena Kagan, one of the liberal justices on the court, dissented and protested that the law violated the free speech rights of adults because it impedes adults’ to view the sites’ content which is protected speech. The law imposes a burden based on the content of the speech and is unconstitutional.

Justice Thomas, writing for the majority, saw the Texas law as an exercise of the state’s “traditional power to prevent minors from accessing speech that is obscene.” Although requiring proof of age to access materials that are obscene for minors may make it harder for adults to access those materials, the law does not actually directly regulate adults’ speech, Thomas wrote. He went on to explain that adults “have no First Amendment right to avoid age verification, and the statute can readily be understood as an effort to restrict minors’ access. Any burden experienced by adults is therefore only incidental to the statute’s regulation of activity that is not protected by the First Amendment.”

The same argument should apply to fighting off challenges to the Australian law and potential bans in the EU and elsewhere. As the Justice further explained, the law can be seen as advancing important governmental interests unrelated to the suppression of free speech and does not burden substantially more speech than necessary to further those interests. The state’s interest in protecting children from sexual materials is, he said, important, even compelling.

He saw the age-verification requirements like this one to enforce age restrictions as “plainly legitimate because they allow adults full access to the content in question after the modest burden of providing proof of age.”

South Korea has enacted a ban effective in 2026 that prevents the use of mobile phones and digital devices in classrooms. The law is aimed at curbing addiction to smartphones and reversing the negative impacts on academic performance and social development. The law will allow the use of such devices as assistive aides by students with disabilities.

Denmark also has a proposed social media ban for children under 15 but parents can under certain circumstances grant access to their 13- and 14-year-olds after an assessment of need.

Children are a special case

Where is all this headed? Clearly, there seems to be a worldwide recognition that children are a special case. It is not a great leap to say that every nation or state has an interest in protecting the health and social well-being of its children and in preventing the negative impacts of social media, cyberbullying, fraud and cybercrime. On the other hand, we have powerful technology companies that make hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars, off such platforms. Don’t expect them to go quietly into the night. We will likely see much lobbying, and vast sums spent on advertising and persuasion to convince the world that it is not the social media platform that is the problem, but that kids need more supervision at home and more education about responsible use of their digital devices. Or worse, that this is government overreach.

But the social media platforms will have difficulty overcoming the findings of Australia’s eSafety Commissioner. A Digital use and risk study report by the commission draws on data from a nationally representative survey of 3,454 children aged 10 to 17 years living in Australia between December 2024 and February 2025. A subset of this data, comprising responses from 2,629 children aged 10 to 15 years, was examined to explore their use of online platforms, their experiences of online harms and where these harms occurred.

Key findings include that 96% of children aged 10 to 15 had used social media and a majority had used a communication platform to chat, message, call or video call others (94%), while 86% had played online video games.

The commission found that exposure to online harms was common. More specifically:

* 71% had encountered content associated with harm

* 57% had seen online hate

* 52% had been cyberbullied

* 25% had personally experienced online hate

* 24% had experienced online sexual harassment

* 23% had experienced non-consensual tracking, monitoring or harassment

* 14% had experienced online grooming-type behaviour

* 8% had experienced image-based abuse.

Online harms occurred across various digital platforms. While social media was the most common category of platform where children reported recently encountering most online harms, many children also experienced harm on communication and gaming platforms.

Cheerz…
Bwana

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 12 December 2025