social-media

The Attention Economy and the Purpose of Education: What Five Weeks in Australia’s Digital Policy Debate Actually Reveal

~ alexiamaddox ~ Leave a comment

This post is something I’m working on to support my Masters of Teaching students to grapple with the diverse public discussion happening right now in Australia that impacts educators. We start with a specific pin in time, the Social Media Age Ban implementation and subsequent ripple effects. By now that debate has its camps, its talking points, and its exhaustion, and I don’t think one more position piece weighing in on “right or wrong” adds anything. This is a companion piece to a professional development session I’m running for pre-service and in-service teachers in the School of Education at La Trobe, and it exists to do something else: to walk through what’s actually happened in Australian digital policy over the past few weeks — a new duty of care bill, a live PISA scandal, a resurgent “brain rot” discourse, a quietly abandoned decade of screen-time guidance — and use all of it to notice a pattern sitting underneath the noise. The pattern is this: children’s attention has become the economic product that platforms, governments, schools, parents, and even researchers are all bidding for at once, mostly without coordinating with each other, and mostly without asking the one question that should come first. Not how do we manage this resource, but who is this person becoming, and what do they need from us to get there.

Kids are not robots. That sentence sounds almost too obvious to write down, and yet very little of what I’m about to walk through was actually built with it fully in mind.

Naming the market

Let’s start with the plainest possible version of the claim: attention is a finite, biological resource, and right now there are at least five distinct institutions competing for a young person’s share of it, most of them unaware they’re even in the same market.

The platform is the most obvious bidder, and the most honest about it, because its business model depends on it. This isn’t speculation — it’s been demonstrated experimentally. In the 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study, a rare collaboration between Meta and seventeen independent academics who retained final say over publication, researchers switched a subset of users onto reverse-chronological feeds for three months. Those users spent measurably less time on the platforms afterward — the researchers’ own conclusion was that the algorithmic feed had made the platforms “more compelling.” That’s not a moral judgment about Facebook. It’s a controlled experiment showing that engagement is engineered, not incidental.

The school is a second bidder, and it comes to the table wanting something quite different: a legible, rankable outcome. PISA scores, NAPLAN results, a number that can be reported to a minister and compared against last year’s number.

The government is a third, and what it wants is something announceable — a bill, a ban, a toggle, a press conference. I’ve written elsewhere about how thin some of that turns out to be once you read the actual clause rather than the press release, but the incentive structure is consistent: legislatures can mandate an age check. They cannot mandate a child’s capacity for judgment into existence with a clause and a penalty regime.

The parent is a fourth bidder, and the most recent EU Kids Online report — 28,465 children surveyed across 19 European countries — shows exactly which way parents have been reaching. Technical and restrictive tools have risen sharply since 2020: content blocking up from 22% to 38% of families, activity tracking up from 21% to 40%, GPS location tracking up from 15% to 42%. Over the same period, the proportion of children who say their parents talk to them about what they do online fell from 66% to 50%. Parents haven’t stopped caring. They’ve shifted from a conversation to a control, because a control is the only lever that feels like it’s actually doing something.

And then there’s research itself, which I include not to be cute but because it’s a genuine fifth claimant. Kaye, Orben, Ellis, Hunter and Houghton’s methodological critique argues that “screen time” (a ‘protaginist’ in this story) as a construct is conceptually incoherent — no agreed definition, wildly different activities bundled under one word, self-report accuracy as low as 34% in some studies. Yee and Luyt go further, in a 95-family Singaporean ethnography, asking bluntly who benefits from the screen-time frame surviving despite its incoherence: platforms, because it deflects blame from design onto usage; governments, because it’s cheap, visible action that doesn’t require regulating an industry; and researchers, because new constructs are what get funded. They call the industry’s own screen-time tracking tools “regulatory theatre” — the same phrase Amanda Third used, entirely independently, to describe Australia’s social media summit process.

None of these five bidders is overtly malicious. Most of them believe, correctly, that they’re acting in a young person’s interest. But none of them is coordinating with the other four, and not one of them, in the entire policy landscape I’ve spent the past month reading, opens with Biesta’s question rather than their own.

What the bidding has displaced

Gert Biesta’s theorisation of education’s purpose — explored recently by Juvonen, Huilla, Kosunen, Thrupp and Toom through ethnographic work in two Finnish primary schools — names three domains a school (and, I’d argue, any adult responsible for a young person) is meant to hold in balance. Qualification is the transmission of knowledge and skills — measurable, testable, comparable. Socialization is learning to be within a culture — its norms, its unwritten rules, absorbed as much as taught. Subjectification is becoming a person capable of independent judgment and action — not just knowing the rules or fitting in, but having the standing to question or resist when it matters. Biesta’s own phrase for it is “qualified freedom”: freedom paired with responsibility, not freedom alone.

The paper’s central warning, borne out in the ethnographic data, is that qualification’s logic keeps colonising the other two domains, because it’s the only one that’s measurable, and measurability is what a system under pressure to produce legible outcomes will always reach for first. A pupil’s growing capacity for independent judgment gets evaluated as if it were a spelling test — right or wrong, on schedule or behind — and something real is lost in the translation.

I don’t think this is a Finnish classroom problem. I think it’s the exact mechanism running underneath every piece of Australian, EU, and UK digital policy I’ve read this year. The American Academy of Pediatrics retired its decade-old fixed-hour screen-time limits in January 2026, replacing them with the “5 Cs” — Child, Content, Calm, Crowding out, Communication — because, in co-author Libby Milkovich’s own words, “people really want the concrete, easy advice, and trying to communicate the nuance is really difficult.”

That’s an official body admitting, on the record, that a number was chosen for its legibility, not its accuracy. Meanwhile Australia’s under-16 ban, the digital duty of care’s opt-out toggle, Victoria’s flat two-hour school screen-time cap, and the UK’s spring 2027 package are all, structurally, the same kind of answer: a verifiable threshold, an audit trail, a yes/no. What’s consistently absent (present, at most, as a single unfunded line item) is anything aimed at socialisation or subjectification.

The ARC Centre for the Digital Child’s Manifesto for a Better Children’s Internet names this directly, among its seventeen principles: “a move away from the over-reliance on ‘parental controls’ as the solution,” and “less focus on protecting children from the digital environment and more focus on protecting them within it.” That second line is, I think, the cleanest possible statement of the category error running through the entire policy landscape. Exclusion-then-access is a qualification-shaped fix. The actual problem was always socialisation and subjectification-shaped, and no amount of tuning the age dial turns one into the other.

Watching it happen this week

If this sounds abstract, it wasn’t abstract this week. Australia’s 2025 PISA results landed on 9 September, and four different, well-credentialled people read four different causal stories out of the same dataset within about seventy-two hours of each other.

Education Minister Jason Clare read screen time: “These results and Pisa over the past show us students who use screens a lot score lower than those who don’t,” he told Sunrise, calling for “a digital detox” in Australian schools. Blaise Joseph of the Centre for Independent Studies read classroom disruption: “Students cannot learn effectively when classrooms are regularly disrupted,” he told multiple outlets — worth knowing that CIS had already published a dedicated paper on classroom behaviour before this news cycle broke, so his PISA commentary is amplifying an existing institutional position rather than forming a fresh judgment from the data. Jonas Bertling, ACER’s research director, who actually administers the test, gave the most hedged account of the three: “the disciplinary climate also still needs attention… we’re really standing high, but I think we have some strengths to build on” — multi-causal, resourcing-focused, declining to pick a single driver.

And then there was Therese Hopfenbeck, Professor of Educational Assessment at the University of Melbourne and, not incidentally, chair of the OECD’s own PISA 2025 and 2029 questionnaire expert committee — meaning she has more authority to interpret what this specific instrument can and can’t tell us than anyone else quoted that week, and no single policy outcome riding on the answer. Her verdict, in The Conversation, two days after Clare’s press conference: “The PISA survey doesn’t report on the reasons for these trends… The OECD has also suggested digital devices could have made an impact on global reading skills, but this is only a suggestion at this point, and more research is needed.” She went further, flagging that even the headline distraction figures — 41% of Australian students reporting noise and disorder, against a 31% global average; 39% reporting peer distraction by digital devices, against a 28% OECD average — are self-reported perception data, not observed classroom time: “What some students report as disturbances might be productive discussions for other students.”

Here’s the sharpest fact in the whole case study, and it comes from the Guardian’s own reporting, not from me: Australia’s public schools have had mobile phone bans in place, state by state, since as early as 2020 — Victoria, WA, Tasmania and NSW primary schools that year, NSW high schools from 2023, Queensland’s full statewide ban, covering breaktimes and smartwatches, from 2024. By the time the 2025 PISA test was sat, most Australian students had spent the majority of their secondary schooling under some form of phone restriction. Distraction is still eleven points above the OECD average. The qualification-shaped fix — the thing you can legislate, measure, and announce — has been in place for years, not months, and the number still hasn’t moved the way the theory predicted.

I don’t think Clare or Joseph are acting in bad faith. I think they’re doing exactly what qualification-logic policymaking always does: reaching for the single, legible, actionable cause, because that’s the only kind of cause a press conference or a think-tank paper can actually work with. Hopfenbeck’s job, and her only professional stake in the outcome, is getting the interpretation of the instrument right. That’s precisely why she’s the only one of the four saying, plainly, that we don’t yet know.

Reframing what kids are actually doing

This is where I want to slow down, because I think the discourse around “brain rot” has been doing real harm to how adults — including, sometimes, teachers — read what’s actually happening in front of them.

Anna Götzfried and Maxi Heitmayer’s study, twenty-four semi-structured interviews with UK and German participants aged 13 to 26, found something that inverts the standard causal story. The “brain-rot feeling” — fogged out, low-selectivity, autopilot — precedes the content, not the reverse. Their participants described a mental state produced by sustained platform engagement, for which brainrot content was a low-cost response, not the cause of the state itself. They coined a term for this: anti-gratification — the deliberate seeking-out of content that makes no demand and offers nothing, precisely because everything else in a saturated media environment is already demanding something. One participant, P19, put it as sharply as any policy paper I’ve read this year: “If everything is content now, then brainrot is anti-content. It’s the only way to be free online, which is to do something so stupid it can’t be monetized.”

And then there’s P21, whose full quote I want to give in full, because I think it’s the single most important line in this entire research trail:

“Before the government regulated the tobacco industry, everyone was smoking, even though they knew it was bad. Because the environment encouraged and allowed for that to happen… Now we need to get into a state where the environment shifts so young people’s habits shift.”

Read that again. That is not a kid asking an adult to rescue them from their own weak willpower. That is a kid correctly, precisely diagnosing that the fix isn’t located in their own behaviour — it’s located in the design of an environment that five uncoordinated institutions are simultaneously extracting from. When we pathologise brain rot as evidence of decline, we’re mistaking a coping mechanism for a malfunction. It’s closer to triage: a young person refusing to hand over any more of an already-contested resource than they absolutely have to.

This is also, I think, the right way to understand what teachers describe as a trisector of challenge — distraction, behavioural disruption, and disengagement — not as three separate classroom-management problems each requiring its own policy, but as three visible symptoms radiating from one shared, shrinking resource: a recalibrated attentional baseline. Distraction is attention pulled away in the moment. Disruption is that frustration expressed outward. Disengagement — boredom — is the baseline itself having reset, so that ordinary, unstimulating pedagogical pace now reads as unbearable by comparison to an environment engineered to never let a gap in stimulation open up. A phone ban can plausibly reduce the first. It does nothing to restore the second or third, because neither was ever a function of device presence alone — they’re a function of a capacity that never had the chance to develop, because nothing in the environment around a young person, including some of what schools themselves now do in the name of “engagement,” has been interested in protecting the conditions under which it could.

What actually builds the capacity

So if bans and controls don’t build it, and if brain rot is a coping response rather than a deficit, what does the evidence actually point toward?

The EU Kids Online data is unusually direct on this. Enabling mediation — conversation, co-use, shared exploration — correlates with more digital skills and more opportunities, alongside more risk exposure. Restrictive and technical mediation correlates with fewer risks, but also fewer skills and fewer opportunities. The report’s own researchers are honest that the combination everyone actually wants — more capability, less harm — “remains elusive.” Nobody has found it yet. But the data also shows something more specific and more useful than that admission alone: the single most common positive parental behaviour recorded wasn’t a rule or a filter, it was “listening when children wish to renegotiate rules.” That’s the empirical signature of what I’d call accountable freedom in practice — not a fixed control that lifts entirely at a set age, but an ongoing, responsive negotiation where demonstrated trust expands what a young person is given latitude to do, continuously, the way a driving instructor extends independence as competence is shown rather than all at once when a licence arrives.

The ARC Centre for the Digital Child’s Manifesto for a Children’s Internet, converges on the same structural answer from a policy-design angle rather than a parenting one. Its clearest, most quotable principle — “less focus on protecting children from the digital environment and more focus on protecting them within it” — names precisely the category error running through the ban, the duty of care’s opt-out toggle, and Victoria’s screen-time cap alike. Its call for regulation that “strikes a fair balance between government policy, technology company policies, and personal responsibility” is a three-way structure, not a binary choice between control and freedom — and it points to something with real regulatory teeth that doesn’t run through surveillance at all: design codes.

The UK’s Age Appropriate Design Code, Ireland’s Fundamentals for a Child-Oriented Approach to Data Processing, France’s Les droits numériques des mineurs — these place proactive, audited obligation on platforms to build safety into products before deployment, rather than asking parents or regulators to catch harm after the fact. Australia’s own eSafety Commissioner has a Safety by Design framework in the same family, but it remains voluntary — a genuinely weaker instrument than its European counterparts, and a real, specific gap in what Australia has actually built compared to what the research consensus says the better model looks like.

None of this, on its own, is something a single teacher controls. But some of it is, and I think this is where the session I’ve built around this material needs to land. A teacher is not meant to be a single point of failure or a single point of control — young people raise themselves through the whole ambient network of relationships available to them: peers, other trusted adults, family, school, and yes, increasingly, the platforms themselves, which are now a permanent, uninvited member of that network with commercial incentives. What a teacher actually has leverage over is smaller than a policy, but it’s real: availability without the automatic cost of surveillance, since a young person discloses less to an adult who is monitoring more, not more; scaffolding that shrinks as competence is demonstrated rather than dropping away entirely at one fixed age; treating a recoverable mistake as a teaching moment inside a relationship rather than a logged event that triggers tighter control next time; and, above everything else, protecting slow, undistracted time as a pedagogical value in its own right — not because it makes a lesson more competitive with a phone, but because sustained, unstimulated attention held over time is the one precondition subjectification actually requires, and it is the single thing that none of the five bidders competing for a young person’s attention has any institutional incentive to protect.

Where this leaves us

I opened by saying this isn’t an argument about whether the ban is right or wrong, and I want to close the same way. Reasonable, well-informed people in the room I’ll be running this session for will land in different places on that question, and that’s fine — it’s not what this piece, or that session, is trying to resolve.

What I do want to leave you with is this: nearly everything currently funded, legislated, and announced around young people’s digital lives — the ban, the toggle, the flat-hour cap, even some of what schools do in the name of student engagement — is a qualification-shaped answer, chosen because it’s the only kind of answer a bill or a press release can actually contain. The evidence, gathered from an EU study of 28,465 children, an Australian research centre’s manifesto, a peak US pediatric body’s own retreat from the metric it invented, and — this week — the actual PISA data everyone’s currently arguing about, points somewhere else entirely: toward relationship, toward scaffolding that responds to demonstrated capability rather than age, toward protected time, toward design accountability that doesn’t run through surveillance. None of that fits neatly into a headline. All of it is slower, harder to measure, and much closer to what education was actually for in the first place.

Kids are not robots, and the thing everyone currently claims to be protecting them from — or extracting from them, more honestly — is a resource that only ever becomes a person’s own through exactly the kind of attention none of us can legislate into existence. We can only build it, one room, one relationship, one protected hour at a time.

My Feed, My Way: The Strategy Comes Into View — And So Does Its Theory of Change Problem

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I want to be careful about what kind of post this is, because it isn’t the same kind of post as “Another Day, Another Declaration.” That one was about a newsletter dressed up as a victory lap for evidence that didn’t support it. This one is different. This is the moment the actual strategy becomes visible — not another announcement to catalogue, but the point where you can finally see the shape of the thing the government has been building toward, and ask whether it hangs together.

It doesn’t, and I want to show my working on why.

What actually landed

On 8 September, Anthony Albanese and Anika Wells announced the draft legislation for the Digital Duty of Care bill including an “Australian first” called My Feed, My Way.

Social media platforms will have to notify users of a choice, according to the press release: opt in to an algorithmically curated feed, or opt out and see only the accounts they follow, in order. That’s the government’s stated intent, not yet the law’s text. What the bill itself creates is a ministerial power to require “user empowerment tools” by legislative instrument — the notification, the two named options, the commitment to “respect that choice,” none of it is written into the Act. It’s a promise about how that power will eventually be used, made at the press conference rather than in the clause.

The parts that are actually drafted, and drafted specifically, are elsewhere. Under-18 protections extend into design features — addictive mechanics, self-esteem effects — and into content categories: eating disorder promotion, misogynistic material, pornography, crime glorification, content causing serious mental health distress. eSafety gets removal powers over nudify apps, a streamlined cyber-abuse scheme, and — this is the part with actual teeth — the power to use registered researchers and its own investigators to test, directly, what platforms are serving users, rather than relying on platforms to self-report. Penalties run to $109.2 million, per the government’s own figure. Legislation — still only an exposure draft, open for “targeted consultation” — is promised to be introduced before year’s end.

Read on its own, it’s a reasonable, even overdue, piece of platform accountability. Read in sequence, it’s the fourth or fifth distinct policy instrument Australia has produced on this issue in under two years, and each one was built to solve the problem the previous one created or failed to solve. That’s the part worth sitting with.

I wanted to ask a few questions even at this point so I’ll drop them in here as a by way and then get back in track with the analysis via the theory of change discussion.

Who the “registered/approved researchers” actually are — as far as anyone can currently say:

The bill’s own definition, once you read it rather than the press coverage of it, is narrower than “such as those from an Australian university” implies. Section 205B doesn’t offer university employment as an example of who might qualify — it’s a strict, three-part gate: to be an “approved researcher” you must (a) be employed by an Australian university, (b) be individually approved by the Commissioner under legislative rules, and (c) meet whatever other requirements those rules end up specifying. Independent researchers, journalists, and civil-society investigators are categorically excluded by definition, not just underrepresented in practice. The research itself has to clear a further bar too — approved by a university ethics committee and “of a kind prescribed by the legislative rules to be in the public interest,” a phrase that, like almost everything operational in this bill, is a placeholder for rules that don’t exist yet.

And the access itself is a power to create a scheme, not the scheme. Section 205C says the legislative rules “may” establish one or more “data access schemes” requiring platforms to hand data to approved researchers — what kinds of data, for what kinds of research, under what process, at what cost to the researcher, is all left to future rule-making. Nothing in the Bill as drafted actually obliges a platform to hand anything over yet. The sock-puppet power fares slightly better on specificity — sections 205G to 205L spell out clearly that both approved researchers and the Commissioner personally may assume false identities to create accounts, observe and download material, test platform features, and probe how a service responds to particular actions, with good-faith immunity from civil action built in. That’s genuinely detailed, operative law, not a placeholder — worth distinguishing from the data-access side, which is still almost entirely promissory.

This is functionally Australia’s version of the EU DSA’s Article 40 “vetted researcher” scheme, which is worth naming as a direct comparator, because that scheme’s actual track record is a caution, not a template to feel reassured by. EU vetted-researcher status is notoriously slow to grant. The Delegated Act specifies an 80-working-day decision window — and even well-prepared applicants routinely fail: a Dutch team with prior European Research Council pilot experience on Article 40 implementation, investigating TikTok’s role in Romania’s contested 2024 election, still failed on five of seven eligibility criteria. Eligibility is nominally broad, extending to universities, non-profits and civil society researchers, but studies of the first wave of applications found platforms rejecting requests via narrow readings of “systemic risk,” excluding non-academic applicants in practice, and handing over incomplete data even once access was granted.Australia’s version adds its own extra layer of narrowness on top — the university-employment requirement is tighter than anything explicit in Article 40 — while leaving the actual data-access obligation exactly as undefined as the EU’s was at the equivalent stage. If Australia copies the label without copying — or improving on — the implementation detail, “approved researcher” risks becoming exactly the kind of unresolved gap Josh Taylor flagged with the opt-out mechanism itself: real on paper, undefined in practice, left for platforms and regulators to fight out later.

On the AIO —parallel timing

A Conversation piece published back in July — “Australia wants a ‘digital duty of care’. But how will we check what Big Tech is doing?” — presented the argument from Australian Digital Media researchers that the duty of care needs an “ecosystem of observability” combining three things: regulatory powers to compel platform data, independent research infrastructure (data donation, browser/mobile measurement, secure research environments), and stronger individual rights for Australians to access, download and donate their own platform data. They named the AIO directly as “one model for this infrastructure.” So this isn’t two separate efforts converging by coincidence — it’s the same research network pushing on two levers at once: build the bottom-up data-donation infrastructure regardless of what parliament does, and publicly campaign for the top-down regulatory access powers that just showed up in the exposure draft two months later.

During the same week’s coverage: Chanel Contos’s National Press Club appearance and the NSW Government’s urgent September 4 roundtable following the Sydney schoolboy assault allegations are being cited directly by other commentary as part of the pressure that shaped this exposure draft — her “23 minutes to misogynistic content” statistic is functioning as the kind of concrete evidence the researcher-access provisions are explicitly meant to make independently verifiable going forward, rather than something advocates have to keep re-measuring themselves via burner-phone experiments.

And what does “harmful content” mean?

And while we’re here going down byways, there is another point worth pulling from the ADM+S policy brief , because it sharpens the “harmful content” categories in the bill in a way that matters beyond researcher access.

Back in June, before any of this had bill text, ADM+S and the University of Melbourne’s CAIDE published a policy brief responding to the government’s Issues Paper, arguing the duty of care should move “beyond specifying a set of narrowly defined risks to safety… to require platforms to address broader, systemic risks.” Their central worry, laid out as a named case study, was harm-reduction and public health communication — evidence-based outreach on HIV and drug use has a documented history of suppression, account restriction and rejected advertising on these platforms, not through deliberate policy but as “the inevitable by-product of automated content moderation systems trained to identify, suppress and remove adult or offensive content.” They predicted, in writing, that a narrowly-defined risk-based model wouldn’t fix this — “risk” captures potential harms, not the absence of legitimate positive content — and proposed concrete affirmative protections instead: moderation exemptions for government-funded health organisations, expedited review for wrongly suppressed public-health material, regular audits of moderation systems’ impact on health content.

None of that made it into the bill. What section 25C actually contains is a narrowly-defined categorical list — eating disorders, misogynistic content, terrorism, crime, and, among the entries the government didn’t put in its own press release, material that “encourages, promotes, urges or instructs illicit drug use.” That’s precisely the drafting style ADM+S told government, months earlier, wouldn’t protect the harm-reduction communication they were worried about — and the affirmative protections they proposed to fix it are nowhere in the draft. So this isn’t a hypothetical risk a colleague raised after the fact. It’s a predicted, documented harm, from the government’s own consulted research network, that the exposure draft appears to walk straight into

A theory of change that was available, and wasn’t used

Now, getting back to where we were in the chronological chain of events. Here’s the thing that gets lost every time this gets reported as a fresh initiative: the design-first version of this reform already existed, in 2024, before the account ban was legislated. Zoe Daniel’s private member’s bill on platform duty of care predates the Social Media Minimum Age Act. It was left to lapse. The government reached for the ban instead — a chain that started with a South Australian premier’s Mother’s Day 2024 social media announcement and a News Corp campaign the following week, gathered momentum through the year via other state premiers and an opposition election promise, and culminated in legislation drafted, introduced and passed in under two weeks, with a 24-hour public comment window, in the last sitting week before the federal election.

I’ve written before about what that sequencing choice cost in evidentiary terms. What I want to name now is what it cost architecturally. Once the ban passed, an entire enforcement apparatus grew up around it: the Phase 2 industry codes, the age-assurance vendor contracts, the trusted-provider lists, eSafety’s document-demand powers reaching into third-party verification companies. That apparatus is not neutral scaffolding sitting empty, waiting for a better policy to move in. It has vendors with revenue tied to its continuation, a regulator whose newly expanded enforcement muscle (the Online Safety Amendment Bill, moving through parliament the same week) reaches further into that same verification paradigm, and a political constituency built around “world-first” account restriction as the signature achievement.

So when the duty of care — the reform actually aimed at design, not access — finally arrives, it doesn’t land in an empty room where design-first thinking can shape the whole architecture from scratch. The bill does sweep away one layer of the pre-existing apparatus — Schedule 3 repeals the general online content scheme codes entirely, folding content-classification into the unified duty of care. But the age-verification layer this apparatus was actually built around — the Phase 2 codes, the vendor contracts, the trusted-provider lists — survives untouched, with its penalties increased the same week. The duty of care has to be built around that surviving core, not replace it. This isn’t a coherent strategy unfolding in the right order. It’s a good instrument arriving after a worse one has already poured the foundation, and having to accommodate the foundation rather than correct it.

The mechanism undercuts its own justification

There’s a second problem, sitting inside the bill itself rather than in its timing. The government’s language around My Feed, My Way is explicitly universalist — Wells frames it as “basic standards for the online products we use every day,” alongside cars, toys, food. That’s inclusive-design logic: build the protection into the system for everyone, rather than trying to identify and specially protect a vulnerable subset. It’s good theory. Universal design works because the protected state is the automatic one — nobody has to find it, understand it, or activate it. Curb cuts don’t require a wheelchair user to request one.

But My Feed, My Way is an opt-out, not an opt-in. The algorithmically optimised, high-engagement default stays exactly where it is; the protective state is the thing a user has to notice, understand, and deliberately choose. We already know what that produces, because we’ve watched the experiment run. Under oath in the Oakland federal trial last August, Instagram’s Adam Mosseri confirmed an internal Meta document had put uptake of its “Take a Break” feature — designed to interrupt exactly the kind of compulsive scrolling this bill is meant to address — at 1.8%, a figure the company never disclosed even as it publicly touted a 90% retention rate among the small number who’d turned it on. Meta’s own internal research pointed the same direction on a related question: making teen accounts private by default, rather than opt-in, was projected to prevent 5.4 million unwanted daily message interactions. The lesson, from the company’s own numbers, is not subtle — default state decides outcomes; availability of a safer option barely moves anything at all

The EU has required platforms to offer a non-algorithmic feed option since February 2024 — and in October 2025, an Amsterdam court still had to order Meta to fix it, giving the company two weeks to comply under threat of a €5 million penalty. It turned not a multi-month enforcement fight, not just a quick fix. As Bits of Freedom’s Rejo Zenger, who brought the case, put it: “even if users can switch feeds, they cannot set a preferred feed that persists, and the platform continually nudges users back to the profile feed.” Meta disputed the ruling and appealed — and for now, the binding order applies only in the Netherlands, not EU-wide. If the justification for going broad rather than narrow is genuinely inclusive-design thinking, the logically consistent implementation is an opt-in default, which is what the Greens and Chanel Contos have been arguing for. The government chose the version that photographs the same way in a press release but almost certainly won’t behave the same way in practice.

Who this doesn’t reach, and who’s left holding it

And then there’s the population question, which is the one that should worry anyone thinking about this as a child-safety measure rather than a general consumer-choice one. The opt-out applies to users over 16. The government’s own account ban was supposed to mean under-16s aren’t the audience for this at all — they’re not meant to be logged in, so the question of their feed algorithm shouldn’t arise.

Except eSafety’s own evaluation data says otherwise. Three months in, account ownership among under-16s had fallen from 52.4% to 42.1% — real, but partial. Of the children who kept accounts, the platform-by-platform breakdown shows two distinct failure modes, both damning in their own way. On YouTube, nearly half never even got asked to verify their age — no prompt at all. On Facebook, the single most common reason was different and arguably worse: the age already listed on the account was 16 or above, meaning a check did happen and simply accepted a false answer. Instagram and Snapchat sit in between, with “never asked” narrowly ahead of “false age accepted” on both. Either way, “reasonable steps” is failing at more than one point in the process — not just an absent gate, but a gate that doesn’t hold. Independently, the University of Newcastle’s BMJ study found more than 85% of under-16s still using restricted platforms at the same three-month mark.

Meanwhile the adults meant to be managing all of this — parents and teachers — have less visibility than they had before, not more. eSafety’s own evaluation found parental awareness of children’s social media use actually declined after the ban took effect, concentrated among parents of girls and 10–12 year olds. Teachers, who inherit whatever happened in a student’s feed the moment it walks into a classroom the next morning, get no new tools at all in this bill — the digital literacy and relational-education infrastructure that would let schools and families actually build capability, rather than just manage fallout, isn’t part of the package. It’s the same gap Lisa Given flagged about the earlier duty of care consultation: real teeth on paper, aimed at platforms, with nothing resourced for the people standing between the platform and the child.

The generational bet nobody has actually defended

There’s a longer-run theory of change sitting underneath all of this that almost never gets said out loud, and I think it deserves to be dragged into the open, because I’m not convinced it survives contact with the evidence we already have.

The theory goes something like this: the ban won’t look like it’s working on the generation that’s already on these platforms, because they were socialised into algorithmic social media before the restriction existed, and restriction always looks like resistance in its first cohort. But the next generation — Gen Alpha, kids who are eight, nine, ten right now — will turn 16 having never legally held an account. For them, the age gate won’t be an imposition on an established habit. It’ll just be an unremarkable fact of childhood, the way not being allowed to drive at twelve is. Robinson, La Sala and Harrison named this directly in their 2025 title: is this a “seatbelt moment” — a restriction that looks costly and contested at first and becomes invisible, uncontested background norm within a generation — or a missed opportunity dressed up as one?

It’s a coherent theory. Seatbelts really did work that way: resistance was highest among drivers who’d learned to drive without them, and uptake became close to automatic once a full generation had never known driving any other way. If social media restriction follows the same curve, today’s dismal compliance numbers — 85%+ of under-16s still using restricted platforms, half of retained accounts never even prompted for age checks — aren’t a verdict on the policy. They’re what a first cohort always looks like, and the real test is what a fully Gen Alpha 15-year-old’s relationship to these platforms looks like in 2032.

But I want to push on two things before I let that theory do any work, because right now it’s operating as an unexamined assumption rather than something anyone has actually argued for or is measuring.

The first is empirical, and it’s sitting in plain sight in the argument over whether “brainrot” belongs to Gen Z or Gen Alpha. The honest answer is both, and how it belongs to both is the point: Gen Z, with full algorithmic platform access, generated and refined this content natively — the irony, the absurdist compression, the in-group signalling. Gen Alpha, meanwhile, absorbed an enormous amount of it into daily vocabulary and offline culture without needing platform accounts of their own to do it. Skibidi Toilet, sigma, rizz — this is a nine-year-old’s vocabulary now, transmitted through older siblings, playground repetition, YouTube (which sits partly outside the restriction architecture), and family devices, not through a personal, algorithmically curated feed. That’s a direct empirical challenge to the seatbelt theory’s core mechanism. Seatbelt norms shifted because the behaviour itself — driving unbelted — has no meaningful peer-transmission pathway once you’re not behind a wheel. Platform culture has an enormous one. Excluding a nine-year-old from an Instagram account doesn’t wall them off from the platform’s cultural output; it just changes the delivery mechanism from direct and individually curated to lateral and peer-mediated. If the goal was a generation genuinely insulated from what these platforms produce, the account ban may be solving the wrong layer of the problem entirely — the content diffuses regardless of who’s logged in.

The second problem is normative, and it’s the sharper one: even if the seatbelt theory worked exactly as advertised, is a childhood spent in what we might call a stigmatised relationship to social media — access as illicit, policed, something you get around rather than something you’re taught to navigate — actually the outcome we want? We have a template for what stigma-based restriction does to adolescent behaviour, from decades of underage drinking and smoking policy, and it isn’t uncomplicated normalisation. It’s secrecy from the adults meant to be guiding you — which is precisely what eSafety’s own data already shows happening, with parental awareness of children’s social media use declining, not rising, since the ban took effect. It’s status economies built around successful circumvention rather than around competent use — TikTok how-to guides on evading TikTok’s own age gate, published on the platform being regulated, are not a normalisation success story, they’re the underground-economy version of the same dynamic. And it forecloses exactly the capability-building the digital literacy argument I made above is trying to protect. A generation that grows up treating platform access as contraband to be smuggled rather than a tool to be taught isn’t obviously better prepared for the platforms they’ll use as adults — a cliff-edge from total exclusion to unrestricted access at 16, with no graduated exposure and no explicit skill-building in between, is a pedagogy problem dressed up as a public health win.

And here’s what makes this a genuine theory-of-change problem rather than just a debate to have later: nobody is actually measuring which of these dynamics is occurring. eSafety’s longitudinal evaluation tracks account status, usage duration, and self-reported wellbeing. It isn’t set up to track cultural diffusion, peer-transmission of platform content among excluded users, or whether the relationship young people have to these platforms is becoming one of literacy or one of stigma. We’re running a generational bet — quietly assuming the seatbelt curve will apply, structuring policy timelines around a 2027–2028 review window that presumes it — without building the instruments that would tell us, a decade from now, whether we bet on the right mechanism at all.

A brief detour through brain rot, because it’s not really a detour

I want to pause on something that looks like a side issue and isn’t, because it’s sitting in the same water as everything above it, and because I keep watching it get used as if it settles an argument it can’t actually settle.

“Brain rot” was Oxford’s word of the year for 2024, and since then it’s been doing an enormous amount of unexamined work in exactly this debate. The trouble is that nobody using the term is using it to mean the same thing. Pull apart the ways it’s actually deployed and you get at least four distinct referents wearing one label: a content genre (the singing toilets, the AI-slop, the absurdist short-form video); a slang register that circulates alongside that genre and, tellingly, migrates into offline speech among children who’ve never held a personal account — which is itself a data point against the idea that account restriction meaningfully insulates a generation from platform culture, since the vocabulary clearly doesn’t need an account to travel; a subjective experiential state, the “fogged-out, low-selectivity” feeling Maxi Heitmayer’s Gen Z interview subjects describe, in which the content is a response to an already-depleted state rather than its cause; and, most recently, a proposed clinical construct — a psychometric “Brain Rot Scale,” explicitly modelled on substance-addiction neurobiology, complete with subscales for Attention Dysregulation, Digital Compulsivity and Cognitive Dependency, tested on an Egyptian convenience sample and explaining a modest 35% of variance, with the authors themselves conceding it hasn’t been validated against any existing measure of problematic internet use. Thoreau, who coined the term in Walden in 1854 “will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?” meant something different again: not an individual affliction at all, but a society choosing simple ideas over complex ones.

What’s genuinely funny, once you go looking, is that Thoreau didn’t stop at the diagnosis, he named the genre. A chapter later, in “Reading,” he takes aim at the popular fiction of his day, cheap, serialised, mass-produced, and devoured compulsively by readers (TikTok rabbit holes anyone?) he compares to cormorants, “who can digest all sorts of this, even after the fullest dinner.” He even mocks the marketing copy, inventing a title that reads uncannily like a lost brainrot video: “The Skip of the Tip-Toe-Hop, a Romance of the Middle Ages… to appear in monthly parts; a great rush; don’t all come together.” And his diagnosis of what this content does to its readers could be lifted whole into any 2026 op-ed: “dulness of sight, a stagnation of the vital circulations, and a general deliquium and sloughing off of all the intellectual faculties.” Deliquium and sloughing off of the intellectual faculties. Nineteenth-century Thoreau just described the brain-rot feeling, named its genre, mocked its marketing, and diagnosed its symptoms, a hundred and seventy years before anyone thought to build a psychometric scale for it. He even had a theory of supply: “this sort of gingerbread is baked daily and more sedulously than pure wheat or rye-and-Indian in almost every oven, and finds a surer market” — which is just the engagement economy, minus the engagement.

All of which is a nice bit of trivia (and it’s my blog, so good times), but it’s also a useful check on where the seriousness actually lives in this debate. Thoreau could name the genre, mock the marketing, and diagnose the feeling — but he never mistook any of that for a discovered fact about the brain. That’s the distinction the current moment keeps losing. This is Ferguson’s construct balkanization problem, which I cited earlier in relation to Rausch and Haidt, showing up again in a completely different corner of the same debate: a folk category getting formalised into something that reads as diagnostic before anyone has established it’s distinct from constructs we already have names for. A scale with excellent internal reliability tells you the instrument is internally consistent. It doesn’t tell you “brain rot” is a real, discrete thing rather than a relabelling of attention difficulties, compulsive checking and existing problematic-use patterns that already have measures.

And it matters which definition is doing the work, because they don’t point toward the same account of what’s happening, let alone the same fix. Compare three recent, more careful pieces of evidence side by side. The passive-sensing study on adolescent phone use I wrote about last week found that low mood predicts more scrolling the next day — a general, content-agnostic disengagement response, consistent with mood management theory: feeling bad, reach for something that costs nothing. Doomscrolling, the pandemic-era construct, is narrower and arguably runs on a different engine entirely — purposeful seeking of threat-relevant, distressing content, closer to anxious vigilance than numbing, a coping strategy that backfires by compounding the very anxiety it’s trying to manage. And Heitmayer’s brain rot, on his own account, sits closer to the first mechanism than the second: his participants describe seeking out content that makes no demand and carries no threat, the near-opposite of doomscrolling’s compulsive checking of bad news. Three different psychological stories, three different underlying mechanisms, one increasingly interchangeable vocabulary — and each new content cycle seems to arrive with a fresh label rather than a resolved question about whether the last one was even right.

Here’s the useful, if slightly deflating, thing this detour actually tells us. Ask what any of this changes about the case for something like My Feed, My Way, and the honest answer is: less than the discourse implies. The strongest evidence for regulating engagement-optimised feeds doesn’t need brain rot, in any of its four senses, to be real. It’s sitting in independent, peer-reviewed research conducted with Meta’s cooperation: when Facebook and Instagram users were switched to chronological feeds for three months in 2020, as part of Meta’s own Election Study with outside academics, they spent measurably less time on the platforms, “suggesting they had become less compelling” — about as clean a demonstration as exists that the algorithmic ranking isn’t neutral scaffolding, it’s the thing actively manufacturing the engagement everyone is worried about. (The same study found the changed feed didn’t measurably shift polarization or political attitudes — a different question from the one this section is asking.)

That evidence stands regardless of whether “brain rot” turns out to be attention dysregulation, mood-driven disengagement, cultural slang, or nothing distinct at all. Which means that when brain rot gets invoked as the reason we need to act — rather than the algorithmic economics standing on their own — it isn’t adding evidentiary weight, it’s borrowing urgency from a construct nobody has actually pinned down. That’s precisely the move I flagged at the top of this post: evidence handled like a fridge magnet, taken out of the room it lives in and put somewhere it can do a different job. The tobacco analogy one of Heitmayer’s own interview subjects reached for — regulate the industry, don’t just tell the individual to smoke less — doesn’t require anyone to have first proven brain rot is a diagnosable condition. It only requires the engagement economics to be what they demonstrably already are.

All over the shop, precisely

So: is this a coherent theory of change finally showing its hand? I don’t think that’s quite right either, and I want to be precise about the claim I’m making, because “incoherent” undersells it. There have been several theories of change here, each internally sensible on its own terms, arriving in the wrong order and now stacked on top of each other rather than replacing one another. The ban’s theory: exclude the population, protect by absence. The industry codes’ theory: verify identity, gate by age. The duty of care’s theory: fix the system, protect by design, regardless of who’s in it. And running underneath all three, unstated and untested: the seatbelt theory, betting that generational turnover will eventually make the first three retroactively look right, on a timeline nobody has committed to actually measuring. Each of these is individually defensible. None of them were built with the others in mind, because none of them were legislated — or even articulated — in the order a single coherent strategy would have chosen. Design-first was available, and shelved, in 2024.

What we’re watching now isn’t a strategy unfolding. It’s a government retrofitting the reform it should have started with onto infrastructure built by the reform it reached for instead, while badging the least structurally demanding piece of the retrofit — a toggle most users won’t find and Meta’s own numbers suggest they wouldn’t use if they did — as the headline. The eSafety document-demand powers, the researcher testing authority, the requirement that platforms document and maintain their harm-mitigation measures: that’s the part of this bill actually shaped by lessons learned, including from the EU’s own enforcement failures. It’s riding into parliament on the opt-out’s press cycle because it isn’t sellable on its own.

Even that’s only half true, though — the same research network likely got the researcher-access and data-scheme provisions largely adopted, while their central structural recommendation, an outcomes-based duty capable of protecting legitimate content like harm-reduction communication from algorithmic over-suppression, was not. Expert input didn’t fail to shape this bill. It shaped the parts that were easiest to say yes to.

I said in July that it was too early to call the ban a failure, and that cuts both ways — too early to call it a success, too. I’ll say something similar here: it’s too early to know whether the duty of care’s substantive parts survive Senate negotiation intact, or get diluted the way the penalty language already seems to have moved between May’s turnover-linked formula and September’s flat cap. That’s not just a hedge — it’s built into the bill’s own timeline. Schedules 2 and 3, the duty of care itself and the repeal of the old content-scheme codes, don’t commence until twelve months after Royal Assent; only the takedown-notice powers in Schedule 1 take effect immediately. But it isn’t too early to say the sequencing was a choice, not an accident, and that the bill in front of parliament right now is being asked to do the work of correcting an architecture it had no hand in designing.

The social media age ban saga: Another Day, Another Declaration

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I’m writing this post because Australia’s social media ban has become a case study in how evidence gets bent to fit a conclusion that was decided before the data arrived — and every time someone with a platform declares victory, that framing hardens a little further into public memory, whether it holds up or not. Documenting it as it happens is the only way I can see, from my skill set, to keep the record straight before it sets.

[sigh] So here I go. I’m really trying not to harp on here, and I do try to progress the discussion, but there are a lot of recursive loops and logics to navigate.

I opened Jon Haidt, Ravi Iyer and Zach Rausch’s latest newsletter and there it was, sitting right under the headline like a benediction: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Lao Tzu, they tell us — though they can’t resist a little joke first, attributing an invented second sentence (“But if that first step is hard, then you should quit”) to unnamed critics, as if anyone doubting six months of shaky data is the one being glib here.

So I went back to Chapter 64 itself, instead of the fridge-magnet version. It’s a strange passage to reach for if you’re trying to defend a law that was drafted, introduced and passed in under two weeks with a 24-hour public comment window. The chapter gives two pieces of advice that I want to pick up here, and the ban’s defenders have managed to miss both of them. The first: deal with problems while they’re small. “That which is at rest is easy to be kept hold of… break it while it is feeble, scatter it while it is small. Act before it exists, regulate before disorder.” Platform design harms didn’t arrive last December — they’ve been documented, litigated and written about for the better part of a decade, and the instrument built to address them at the design level, the Digital Duty of Care, was left to lapse while the government reached for the bluntest tool available instead. The second argument: be as careful at the end as you were at the beginning. “The common people, in their undertakings, fail on the eve of success,” the same chapter says. “If they were as prudent at the end as they are at the beginning, there would be no such failures.” That’s not an argument for patience — it’s a warning against declaring success early and getting careless right as the real test arrives. Lao Tzu, I suspect, would have had more to say about a government that let the problem grow large before acting, and commentators that want to call an unfinished job a win, than he would about critics being impatient.

That’s the kind of move I kept running into working through this. Not lies, exactly — just evidence handled the way you’d handle a fridge magnet: taken out of the room it lives in, polished up, and put somewhere it can do a different job than the one it was built for. And once I saw Haidt’s name at the top, I knew what kind of piece this was going to be…

Here’s what got me. Not that Haidt is optimistic — optimism isn’t a crime. It’s that he’s declaring victory using studies that, when you actually open them up, say close to the opposite of what he’s implying. That’s not interpretation. That’s not “reasonable people reading the same data differently.” That’s citing a source for a conclusion the source itself explicitly rejects.

I’m not going to refute this newsletter line by line. That’s not the point of this post, and honestly, it gives the piece more structural respect than it’s earned. What I want to do instead is lay out the tensions this whole saga has surfaced — the ones sitting underneath the “it’s working” narrative, that I don’t think most readers following this story casually may have had the opportunity to piece together.

The pattern isn’t new

This isn’t the first time Haidt’s relationship with evidence has been flagged. Candice Odgers, reviewing The Anxious Generation in Nature back in 2024, called him “a gifted storyteller” whose “tale is currently one searching for evidence” — noting that hundreds of researchers looking for the effects he describes have found “a mix of no, small and mixed associations.” She pointed to a 72-country analysis of nearly a million people, which found no evidence that the global rollout of social media was associated with widespread psychological harm — if anything, the associations ran mildly the other way, with higher adoption linked to slightly better wellbeing, particularly among younger users. The study’s own authors are careful about what this does and doesn’t show: the associations were small, descriptive rather than causal, and drawn from a single platform’s data at a national level — not proof that social media is good for people, just an absence of the widespread harm signal a precautionary ban would presume. Odgers still specifically flagged that age-based restrictions and device bans were “unlikely to be effective in practice — or worse, could backfire.”

Haidt was flown in anyway, as the scientific keynote. Axel Bruns — an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow at QUT and a past president of the International Association of Internet Researchers, who attended the Sydney leg in person — called it “a curious event.” The SA premier opened proceedings by declaring “the results are in and the science is settled,” which, Bruns notes dryly, “immediately undermined the summit’s stated consultative intent.” The keynotes bore that out: Jean Twenge delivering what Bruns calls “a masterclass in casually sliding from mere appearances of vague correlation to strongly suggesting but not explicitly claiming causation,” followed by Haidt. Meanwhile, the small number of Australian scholars actually invited — from a country Bruns notes is home to some of the field’s world leaders — were relegated to breakout sessions that, unlike the keynotes, weren’t included in the livestream. His verdict: “It was a petty slap in the face of our world-leading, home-grown digital media expertise… taxpayer money was wasted on flying out professional manufacturers of concern from the United States, just because their narrative suited the predetermined policy outcomes.” Two years on, watching Haidt mark his own homework on the policy his book helped inspire, it’s hard not to see the same move happening again, just with a different dataset.

What the actual evidence says

I went back through the studies they drew on to support their position on the “misconceptions” of the critics of the ban. Here’s the shape of it:

Barnes et al., BMJ — the most methodologically rigorous thing in this entire debate: preregistered, regression discontinuity design, STROBE-compliant. Their conclusion, verbatim: “little evidence was found of immediate substantive reductions in reported social media use by adolescents under 16 years.” Their causal estimate was a statistical null (P=0.92 and P=0.60). Their own follow-up opinion piece went further, warning that “policy decisions will continue to outpace the evidence needed to inform them,” and calling explicitly for evaluations “free from industry influence.”

Bursztyn et al. — a working paper, not peer reviewed, titled, with admirable bluntness, “Why Bans Fail.” Their model finds the only stable equilibrium for compliance sits around 18%, below the 27% currently observed — meaning their own math says things are more likely to get worse, not better. Worth noting: two of the authors hold equity in a digital-wellness company whose product category is exactly what they recommend as the fix.

The eSafety Commissioner’s own parent survey — found that the single biggest reason kids retained their accounts was that the platform simply hadn’t gotten around to checking their age yet. Not sophisticated evasion. Not circumvention. Nobody asked.

Molly Rose Foundation — 61% of previously-active 12-15 year olds still had an account four months in, 70% said it was “easy,” and 60-64% said the platform had taken no action at all. Their analysis is blunt about what this means: it gives parents “a false sense of safety” while letting platforms “off the hook” for the safety-by-design work that might have actually helped.

None of this is ambiguous. None of it requires charitable reading to arrive at “not working yet, and possibly not built to work at all.”

The bit that actually made me sigh

Haidt’s newsletter lists “companies are making their products safer” as one of five reasons for optimism. I went looking for what backs that up. There isn’t anything. Not in what I could find, not in any of the studies cited alongside it. And the reason is structural, not incidental: the ban doesn’t ask platforms to change anything about how they’re built. It asks them to remove a demographic. Design, algorithms, engagement mechanics — completely untouched, for whoever remains on the platform, child or adult.

Lisa Given put this more precisely than I have: the law “does not hold technology companies to account for the content they present, or the potential harm posed by their algorithmic designs.” What has reappeared, in May 2026, is a likely to be a zombie version of the idea — a consultation paper, not legislation, reanimating some of the same design-based principles Zoe Daniel’s original bill contained, but stripped of urgency and arriving into a regulatory landscape the ban and its industry codes have already reshaped. It proposes real teeth on paper — penalties of the greater of 5% of global turnover or $50 million, risk assessments, researcher data access — but it’s still pre-drafting, with a 12-month transition period built in even after it passes, if it passes. Which puts genuine operation, at the earliest, years away.

Sequencing, not just failure

This is the part I think gets missed in the “is it working / isn’t it working” framing entirely, and it’s the point I keep circling back to. It’s not just that the ban hasn’t reduced access. It’s that while everyone argues about that, an entire age-assurance and identity-verification architecture is being built and commercially entrenched underneath it — through the ban’s enforcement apparatus, and through the Phase 2 industry codes running in parallel, developed by industry associations rather than debated in Parliament. Vendors are signing multi-year contracts. Trusted-provider lists are being drawn up. The age-verification industry itself is now lobbying eSafety for stronger powers, because a bigger, more entrenched enforcement regime is a bigger market for them.

By the time the Digital Duty of Care — the thing that would actually regulate design rather than access — arrives, if it arrives, it walks into a room where the surveillance infrastructure is already the established baseline. It doesn’t replace that infrastructure. It accommodates it.

And nobody who matters has weighed in yet

Here’s the thing that undercuts Haidt’s “it’s succeeding” framing more than any single study: the actual evaluation hasn’t happened. The government’s own assessment — led by Stanford’s Social Media Lab with an eleven-member international Academic Advisory Group — is still underway, feeding into a legislative review that doesn’t even start until 2027. Design and analysis sit with eSafety and Stanford; the advisory group’s own statement is careful to note it “does not represent the government, nor does our work constitute either endorsement or opposition to the legislation” — real independence, but advisory independence, with no lever to act on what it finds. The panel includes Amy Orben, the Cambridge researcher who co-authored the ABCD brain-imaging study that Candice Odgers cited against Haidt’s “great rewiring” thesis in her original Nature review — a preregistered study of over 10,000 children that found no meaningful relationship between screen engagement, including social media specifically, and neurodevelopment, cognition or wellbeing, “even if we set the evidential threshold very low.” Haidt is nowhere in that process. Not on the Stanford team, not on the advisory panel, not named anywhere in eSafety’s evaluation documentation. He’s commenting from outside it, ahead of it, using a working paper called “Why Bans Fail” — whose own modelling puts the stable compliance equilibrium below the rate currently observed — as evidence that it’s succeeding, while the scientists actually tasked with finding out are still years from reporting.

And in among all of it — the industry lobbying, the compliance updates, the newsletter victory laps — the people this law is actually about are almost entirely absent. When researchers did ask them: 72% of under-16s told Bursztyn’s team they’d prefer a self-limiting app to an outright ban. Molly Rose found only 31% of affected kids felt safer; 14% felt less safe. That’s not nothing. That’s the population the law claims to protect, telling anyone who’ll listen that the thing built for them wasn’t built with them.

It’s too early to call this a failure. I want to be careful about that, because “too early to tell” cuts both ways — it’s also too early to call it a success, which is exactly what Haidt did anyway. That’s the thing about being careless at the end instead of the beginning: the government rushed the law through in eight days, and now its loudest defender is rushing the verdict, declaring the journey is on the path to success if we just give it time… before the first proper measurement has even been taken. Lao Tzu had a word for that too, a few lines further into the same chapter: whoever grasps, loses.

When a Digital Duty of Care Becomes Lipstick on a Pig: Policy Sequencing, Market Logic, and the Importance of a Theory of Change

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We want the internet to be safer. For our kids. For ourselves. We want to communicate, find information, collaborate, create, share, engage, participate and have fun. We want to seek out what we need — including the full range of adult content that adults have always sought — in ways that are appropriate to who we are and where we are in our lives. We want age-appropriate access that doesn’t require us to hand over our passports to every platform we visit. We want the architectural conditions of digital life to be designed for human flourishing rather than engineered for compulsive use. And we don’t want the solution to these problems to be a surveillance infrastructure that violates the privacy rights it claims to protect.

These are not unreasonable things to want. They are, in fact, the things that good digital regulation should deliver.

But there is something more specific underneath all of this. We want digital environments that lean toward a caring orientation. Spaces where the default assumption is that users are people with complex needs, relationships, vulnerabilities and capacities — not attention units to be harvested. Where the architecture of the platform supports human connection rather than exploiting it. Where the experience of being online doesn’t require constant vigilance against the system that is supposed to be serving you.

That is the design brief. And almost nothing about the regulatory choices being made right now — in Australia, in Europe, in the UK, and across the globe — is actually building toward it.

Person wearing pig mask applying red lipstick and taking a selfie in office cubicle
Image: AI generated image riffing off the lipstick on a pig concept. No animals were harmed in the making.

The Market Logic Nobody Wants to Name

Before getting to the policy failures, it is worth being precise about why they keep happening. The answer lies in market logic that is so entrenched, so global, and so structurally opposed to a caring orientation that no single national regulatory instrument can adequately address it.

The incumbent platforms — Meta, TikTok, Google, Snap — are not primarily communication services that have some problematic features. They are attention extraction machines that have communication as a byproduct. The product is engagement. The inventory is human time and psychological state. The business model optimises for the time users spend in states of arousal, comparison, compulsive return, and social anxiety — because those states generate the engagement signals that drive advertising revenue.

Every design feature that has been identified as harmful — infinite scroll, algorithmic recommendation, social feedback loops, disappearing content, notification systems, engagement-maximising AI — is not incidental to how these platforms make money. It is how they make money. The harm is the business model. The architecture that exploits developing brains is the same architecture that generates billions in revenue. Internal corporate communications — made visible through litigation processes rather than through corporate transparency — show that companies knew this and chose not to adequately address it. This is evidence of deliberate design intent, not corporate negligence.

Regulation that doesn’t change this underlying market logic doesn’t address the problem. An age ban doesn’t change the market logic — it removes a demographic without reforming the architecture that exploits them. Age verification doesn’t change the market logic — it adds a compliance cost that large platforms absorb and small competitors cannot. Even design obligations only change the market logic if the penalties make harmful features more expensive than the revenue they generate. For Meta, whose annual global revenue exceeded USD200 billion in 2025, a flat AUD49.5 million fine — Australia’s maximum penalty — is a rounding error. It does not change the calculation.

This is why the financial structure of regulation is not a technical detail. It is the mechanism by which regulation actually changes what the market produces. Penalties proportionate to global turnover — 5% to 10% — make the cost of harmful architecture real in a way that flat caps never can. Design obligations without proportionate penalties are aspirations. Design obligations with proportionate penalties are market signals.

The global reach of these platforms makes this harder still. TikTok’s recommendation algorithm is trained on engagement data from over a billion users across every jurisdiction. Meta’s systems don’t differentiate by country. A platform regulated to remove infinite scroll in Germany still has infinite scroll optimised on data from 3 billion users elsewhere. A national design obligation is a local intervention in a global architecture. This is why harmonisation matters — not just for legal coherence, but for actual effectiveness. The European Digital Services Act‘s harmonised framework, with Commission-level enforcement against Very Large Online Platforms, is structurally more capable of changing the market logic than any national ban. But only if it is designed with the financial penalties and design obligations that make compliance cheaper than non-compliance, and only if it is consistently enforced.

The attention extraction economy also produces a specific kind of competitive moat. The more data a platform has, the better its recommendation system. The better its recommendation system, the more engaging the platform. The more engaging the platform, the more users it attracts. The more users it attracts, the more data it has. This is a self-reinforcing loop that incumbents have been running for fifteen years. Regulation that adds compliance costs without breaking that loop entrenches incumbents rather than challenging them — because large platforms can absorb the compliance cost while smaller competitors cannot build the alternative at scale.

What the Australian Social Media Age Ban Has Taught Us

Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age Act came into force on 10 December 2025, banning children under 16 from holding accounts on designated social media platforms. It was the world’s first such ban. It passed in the last sitting week of 2024, introduced and passed within eight days, with a 24-hour public submission period that received 15,000 submissions, of which only 107 were published. This expedited process occurred shortly before a federal election that was called four months later in March 2025. FOI correspondence reported by Crikey and analysed by researcher Amanda Third showed the national Social Media Summit was designed to “build momentum for a decision already made,” not to deliberate on evidence. The political momentum was performative — the instrument was chosen for its communicative power rather than its causal effectiveness.

Six months in, the picture is clear.

The ban is not working on its own terms. The Molly Rose Foundation’s survey of 1,050 Australian 12-15 year-olds found 61% of those who previously had accounts on restricted platforms still have access to at least one active account. Among those still accessing banned platforms, 60-64% said the platform had taken no action to remove their account. The dominant story is not children cleverly circumventing the ban. It is platforms failing to comply.

The harm measures haven’t moved. The eSafety Commissioner’s own compliance report found no measurable drop in cyberbullying or image-based abuse complaints from children under 16 in the first three months of enforcement. These are the direct harm measures the ban was designed to move. They haven’t moved. Because the harm is in the architecture. And the architecture hasn’t changed.

Children were not consulted. The policy was designed by adults, about children, driven by adult anxieties, in a process that made meaningful child participation structurally impossible. A FOSI survey conducted in December 2025 found 65% of Australian parents support the ban — but only 38% of Australian children did. 56% of children said they feared losing important connections and support. The recent EU Kids Online network’s survey of 29,169 children across 19 European countries found 45% disagree that an age ban would make them safer online. Children knew this wouldn’t work. Nobody adequately asked them. They just became media soundbites.

Vulnerable children have been made less safe. Teenagers who bypassed the ban by appearing as adults lost the safety features platforms built specifically for teen accounts. The children most likely to circumvent the ban — the most determined, often the most vulnerable — have been stripped of the protections designed for them.

The ban was built on the wrong argument. It was passed on a mental health narrative — the claim that social media is the primary driver of the youth mental health crisis. That causal claim was contested in the peer-reviewed literature at the time of enactment and remains contested. The government has since quietly shifted the rationale — writing recommender algorithms and endless-feed features into the legal definition of a harmful platform — without acknowledging it. The shift is correct: the harm is in the design architecture. But arriving at the right argument after passing the wrong instrument doesn’t fix the instrument.

The Social Adoption Curve and the Workaround Economy

Regulation that ignores how people actually behave in response to restrictions will consistently produce outcomes it didn’t intend. The social adoption curve — how technologies spread through populations, become embedded in social norms, and resist displacement — is not a peripheral consideration for digital regulation. It is central to whether regulation achieves anything.

The NBER working paper surveying 835 Australian teenagers four months after the ban found that only about one in four 14-15 year-olds comply. Most banned teens believe their peers are still using platforms and cite social reasons for continuing. Teenagers reported they would need roughly two-thirds of their peers to stop using social media before they themselves would stop — far above the share currently complying. The more influential teenagers disproportionately stay on the platforms. The ban hasn’t shifted the social norm, and without that shift, legal prohibition alone cannot move behaviour.

This is not a failure of enforcement. It is a failure to understand how social technologies become embedded in the texture of everyday life. Social media is not a product that teenagers chose from a range of alternatives. For many, it is the primary infrastructure of peer connection, social identity, cultural participation, and information access. Removing it without providing alternatives — without investing in digital literacy, without creating safer spaces, without engaging with the social dynamics that make these platforms so central — is like removing a road and expecting people not to find another route.

The workarounds don’t just circumvent the regulation. They route around the safety infrastructure too. When teenagers bypass the ban they don’t find a safer internet. They find Discord servers, Reddit threads, private WhatsApp groups, and gaming platforms — all less moderated, less visible to adults, and more opaque to regulatory oversight. The Molly Rose Foundation data shows 43% of children are using gaming platforms more and 39% are using messaging apps more since the ban. These spaces are not covered by the ban, have weaker safety systems, and are harder for researchers, regulators, and parents to monitor. The unintended consequence of the ban has been to push children’s online activity into less regulated environments while maintaining the fiction that they are protected.

Social norm change does happen — and when it does, it can be powerful. But the evidence from decades of public health research suggests that norm change is produced by education, social modelling, environmental design, and cultural shift — not by prohibition that lacks meaningful enforcement and ignores the social dynamics that make the prohibited behaviour attractive. The ban cannot shift the norm because it doesn’t address why the platforms are so central to teenagers’ social lives in the first place. That is a design problem. And design is what the ban doesn’t touch.

The Age Verification Architecture: Surveillance by Another Name

The ban’s enforcement depends on platforms verifying users’ ages. Australia’s law requires “reasonable steps” without specifying what those steps must be, and mandates that verification data be deleted once its purpose is served.

In practice, platforms deployed a patchwork of unreliable methods. Facial recognition proved wildly inaccurate near the 16-year threshold. The government’s own age assurance technology trial found that no single solution suits all use cases — and that some vendors were proactively retaining biometric and identity data beyond legal requirements, anticipating future law enforcement or regulatory requests that didn’t yet exist. This is surveillance creep in documented, real-world form. The legislation required deletion. Vendors were building retention infrastructure instead.

The attack surface problem is structural. Every mandatory age verification requirement creates a chain of custody for sensitive identity information. Every link in that chain is vulnerable. The Discord breach of September 2025 — in which government identity documents submitted for age verification were accessed through a compromised third-party provider — illustrated exactly what mandatory verification creates. Third-party age assurance providers don’t just become attack vectors. They become commercially entrenched ones, with incentives to retain rather than delete the data they process.

There is also a fundamental confusion in the verification approach between identification and safety. Safety is a property of environments. Identification is a property of users. Making an environment safe does not require knowing who is in it. Article 28(3) of the EU’s Digital Services Act makes this explicit: compliance with child safety obligations “shall not oblige providers of online platforms to process additional personal data in order to assess whether the recipient of the service is a minor.” Europe’s primary platform safety instrument explicitly says you do not need identity verification infrastructure to protect children. The design obligation can be met through architecture, not identification.

The identification-surveillance-rights tension cannot be resolved within the verification framework. It can only be dissolved by the design framework, which doesn’t require it. If platforms are required to make their services safe by design for everyone, the question of who users are becomes largely irrelevant to the regulatory obligation.

The Kitchen Sink Problem: Two Instruments in Operation, One Horse Being Backed

Australia has two regulatory instruments already in operation that are pulling in opposite directions — and a third that the government is now hastily backing as the evidence mounts that the first two are seemingly in conflict with their desired outcomes, but rapidly servicing an economic boon in age assurance technologies.

The age ban says under-16s should not be on restricted platforms — access control through exclusion. It is being enforced now, with formal investigations underway against five major platforms.

The Phase 2 industry codes extend age assurance obligations across the commercial internet infrastructure that most Australians use daily — social media, messaging, gaming, search engines, hosting platforms, app stores, and operating systems. Surveillance architecture through identity verification at every layer of digital life. Already being implemented. Commercial infrastructure being built around it now.

These two instruments share a theory of change: identify users → gate by age → safety through exclusion and verification. They are the horses that won the race to be saddled first.

The Digital Duty of Care is the horse now being backed after the race has started. Released as an issues paper for consultation in May 2026 — eighteen months after the ban passed — it proposes that platforms must maintain safe environments through effective systems and processes, covering the entire commercial internet infrastructure that most Australians use daily: social media, messaging, gaming, search engines, hosting services, app stores, internet service providers, equipment and operating systems, and generative AI capabilities embedded in service provision. It has a fundamentally different theory of change: design safe environments → safety through architecture.

It is not legislation. It is not law. It is a consultation document that may or may not become legislation, that if it becomes legislation will commence no earlier than 2028, into a regulatory environment where the surveillance architecture will have had three or four years of commercial entrenchment. Whether it actually passes is uncertain. Whether it retains its ambition through consultation, drafting, parliamentary debate, and an election cycle is more uncertain still. The government that releases issues papers is not the same thing as a government that passes legislation — as Australia’s stalled gambling reform, its undelivered media bargaining code amendments, and a dozen other promised instruments demonstrate.

What is certain is that the Safety-by-Design angle of the Duty of Care cannot be coherent alongside the instruments that arrived before it. The ban removed under-16s as a regulatory lever — platforms no longer have a commercial relationship with that demographic, so design obligations for that age group have no market teeth. The industry codes built identity verification infrastructure across the entire internet stack before the design obligation existed to challenge it. By the time the Duty of Care arrives — if it arrives — the surveillance architecture will be the established compliance baseline and the design obligation will accommodate itself to that baseline rather than replacing it.

The first two instruments share a theory of change that is incompatible with the third. No amount of drafting ingenuity can resolve that incompatibility because it is not a drafting problem. It is a sequencing problem. And sequencing problems cannot be fixed retroactively.

This is what happens when policy is made reactively, under political pressure, without a coherent theory of change. The ban for electoral momentum. The industry codes for the enforcement gap the ban couldn’t address. The Duty of Care for the evidence gap the ban made visible — a gap that the evidence predicted before the ban passed and that the compliance data has since confirmed. Each instrument designed in response to a different political moment, without knowledge of the others, building infrastructure that points in opposite directions.

The kitchen sink approach feels comprehensive. It is, in fact, incoherent — and nobody in the political process is stepping back to ask what theory of change actually connects any of this to children being safer.

The Senate committee that passed the ban knew it was insufficient. In the same report, it recommended a Digital Duty of Care, meaningful engagement with young people, and an independent review within 18 months. Eighteen months later, the Duty of Care is still only an issues paper, children were not meaningfully consulted, and the compliance data has confirmed what the committee already knew: the ban alone was not enough.

First Mover Entrenchment: Why the Wrong Instrument Wins

The sequencing problem is worse than a policy mistake. It is a policy mistake that forecloses correction.

Regulatory infrastructure creates commercial ecosystems. Commercial ecosystems create incumbents. Incumbents invest in maintaining their position. Regulators incorporate incumbent frameworks into compliance standards. Compliance standards become the definition of reasonable steps. The alternative has to fight the established definition rather than starting from first principles.

The age assurance industry had a structural commercial interest in the Australian ban passing. Without mandatory verification requirements their market is voluntary and limited. With mandatory requirements — extended through Phase 2 industry codes across the entire internet stack — they have a legislatively mandated, expanding global market. The cascade of age ban legislation following Australia is, from their perspective, a commercial opportunity of extraordinary scale. Every new jurisdiction that follows Australia is a new market.

The trial dynamic illustrates the problem precisely. The Australian age assurance technology trial was run by the Age Check Certification Scheme — a UK-based company that specialises in certifying identity verification systems. The 53 vendors who participated were hoping to win contracts. Yoti — one of those vendors — was simultaneously already operating as Meta’s age verification provider for Instagram and Facebook in Australia. The trial was partly evaluating a vendor that was already commercially embedded in the platform being regulated.

Meta’s participation in the trial was not a technology submission — it was a policy position paper arguing that Apple and Google should bear the age verification infrastructure burden at the operating system level. A platform being regulated used a technology evaluation process to argue someone else should build the infrastructure.

By the time the Digital Duty of Care might commence — 2028 at the absolute earliest — the age assurance industry will have had three or four years of commercial entrenchment. The ACCS accreditation framework will be established. Trusted provider lists will be published. Yoti, k-ID, and whoever else made the cut will have multi-year contracts with major platforms. The regulatory definition of “reasonable steps” will have been shaped by the infrastructure that already exists — which is surveillance-based, not design-based.

The Duty of Care arriving into that environment does not displace the surveillance architecture. It layers design obligations on top of it. Platforms satisfy their risk assessments by pointing to their age assurance compliance. Design-based safety becomes an aspiration accommodated within the surveillance infrastructure it was supposed to replace.

This is the lipstick. The pig is already there.

The Market Foreclosure Nobody Is Talking About

Building expensive surveillance infrastructure as the baseline compliance requirement for operating digital services locks out the competitive innovation ecosystem that could produce the alternatives we actually need.

Age verification at scale requires technical capability, regulatory accreditation, legal compliance across jurisdictions, and ongoing operational infrastructure. These requirements favour large, well-resourced incumbents who can absorb compliance costs. They disadvantage smaller players who might otherwise develop genuinely safer localised alternatives — platforms designed from first principles around user wellbeing rather than engagement maximisation, community-governed spaces, federated architectures, open-source tools, cooperative models.

A small company building a genuinely caring social platform for young people cannot afford the age verification infrastructure required to operate legally under the industry codes. The incumbent platforms — Meta, TikTok, Google — can. The regulatory requirement that was supposed to hold them accountable instead reinforces their monopoly position. This is not an incidental side effect. It is a predictable consequence of designing compliance infrastructure around the capabilities of the largest players.

The attention extraction economy already has a massive first-mover advantage built on fifteen years of engagement data, network effects, and platform lock-in. Surveillance-based compliance requirements compound that advantage. They create regulatory moats around incumbents that make it structurally harder for new entrants to compete — even new entrants with better, safer, more caring designs.

This matters because market competition, properly structured, is a more powerful mechanism for improving platform safety than any single regulatory instrument. If a platform with a genuinely caring orientation — one that doesn’t exploit users, builds in natural stopping points, recommends content for user want rather than engagement maximisation — can compete effectively with Meta and TikTok, the incumbents face pressure to match it. If the regulatory architecture makes it impossible for that platform to exist, the pressure disappears and the incumbents have no incentive to change.

The caring orientation we want from digital environments is more likely to emerge from a diverse, competitive innovation ecosystem than from regulatory mandates on entrenched monopolists. Mandates matter — but they work best when they operate alongside competitive pressure that makes compliance in the spirit of the regulation commercially rational, not just legally required.

What the Duty of Care Gets Right — And Why It Arrived Too Late

The Australian Digital Duty of Care issues paper is, on its own terms, a well-designed framework. It is worth being clear about what it gets right, because the argument here is not that the Duty of Care is wrong. It is that it arrived too late, in the wrong sequence, into an environment that has already foreclosed much of its potential.

It proposes design obligations covering the commercial internet infrastructure Australian’s access — including generative AI capabilities embedded in service provision. This is genuinely forward-looking. Generative AI is no longer just a discrete tool that users consciously choose to engage with. It is disappearing into the infrastructure of everyday digital experience — embedded in recommendation systems, content generation, conversational interfaces, image manipulation, synthetic social interaction. The harm is becoming invisible precisely as it becomes more pervasive. A regulatory framework that covers AI as it is actually deployed, rather than as a separate product category, is the only framework that can keep pace with that technological shift.

It proposes penalties of up to 5% of global annual turnover, with a floor of AUD50 million — proportionate, not performative. For Meta, 5% of global turnover would be in USD billions. That is a different conversation entirely from the ban’s maximum penalty — currently equivalent to approximately AUD $49.5 million — which for the largest platforms amounts to a calculable cost of doing business rather than a genuine deterrent.

It proposes researcher data access, independent audit powers, transparency requirements, and executive accountability. These are the instruments of ongoing accountability rather than one-time compliance. They create the evidence base that regulatory decisions require and the governance structure that makes accountability real rather than performative.

This is, essentially, what Australia should have passed instead of the ban. It is what Zoe Daniel’s Digital Duty of Care Bill introduced on 25 November 2024 — four days after the social media ban was tabled, lapsing when Daniel lost her seat in the federal election. The right framework existed. The wrong instrument passed instead.

But the Duty of Care is still only an issues paper. Not legislation. Not law. Pre-consultation, with no timetable for introduction, no guarantee of passage, and a 12-month commencement period after passage. It will not be operational before 2028 — into a regulatory environment where the surveillance architecture will have had three or four years of commercial entrenchment, where the age assurance industry’s trusted provider lists will have defined what compliance looks like, and where the market foreclosure of smaller competitors will have narrowed the innovation ecosystem that the Duty of Care depends on to work.

The right framework. The wrong sequence. And by the time it arrives, the pig will be so thoroughly established that the lipstick is all that’s visible.

Toward a Caring Digital Environment: What the Theory of Change Actually Looks Like

The alternative starts with a different question. Not “how do we stop harm” — a defensive, prohibitionist frame that produces bans and verification infrastructure. But “how do we cultivate environments that lean toward care” — a constructive frame that produces design obligations, competitive innovation, and genuine safety.

A caring orientation in platform design means: recommendation systems that notice when a user is in distress and surface support rather than amplifying distress content. Interfaces that create natural stopping points rather than eliminating them. Social feedback mechanisms that may reinforce connection and mutual support rather than performance and comparison. Defaults that create safe conditions rather than expose. Design that treats users as people with complex needs rather than attention units to be harvested. GenAI capabilities that are designed to support rather than exploit the people they interact with. Architecture that serves the user’s actual interests rather than the platform’s engagement metrics.

This is achievable. Elements of it already exist. The question is whether regulation mandates it as the default or leaves it as an optional add-on to engagement-maximising architecture.

The coherent theory of change — the one that actually delivers what we said we wanted — follows this sequence:

Enforce existing obligations first. Platforms already prohibit under-13s. Make them prove it, with turnover-linked penalties for failure. The EU’s DSA enforcement is already doing this. Start where the law already is.

Design obligations with proportionate penalties. Risk assessments of harmful features, required mitigation, mandatory transparency, researcher data access, audit powers, executive accountability. Article 28 of the DSA with teeth. Financial penalties that make the harmful architecture more expensive than the safe one.

Protect the innovation ecosystem. Proportionate requirements for smaller platforms. Safe harbours for open-source, federated, and community-governed architectures. Active support for alternatives that don’t rely on engagement maximisation. The competitive pressure that makes market incentives work alongside regulatory mandates.

Age-appropriate spaces by design — not by identity. Default-safe architecture for younger users that adapts to developmental needs without requiring biometric data or government identity documents. Opt-in to higher-risk features rather than opt-out of safety. Design that serves the whole arc of young users’ digital lives.

Graduated access rather than cliff edges. If age-differentiated access to specific features is warranted, implement it gradually with digital literacy scaffolding, parental engagement, and design safeguards. No binary exclusion followed by unrestricted access at an arbitrary threshold.

Children’s voices throughout. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child gives children the right to be heard in decisions that affect them. That right was not honoured in Australia’s ban. It must be built into any regulatory process that claims to act in children’s interests.

International coordination. Design obligations without international coordination are local interventions in a global architecture. Harmonised standards, mutual recognition of regulatory findings, and coordinated enforcement against platforms that arbitrage regulatory differences are prerequisites for regulation that actually changes global market logic rather than just shifting harm between jurisdictions.

This sequence puts design obligation first, surveillance infrastructure never, competitive innovation throughout, and children’s voices in the room from the beginning.

What Europe and the UK Can Still Do

Europe is not Australia. It has better foundational regulatory architecture, stronger privacy law, and a procedural framework — the DSA’s notification requirement — that is actively slowing the race of national ban legislation while the Commission builds harmonised alternatives.

Article 28 of the DSA already exists. It requires design-based safety obligations. It explicitly says compliance does not require processing additional personal data to identify minors. The EU Kids Online network — 29,169 children across 19 European countries — has told European policymakers to implement it. The Digital Fairness Act, expected Q4 2026, can extend design harm obligations with proportionate penalties and cover the emerging architecture of generative AI harm.

But Europe is not immune to the same political dynamics. France has passed its ban through the National Assembly. Germany’s governing coalition is calling for an under-14 ban. The age verification industry is positioning for the European market. The EUDI Wallet is being deployed. The trusted provider lists are being established.

The window closes when national bans become entrenched political commitments. When age verification industry codes are written into DSA compliance frameworks. When first mover entrenchment forecloses the design-based alternative. When the competitive innovation ecosystem is locked out by compliance infrastructure it cannot afford.

Once age bans pass, they cannot be repealed. Australia’s ban will stay on the books while the evidence continues to show it isn’t working, while the Duty of Care is quietly developed around it, and while the surveillance architecture it generated becomes the default condition of Australian digital life. No government repeals a signature child protection measure. The political ratchet only goes one way.

The lesson is not that child online safety doesn’t matter. It matters enormously. The lesson is that the instrument chosen determines what kind of safety is built — and what kind of digital future everyone inherits. An internet that leans toward care is achievable. It requires design obligations, proportionate penalties, competitive innovation, international coordination, and children’s voices in the room. It does not require surveillance infrastructure, biometric data, identity verification at every layer of the stack, or the foreclosure of the competitive ecosystem that could build the alternatives we need.

Australia chose the instrument that was easier to communicate. Europe still has the chance to choose the one that works.

But the window is open, not indefinitely. And the pig is already being prepared for its close-up.

Updated 9 June 2026: Legislative timeline corrected, currency notations clarified, and primary source links added throughout

The social media ban just changed what it’s actually for — and almost nobody noticed

~ alexiamaddox ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been tracking Australia’s social media regulation landscape for a long time. Not just since the ban passed in November 2024 — but through the age assurance technology trials, the industry code consultations, the evidence debates, the Summit that wasn’t really a Summit. Every few months something happens that brings the public conversation back to this space. This week was one of those moments. But what landed in the news cycle wasn’t the most important thing that happened. So I want to explain what was.

Girl using phone with digital casino slot machine showing text CASINO, SPIN, 777, and AGRTUL INSTAL.
Image: generated with AI

What everyone is talking about

This week, eSafety published its first compliance report on Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age obligation. Five platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube — are under investigation for potential non-compliance. The Commissioner is moving into an enforcement stance. Fines of up to $49.5 million are on the table.

That’s the story most outlets covered. It’s a real story. But it’s the surface.

What happened underneath

Six days before that report landed, the Minister for Communications quietly registered a new legislative instrument — the Online Safety (Age-Restricted Social Media Platforms) Amendment Rules 2026 (F2026L00370, 25 March 2026) — that adds two new conditions to the definition of an age-restricted social media platform. To fall under the ban, a platform must now also have either or both of:

  • A recommender feature: algorithms that select and display content based on a user’s account information
  • A logged-in feature: endless-feed features, feedback features such as likes and upvotes, or time-limited features such as disappearing stories

In plain language: infinite scroll, algorithmic recommendation, and social feedback loops are now formally written into the legal definition of what makes a platform harmful to children.

This attracted almost no media coverage. It should have. Because it signals something fundamental — the intellectual foundation of the ban has quietly shifted.

Two trials that influence everything

To understand why this matters, you need to know what else happened this week.

On 24 March, a New Mexico jury found Meta had violated state consumer protection law — finding 75,000 individual violations and ordering $375 million in penalties. The case arose from an undercover operation in which investigators created accounts posing as users under 14, who then received explicit material and were contacted by adults seeking similar content. The jury found Meta knowingly engaged in unfair and deceptive trade practices and exploited users’ lack of knowledge. A second phase in May will consider ordering Meta to change its platforms.

Then, in the same week, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable in a landmark addiction case. The plaintiff — now 20 — began using YouTube at six and Instagram at nine. The jury found that design choices including infinite scroll were made deliberately to maximise engagement in developing brains, borrowing from the behavioural techniques of poker machines and the cigarette industry. Meta was found 70% responsible, Google 30%. TikTok and Snap settled before the trial began.

Two separate juries. Two separate legal theories. Two separate verdicts. Both pointing at the same thing: these platforms were designed to exploit users, and the companies knew it.

The Australian legislative instrument and the US jury verdicts are, in effect, saying the same thing in the same week.

[Edit: A reader pointed out that jury verdicts don’t validate scientific arguments — juries are susceptible to emotional reasoning and the history of problematic jury decisions is long. It’s a fair prompt to be more precise. What I’m claiming is not that the verdicts prove harm science, but that litigation processes do give us access to internal corporate documents not otherwise visible in the public record — evidence of deliberate design intent. Meta’s own internal communications compared their platform’s effects to pushing drugs and gambling. A YouTube memo reportedly described “viewer addiction” as a goal. For a detailed legal analysis of how these documents functioned as evidence of corporate knowledge, see this USF Law Center piece. That is a claim about corporate conduct, not about clinical addiction or peer-reviewed harm science.

What the verdicts do represent is a significant socio-temporal indicator — a signal that public opinion and legal culture are shifting around platform accountability. Whatever their scientific limitations, two juries in the same week finding against Meta and YouTube on design harm grounds is a cultural and legal moment worth marking. The direction of travel matters, even if the science hasn’t fully caught up.]

This is a design problem. The harm is in the architecture.

Why this matters for the ban

The Australian social media ban was built on a different argument entirely. It was passed on a mental health narrative — driven substantially by Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation thesis that social media is the primary cause of the youth mental health crisis. That causal claim was already being contested in the peer-reviewed literature at the time of enactment.

I know this because in May 2025, my colleagues and I published analysis in The Conversation predicting exactly the compliance failures eSafety has now confirmed — and we were drawing on a literature that had been raising these concerns for years.

Most recently, a major longitudinal study published in the Journal of Public Health this month — Cheng et al., following 25,629 adolescents across three years — found no evidence that social media use predicted later anxiety or depression in either girls or boys. That is among the strongest findings the literature has produced on this question.

And yet eSafety is escalating enforcement of a ban whose foundational causal claim remains unestablished. That is a significant governance concern.

But here is what the March 2026 rule changes: by writing recommender algorithms and endless-feed features into the legal definition, the Minister has effectively acknowledged that the mental health narrative was never quite the right framing. The harm is in the design — the deliberate engineering of compulsive use. Arguably, that causal claim no longer needs to carry the full weight of the ban’s legitimacy. The government has moved on from it. Without saying so.

eSafety’s own data confirms the point

If design is the problem and accounts are merely the delivery mechanism, we would expect the harm measures to be unchanged by an accounts-based ban. That is exactly what the compliance report shows.

Buried on page 15, in the complaints section: there has been no discernible drop in cyberbullying and image-based abuse complaints from children under 16 in January and February 2026 compared to the same period in 2025.

That is the direct harm measure. The one the ban was designed to move. It hasn’t moved.

Because the harm is in the design. And the design hasn’t changed.

The legislation that should have been passed

Here is where I get genuinely frustrated. And I think the public should too.

Four days before the social media ban passed through parliament — in 48 hours, with a 24-hour public submission period, in the last sitting week before a federal election — independent Member for Goldstein Zoe Daniel introduced the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2024.

I have been watching this space for long enough to recognise good policy design when I see it. Daniel’s bill was good policy design.

It required large platforms to conduct and publish risk assessments of their recommender systems and algorithmic systems specifically. It required risk mitigation plans that included changing design features, testing algorithmic systems, and modifying recommender systems. It required annual transparency reports covering design features and children’s access metrics. It gave researchers access to platform data — something academics working in this space have been asking for for years. It allowed users to opt out of engagement-based recommender systems and targeted advertising. It made key personnel personally liable for failures.

And it set penalties proportionate to revenue: the greater of 100,000 penalty units or 10% of annual turnover. For Meta globally that figure would be in the billions. For TikTok Australia — with revenue of $679 million in 2024 — it would be approximately $68 million. Compare that to the ban’s flat cap of $49.5 million, which represents roughly seven weeks of TikTok’s local revenue. As I’ve said publicly: for the largest companies, the calculation is not whether to comply but whether the cost of genuine compliance exceeds the cost of the fine.

Daniel’s bill lapsed at dissolution on 28 March 2025 when the federal election was called. She lost her seat in Goldstein.

What the political record shows

The ban that passed instead was never really about the evidence. Academic researcher Amanda Third’s chapter in The Public Child (Palgrave, 2025), drawing on FOI correspondence between the South Australian Premier’s office and Jonathan Haidt, documents that the Social Media Summit — jointly hosted by the SA and NSW Premiers in October 2024 — was explicitly designed to “build momentum and support for national legislation to enforce a minimum age for access to social media.” Not to gather evidence. Not to deliberate. To build political momentum for a decision already made.

The eSafety Commissioner, meanwhile, repeatedly declined to endorse the proposal, pointing instead to the suite of design-focused regulatory work already underway — including the very framework that Daniel’s bill would have legislated.

The ban passed. Daniel’s bill lapsed. And now, fifteen months later, the government has quietly written two of Daniel’s core concepts — recommender features and endless-feed features — into a ministerial instrument, without the transparency requirements, without the proportionate penalties, without researcher data access, without personal liability for executives, and without any public acknowledgment of what it is doing.

The Duty of Care that’s still waiting

There is one more piece to this picture. The government completed consultation on a Digital Duty of Care in December 2025 — three days before the ban took effect. That consultation closed. The legislation has not been introduced.

The Duty of Care is the instrument that would actually address the design harm problem. It would require platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent foreseeable harms, shifting responsibility from individuals to platforms. It is the instrument the Commissioner’s regulatory work was always pointing toward.

It is sitting unintroduced while the accounts-based ban is being enforced.

The unintended consequences nobody planned for

Guardian Australia’s technology reporter Josh Taylor has documented several unintended consequences of the ban that reinforce the design argument. Most striking: teenagers who have managed to bypass age checks are no longer given the safety features platforms built specifically for teen accounts — because their account now appears to belong to an adult.

The ban has inadvertently stripped the most vulnerable users of the very protections designed for them. Taylor also revealed that the federal government’s anti-vaping campaign targeting teenagers had to be diverted away from the banned social media platforms to gaming and audio platforms — on the same day research found vaping could cause cancer. These are not teething problems. They are structural consequences of an accounts-based approach that doesn’t touch the underlying architecture.

What this means for children

I want to be clear about something. I am not saying the ban is simply wrong. Children have been exposed to genuine harms on these platforms — harms that two US juries have now confirmed the companies knew about and chose not to adequately address.

But children also have digital rights — to participate, access information, connect, learn and create. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Australia is a signatory, affirms those rights explicitly in digital environments.

The slot machine architecture of social media is a genuine harm to children. The evidence — now including two jury verdicts and a growing body of peer-reviewed research — supports that framing. But children who turn 16 tomorrow will walk from total exclusion into unrestricted access to the same unreformed platforms, with no graduated pathway, no enhanced digital literacy, and no legal requirement on platforms to have changed the design features that caused the harm in the first place.

The ban delayed the exposure. It did not address the cause.

The week everything converged

In the same week: a legislative rule acknowledged design harm. Two US juries found liability for platform design and content failures. A compliance report showed the harm measure hasn’t moved. And a major peer-reviewed study confirmed the mental health causal claim the ban was built on remains unestablished.

The intellectual foundation of the ban has shifted — from an unproven mental health argument to a design harm argument the evidence actually supports. That shift is real and it matters.

But the instrument that would have acted on it died when its sponsor lost her seat in an election the ban was designed to win.

I’ve been watching this space for a long time. This week, everything that was always true about it became undeniable. I hope the public — and policymakers — are paying attention.

When Research Becomes “Big Tech Talking Points”: The Erosion of Good-faith Discourse on Social Media Regulation

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As a sociologist of technology and educator focused on digital literacy, I’ve spent years working with research on the complex relationship between young people and social media. Recently, I found myself in an online discussion that exemplifies a troubling pattern in how we debate digital policy issues in Australia.

After sharing peer-reviewed research showing that while some correlations exist between social media use and mental health outcomes, there’s limited evidence supporting a causal relationship where social media directly causes poor mental health or reduced wellbeing. I was quickly labeled as someone “shilling” for “Big Tech,” with my evidence-based positions dismissed as “talking points”.

Research points to how individuals with existing mental health challenges may gravitate toward certain types of social media use, rather than social media itself being the primary cause of these challenges. This important distinction highlights how nuanced research gets flattened into simplistic positions when policy discussions become emotionally charged.

The False Binary: Protect Kids or Support Big Tech

The current discourse around Australia’s social media age ban has created a false dichotomy: either you support sweeping restrictions or you’re somehow against protecting children. This reductive framing leaves no room for evidence-based approaches that aim to both protect young people and preserve their digital agency.

When I cite studies showing that social media use accounts for only 0.4% of the variance in well-being – findings published in reputable journals – these aren’t “industry talking points”. They’re research conclusions reached through rigorous methodology and peer review. As noted in a recent Nature article, the evidence linking social media use to mental health issues is far more equivocal than public discourse suggests.

Just look at what the research actually says: “An analysis of 3 data sets, including 355,000 adolescents, found that the association between social media use and well-being accounts for, at most, 0.4% of the variance in well-being, which the authors conclude is of ‘little practical value’. Another large study of adolescent users concluded that the association was ‘too small to merit substantial scientific discussion’. A longitudinal study that measured social media use through an app installed on participants’ mobile devices found no associations between any measures of Facebook use and loneliness or depression over time.”

The current push for age bans in Australia reveals concerning patterns in how policy is developed. Australian researchers have pointed out that much of the momentum behind these restrictions can be traced directly to Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation,” which has become influential despite its claims being disputed by experts at prestigious institutions like the London School of Economics. As Dr. Aleesha Rodriguez from the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child has observed, books that capitalise on parental anxieties should not drive national policy decisions, especially when they bypass evidence-based approaches and committee recommendations. The government’s announcement of social media age restrictions came before the Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society even issued its interim report, raising questions about the role of evidence in this policy development process. You’ll see that the final report came out on the 18th November 2024 and it did not recommend the implementation of age bans.

The Power of Emotional Appeals vs. Research Findings

But in our current climate, sharing such research and insights is met with accusations of being “in the pockets of Big Tech” or having “industry interference” – rhetorical devices designed to discredit without engaging with the substance of the evidence. This pattern of discourse relies heavily on emotional appeals and anecdotes to overwhelm research findings. “Children’s wellbeing (and lives) are at stake,” advocates declare, implying that questioning the effectiveness of age bans is equivalent to devaluing children’s safety.

These emotional appeals are powerful because they tap into genuine parental anxieties. In their public communications, advocates may employ evocative language (“stranglehold,” “insidious,” “shame on them all”) and frame the debate as a moral binary: either you support age bans or you’re effectively siding with “Big Tech” against children’s interests. This rhetorical approach creates a false dichotomy where nuanced research positions are dismissed as “industry talking points” without engaging with the substance of the evidence.

By contrast, research on children’s digital experiences draws on diverse empirical methods—including large-scale surveys, in-depth qualitative studies, longitudinal tracking, and co-design work with children themselves. This comprehensive approach captures a wide range of social experiences across different demographics and contexts. Such research undergoes rigorous peer review, requiring methodological transparency and critical evaluation before publication.

Importantly, the research landscape itself contains diverse perspectives and interpretations. Even within academic disciplines studying digital youth, researchers may disagree about the significance of findings, methodological approaches, and policy implications. Some researchers emphasise potential harms and advocate for stronger protections, while others highlight benefits and concerns about digital exclusion. This diversity of expert opinion reflects the complex nature of children’s digital engagement rather than undermining the value of research-informed approaches.

What most researchers do agree on is that the evidence doesn’t support simplistic narratives. The findings indicate that while correlations exist between social media use and well-being, many other factors play more significant roles, and the relationships are often bidirectional and context-dependent.

Policy decisions affecting millions of young Australians deserve more than anxiety-driven responses – they require careful consideration of evidence, unintended consequences, and alternative approaches that address both the genuine concerns of parents and the established digital rights of children.

When Nuance Gets Lost: The Digital Duty of Care Example

The irony is that I and many researchers share the same core concern as advocates: we want digital environments that are safer for young people. Where we differ is in how to achieve this goal effectively.

Australia’s Digital Duty of Care bill proposal, which has received far less media attention than the age ban, represents a more evidence-based approach to improving online safety. You can also see its much slower movement through parliament. It focuses on making platforms safer by design rather than simply restricting access.

This legislation, developed through extensive consultation and aligned with comparable measures in the UK and EU, places responsibility on platforms to proactively prevent online harms. Yet because it lacks the emotional appeal of “keeping kids off social media”, it hasn’t captured public imagination in the same way.

I support making digital environments safer for young people. Following the intention of this policy, research suggests this is better accomplished through platform design requirements, digital literacy education, and appropriate safeguards rather than blanket age bans that may create unintended consequences.

The Overlooked Complexities

Lost in the simplified discourse are crucial considerations that research brings to light:

  1. Digital equity concerns: Age restrictions disproportionately impact young people in regional and remote areas who rely on social media for educational resources and social connection.
  2. Support for marginalised youth: For many LGBTQI+ young people and others who feel isolated in their physical communities, online spaces provide crucial support networks.
  3. Technical realities: The age verification technologies being proposed have significant technical limitations, with biometric age estimation showing concerning accuracy gaps for young teenagers and disparities across demographic groups.
  4. Platform compliance challenges: As we’ve seen with Meta’s pushback against EU regulations, we can’t assume platforms will simply comply with national regulations they see as burdensome for smaller markets.
  5. Educational implications: Schools face significant challenges in navigating restrictions that could inadvertently disrupt established educational practices that use social media platforms.

These complexities matter, not because they invalidate safety concerns, but because addressing them is essential to developing effective policy that truly serves young people’s interests.

Unintended Consequences of Age Verification Systems

A significant oversight in the age ban debate is how age verification technologies will inevitably impact all users—not just children. The government’s Age Assurance Technology Trial, while focused on “evaluating the effectiveness, maturity, and readiness” of these technologies, does not adequately address the far-reaching implications for adult digital access.

These systems, once implemented, create barriers for everyone—not just children. Adults who lack standard government-issued ID, have limited digital literacy, use shared devices, or have privacy concerns may find themselves effectively locked out of digital spaces. This particularly affects already marginalised groups: elderly people, rural and remote communities, people with disabilities, individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and those with non-traditional documentation.

Age verification systems that rely on biometric data, ID scanning, or credit card verification raise serious privacy concerns that extend well beyond children’s safety. Once these surveillance infrastructures are established for “protecting children,” they create permanent digital checkpoints that normalise identity verification for increasingly basic online activities. The same parents advocating for these protections may not anticipate how these systems will affect their own digital autonomy and privacy.

Moreover, the technical limitations of age verification technologies create a false sense of security. Current systems struggle with accuracy, particularly for users with certain disabilities, those from diverse ethnic backgrounds, or individuals whose appearance doesn’t match algorithmic expectations. Rather than creating safe digital environments through design and platform responsibility, age verification shifts the burden to individual users while potentially exposing their sensitive personal data to additional security risks.

Children’s Rights in the Digital Environment

What’s frequently missing from this debate is recognition of children’s established rights in digital spaces. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s General Comment No. 25 (2021) specifically addresses children’s rights in relation to the digital environment. This authoritative interpretation clarifies that children have legitimate rights to:

  • Access information and express themselves online (Articles 13 and 17)
  • Privacy and protection of their data (Article 16)
  • Freedom of association and peaceful assembly in digital spaces (Article 15)
  • Participation in cultural life and play through digital means (Article 31)
  • Education that includes digital literacy (Article 28)

The UN framework emphasises that the digital environment “affords new opportunities for the realization of children’s rights” while acknowledging the need for appropriate protections. It specifically notes that children themselves report that digital technologies are “vital to their current lives and to their future.”

This rights-based framework fundamentally challenges the premise that children should simply be excluded from digital spaces until they reach an arbitrary age threshold. Instead, it calls for balancing protection with participation and recognising children’s evolving capacities.

The Australian context

In Australia, the digital rights of children are recognised and protected, encompassing privacy, safety, and access to information, with organisations like the eSafety Commissioner and the Alannah & Madeline Foundation playing key roles in advocacy and research. 

Here’s a more detailed breakdown of the digital rights of children in Australia:

Key Rights and Protections: 

  • Privacy: Children have the right to privacy in the digital environment, which is protected by the Privacy Act 1988. 
  • Safety: The eSafety Commissioner works to protect children from online harms like cyberbullying, grooming, and exposure to harmful content. 
  • Access to Information: Children have the right to access reliable and age-appropriate information online. 
  • Freedom of Expression: Children have the right to express themselves online, but this right must be balanced with the need to protect them from harm. 
  • Participation: Children have the right to participate in online activities and to have their views heard, especially in matters that affect them. 

Relevant Organisations and Initiatives: 

  • eSafety Commissioner: This government agency is responsible for promoting online safety and protecting children from online harms. 
  • Alannah & Madeline Foundation: This organisation advocates for children’s rights online and works to create a safer online environment for children. 
  • Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child: This research centre focuses on creating positive digital childhoods for all Australian children. 
  • UNCRC General Comment No. 25: This document outlines the rights of the child in relation to the digital environment and provides guidance for governments and other actors. 
  • The Digital Child: A research and advocacy organisation focused on children’s digital rights and wellbeing. 
  • UNICEF Australia: Collaborates with the Digital Child centre to promote digital wellbeing for young children. 
  • Digital Rights Watch: An organization that works to ensure fairness, freedoms and fundamental rights for all people who engage in the digital world. 

Key Issues and Challenges: 

  • Online Safety: Protecting children from online harms like cyberbullying, grooming, and exposure to harmful content is a major concern. 
  • Privacy: Balancing the need to protect children’s privacy with the need for parents and caregivers to monitor their online activity is a complex issue. 
  • Age Verification: Ensuring that children are not exposed to age-inappropriate content and that they 
    are not targeted by online services is important. 
  • Misinformation and Disinformation: Children are vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation online, and it’s important to equip them with the skills to identify and avoid it. 
  • Technology-Facilitated Abuse: Children can be victims of technology-facilitated abuse (TFA) in the context of domestic and family violence, and it’s important to address this issue. 
  • Parental Rights vs. Children’s Privacy: The extent to which parents can monitor their children’s online activity is a complex issue with legal implications. 
  • Digital Literacy: It’s important to support digital literacy initiatives that encourage and empower children to take further responsibility for their online safety. 

Alternative Approaches: A Better Children’s Internet
Australian researchers are offering a more constructive approach to online safety than blanket age restrictions. In a timely article, researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child explain that while they understand the concerns motivating the Australian Government’s decision to ban children under 16 from creating social media accounts, they believe this approach “undermines the reality that children are growing up in a digital world”.
They have developed a “Manifesto for a Better Children’s Internet” that acknowledges both the benefits and risks of digital engagement while focusing on practical improvements. They argue that “rather than banning young people’s access to social media platforms, the Australian Government should invest, both financially and socially, in developing Australia’s capacity as a global leader in producing and supporting high-quality online products and services for children and young people.”

Their framework includes several key recommendations:

Standards for high-quality digital experiences – Developing clear quality standards for digital products and services aimed at children, with input from multiple stakeholders including children themselves.
Slow design and consultation with children – Involving children and families in the design process rather than using them as “testing markets” for products and services.
Child-centered regulation and policy – Creating appropriate “guardrails” through regulatory guidelines developed with input from children, carers, families, educators and experts.
Media literacy policy and programs – Investing in media literacy education for both children and parents to develop the skills needed to navigate digital environments safely and productively.

This approach acknowledges that the internet “has enhanced children’s lives in many ways” while recognising it “was not designed with children in mind.” Rather than simply restricting access, it focuses on redesigning digital spaces to better serve young people’s needs and respecting their agency in the process.
This framework offers a promising middle path between unrestricted access and blanket prohibitions, focusing on improvement rather than exclusion.

Moving Forward: Good faith engagement

What would a more productive discourse look like? Rather than dividing positions into “protectors of children” versus “Big Tech shills,” we need approaches that:

  • Recognise children’s established rights: Digital policy should acknowledge children’s legitimate rights to information, expression, association, privacy, and participation as articulated in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
  • Engage with the full evidence base: This includes both research on potential harms and studies showing limited correlations or positive benefits, with a commitment to understanding the methodological strengths and limitations of different studies.
  • Center young people’s voices: The young people affected by these policies have valuable perspectives that deserve genuine consideration, not dismissal as naive or manipulated.
  • Acknowledge trade-offs: Every policy approach involves trade-offs between protection, privacy, and participation rights. Pretending otherwise doesn’t serve anyone.
  • Focus on effective solutions: Research suggests a combination of platform design improvements, digital literacy education, and more nuanced moderation systems may be more effective than simply setting age limits.
  • Maintain good faith dialogue: Rather than using emotional appeals and moral accusations to shut down debate, all participants should approach these discussions with the genuine belief that others share the concern for children’s wellbeing, even when they disagree about methods.

This approach would move us beyond simplistic binaries and rhetorical tactics toward policies that genuinely serve children’s best interests in all their complexity.

I remain committed to research-informed approaches to making digital spaces safer for young people. This doesn’t mean blindly defending the status quo, but rather advocating for solutions that address the real complexities of young people’s digital lives while respecting their established rights.

The Digital Duty of Care legislation offers a promising framework that places responsibility on platforms to make their services safer for all users through design choices, risk assessment, and mitigation strategies. Combined with robust digital literacy education and appropriate parental controls, this represents a more comprehensive approach than age restrictions alone.

As the social media landscape continues to evolve, maintaining evidence-based discourse matters more than ever. Dismissing research as “talking points” doesn’t advance the conversation – it closes it down just when we need it most.

Young Australians deserve digital policies crafted through careful consideration of evidence, informed by young people’s perspectives, and grounded in their established rights. That’s not a “Big Tech talking point” – it’s responsible, ethical policymaking that centres the needs and interests of the very people these policies aim to serve.

Thinking Through Meta’s Fact-Checking Changes: What It Means for Australia

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Please note, this blog is being actively updated as position pieces and insightful commentary arise. Last update 10 January 5pm AEST.

When I saw Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement yesterday about Meta ending their third-party fact-checking program in favour of a community-based system, my first thought was naturally about its implications for Australia given that many of my colleagues over the years have researched the Australian media sphere and misinformation on social media.

My second thought was, what is this agenda really about? This skepticism about Meta’s motives is shared by major advocacy organisations. Common Sense Media, a leading voice on kids’ digital wellbeing, issued a scathing response, describing the changes as a ‘transparent attempt to curry favour with incoming political power brokers’ and pointing to Meta’s recent actions killing key federal legislation to protect kids online through ‘flanks of lobbyists and the promise of a new data center in Louisiana’ (Common Sense Media, 2025). Listening to Zuckerberg, what I heard amongst all the Silicon Valley speak was something that they didn’t include in the written text that I thought may be the key.

At about 4 minutes in Mark drops the following very telling spin: “Finally we are going to work with president Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalising censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in this country. The only way we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government. And that’s why it’s been so difficult in the past 4 years when even the US government has pushed for censorship. By going after us and other American companies it has emboldened other governments to go even further.”

I could give you an analysis of this statement, but I think it stands for itself if you just remove the spin and observe that the European Digital Services Act is intended to provide positive outcomes for people and while it does constrain what Meta can do, maybe that is a good thing. You can see the EU commission response here pushing back on the interpretation of content moderation requirements as censorship, which was a definite spin coming from Meta’s statement, mouthpieced by Mark (whoever wrote this piece actually did this with a straight face?).

In some insightful commentary, Daphne Keller, Director, Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford Cyber Policy Center posts on LinkedIn that Zuckerberg’s open declaration of Meta’s antagonistic stance towards EU regulators may well encourage an equal and opposite response from regulators, cultivating their worst crackdown tendencies and marginalising those who wish to be careful.

Also, there is clearly a fundamental conflict between the Trump administration’s approach to technology regulation, Silicon Valley’s claims of innovation, the power of the ‘tech demagogues’ and any meaningful duty of care towards platform users (let alone acknowledgement of legislation in different national jurisdictions). Let us not forget Elon Musk and the kitchen sink meme upon Trump’s election win. There is also likely the need for a repositioning from Meta considering their history with banning Trump during the attack on the US Capitol. This analysis by writers for PolitiFact, one of the US 3rd party fact-checking organisations, while depressing, is insightful on this aspect of the situation.

However commentary from prominent social media researcher, danah boyd, and Siva Vaidhyanathan speak to perhaps the personal motivations at play here and point to a wobbling spinning top of desire for political alignment, a seeking of power, motivations not connected to money, and perhaps an outsized or cartoonish expression of competitive masculinity within the techbro elite. This is where the commentary gets personal and starts to incorporate the charismatic approach of social media company CEOs such as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, whose companies appear to be more like a personal play toy for their various ambitions.

As media requests started coming in and discussions began among my colleagues, I have taken the scope of this discussion away from a ‘culture shift’ – the term of the day – and considered specifically the ways that we need to carefully consider what this shift means for how Australians access and share credible information about political issues on social media.

Understanding the Change

Currently in Australia, Meta partners with fact-checking organisations including AFP and AAP FactCheck. These organisations provide structured, methodical verification of claims that circulate on Meta’s platforms, helping establish a baseline of credible information that can inform public discussion. Then there is RMIT Lookout, accredited by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) based at Poynter.

While Meta frames fact-checking as something that can be readily replaced by community input, the reality of professional fact-checking involves complex verification processes, collaborative networks, and sophisticated tools. Professional fact-checkers have established relationships with deep fake detection experts and digital forensics specialists who can be quickly consulted on complex cases. Until recently, they also had access to Meta’s CrowdTangle tool, which allowed them to track and analyse how content spreads across the platform. These kinds of editorial decisions require not just expertise and established processes, but access to tools and expert networks that are difficult to replicate consistently by community moderation.

The shift to a Community Notes system represents a significant change from this professional approach. Meta currently partners with certified fact-checkers through the non-partisan International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), which this open letter to Zuckerberg shows required all fact-checking partners to meet strict nonpartisanship standards. Instead of this reputable and standards based verification approach, this new system would rely on user communities to identify and provide context for potential misinformation.

This shift reflects a concerning pattern identified in recent research. A study published in Social Media + Society shows that platforms consistently prioritise managing content visibility over ensuring information accuracy (Cotter et al., 2022). By focusing on how content is displayed rather than verifying its accuracy, platforms treat misinformation primarily as a visibility problem rather than an information quality challenge. This approach fundamentally misunderstands the complexity of fact-checking and verification processes.

Recent research from the Prosocial Design Network offers insight into Community Notes’ effectiveness in addressing the visibility issue: while they can reduce retweets of flagged posts by 50-60%, their delayed appearance (usually after 80% of reshares have occurred) means they only reduce overall sharing of misleading posts by about 10%. The system shows promise but faces inherent scalability challenges due to its reliance on volunteers (Prosocial Design Network, 2025).

However, as The Advocate reports, the shift to Community Notes comes alongside broader changes to content moderation policies that go beyond just managing misinformation. These changes also include significant alterations to hate speech policies, raising concerns about protections for vulnerable communities (Wiggins, 2025).

The shift from professional fact-checking to community moderation represents more than just a change in process – it signals a fundamental retreat from platform responsibility for maintaining safe, credible information environments and changes how online information is verified and controlled. By replacing expert systems with user-led tools like Community Notes, Meta is effectively transferring responsibility for information quality from trained professionals to its user base – a shift that raises serious questions about the future of truth and accountability in our digital public spaces.

What is the Community Notes system?

The Community Notes system in X operates through a specific process: users who meet initial eligibility criteria (having accounts at least six months old, verified phone numbers, and no recent rule violations) can contribute contextual notes to any post. However, the ability to rate notes requires users to first demonstrate consistent, thoughtful rating behavior that earns them “rating impact.” Notes only become visible when rated ‘helpful’ by enough users who have previously disagreed in their note-rating patterns – a unique approach designed to surface consensus across different viewpoints.

As Queensland University of Technology’s Dr Tim Graham points out, this consensus-based approach is fundamentally different from professional fact-checking: ‘Community Notes is billed as a panacea… but when you get into the nitty-gritty the system fails to get a consensus most of the time. [Consensus] is a fundamental misreading of truth and how fact checking works’ (ABC News, 2025).

The system’s design, while aimed at preventing bias, creates additional structural challenges. Coordinated groups can potentially game the system by deliberately creating artificial disagreement patterns in their rating histories to control which notes become visible. Furthermore, the system’s reliance on volunteer labour means coverage tends to skew toward viral political content while technical misinformation or regional issues often lack sufficient qualified raters. The absence of expertise verification also means that authoritative-sounding but subtly inaccurate notes can gain visibility if they appeal to multiple viewpoints.

Research highlights significant limitations: analysis from The Washington Post found only 7.7% of proposed notes actually appeared on posts, while the Centre for Countering Digital Hate found 74% of accurate notes on misleading political posts never reached the consensus needed for display. The system faces particular challenges with timing – notes typically take several hours to achieve consensus and become visible. As Dr Graham notes, ‘The damage is already done in an hour or two, once you get into five hours, a day, two days, everyone moves on’ (ABC News, 2025).

As Meta looks to emulate X’s (formerly Twitter) Community Notes system, the results so far reveal clear strengths and weaknesses. While notes excel at correcting clear factual errors like misattributed images or incorrect statistics, they struggle with more nuanced claims or context-dependent situations. The system has shown vulnerabilities including susceptibility to coordinated action by groups of users, inconsistent coverage across different types of content, and varying quality of notes that sometimes lean more toward opinion than fact. During fast-moving events where rapid fact-checking is crucial, these limitations become particularly apparent.

Meta’s proposed Community Notes feature represents both opportunity and risk. While Daphne Keller sees positive potential in this approach – which builds on successful models of social curation like Wikipedia – she raises crucial concerns about its implementation. Meta’s decision to use Community Notes as a replacement for professional fact-checking, rather than a complement to it, while simultaneously reducing other safeguards against hate speech, puts enormous pressure on the system to perform. This strategic choice, Keller argues, could put Meta and this model into the firing line and may discourage other platforms from experimenting with similar collaborative moderation tools, even as the need for innovative approaches to content moderation grows.

The effectiveness of Meta’s implementation will ultimately depend on:

  • The diversity and representativeness of contributors, including robust systems to prevent domination by any particular viewpoint or group
  • Technical safeguards against manipulation by coordinated groups
  • Significantly faster response times to emerging misinformation than currently seen on X
  • Clear accountability measures and transparency about note visibility decisions
  • Robust mechanisms to verify expertise and maintain quality in specialised topic areas

So Does Fact Checking matter?

The Prosocial Design Network’s research reveals that fact-checking is just one tool in a broader kit of misinformation interventions. Their evidence review suggests that other approaches, such as accuracy prompts and pre-bunking, can be more effective than fact-checking alone in reducing misinformation spread (Prosocial Design Network, 2025). This raises an important question about Meta’s shift away from professional fact-checking: how much does fact-checking actually matter?

This is actually an interesting question about whether having 3rd party fact checking actually matters, ie that it impacts upon news consumers and social media content consumers perception and assessment of information credibility and authenticity. We know from the impacts of misinformation surrounding the COVID19 vaccination and in exacerbating political polarisation, alongside the increasing prevalence of AI generated content online, that we WANT it to matter. But does fact checking impress upon people that the information/content they are consuming is factual and credible or not?

Recent research published in Digital Journalism (Carson et al., 2022) found that third-party fact-checking can actually decrease trust in news stories – a concerning “backfire effect” that suggests we need to carefully consider how fact-checking is implemented. The study, which examined Australian news consumers, found that when readers were presented with a fact-check of a political claim, their trust in the original news story decreased, regardless of their political leanings or the media outlet involved.

Carson et al.’s research demonstrates that news audiences may not clearly distinguish between a politician’s false claims within a news story and the news reporting itself. This means that when a fact-check identifies a false claim, readers’ distrust can spread to the entire story and news outlet, rather than being limited to the politician making the false statement. This finding is particularly relevant as Meta shifts away from professional fact-checkers to a community-based system.

Meta’s shift away from fact-checking comes alongside deeply concerning changes to content moderation policies. As documented by the Platform Governance Archive, Meta has significantly rewritten its Community Guidelines, removing crucial protections against hate speech and reframing these rules as “hateful conduct” policies. I think Matt Schneider articulates the concerns this raises best in his LinkedIn post on the topic. He argues that these changes explicitly permit previously restricted content, particularly harmful speech targeting gender, sexual orientation, and minority groups. Most alarming is his observation on the explicit permission of “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation” and allowing comparisons of women to “household objects or property” (Schneider, 2025).

These policy changes have dire implications for vulnerable communities. According to Platformer’s January 2025 reporting, Meta has explicitly removed protections against dehumanising speech targeting transgender people, women, and immigrants. The platform now allows posts denying trans people’s existence, comparing them to objects rather than people, and making allegations of mental illness based on gender identity or sexual orientation. This shift comes at a particularly dangerous time – when over 550 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were introduced in state legislatures last year in the US, 40 became law, and hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people reached record levels, with more than 2,800 incidents reported in 2023 alone.

These changes represent more than just a technical policy shift – they signal a troubling retreat from platform responsibility that could have serious consequences for vulnerable communities. This context is crucial – the move away from professional fact-checking isn’t happening in isolation, but as part of a broader and potentially harmful shift in how Meta approaches content moderation and platform governance, seemingly prioritising political expediency over user safety and dignified public discourse.

A Pattern of Platform Responsibility

This isn’t the first time Meta has attempted to dodge platform responsibility. As documented in WIRED’s investigation of Facebook’s response to the 2016 election crisis (Thompson & Vogelstein, 2018), the company has a pattern of initially denying accountability for content moderation issues, only acknowledging responsibility after significant pressure. While Meta continues to invoke Section 230 protections and claim it’s ‘just a platform,’ history shows that its algorithmic choices and content moderation policies actively shape public discourse.

The current retreat from professional fact-checking echoes previous instances where Facebook prioritised growth and engagement over safety and accuracy. Just as the company eventually had to acknowledge its role in election misinformation, Meta needs to recognise that with its unprecedented reach comes unprecedented responsibility. The solutions to addressing fake news, AI-generated content, deep fakes, and hate speech cannot come from community moderation alone – they require platform-level commitment and investment.

Beyond “Free Speech”

Using the euphemism of a ‘cultural shift’ to justify kiboshing their years of work bringing in fact checking, Zuckerberg says that their concern now is on increasing ‘speech’. However free speech exists within an ecosystem of other rights and responsibilities. Meta’s announcement focuses heavily on reducing restrictions in the name of free expression, but as researchers at Cornell’s CAT Lab note, the ability to participate meaningfully in online spaces involves more than just the freedom to speak – it requires the freedom to form connections and engage in collective action without fear of harassment or intimidation (Matias & Gilbert, 2024).

While Meta frames these changes as expanding free speech, the real challenge is ensuring everyone can participate meaningfully in online discourse. When misinformation spreads unchecked, or when harassment goes unmoderated, it can effectively prevent certain groups from participating in public debate. Free expression isn’t just about removing restrictions – it’s about creating an environment where all voices can be heard and verified information can reach its audience.

The Challenge of Shared Information

Meta’s move reflects what researchers identify as a “marketplace of ideas” approach where platforms “prioritise free speech and more speech to correct the record” (Cotter et al., 2022). While this might seem reasonable, it creates practical challenges for public discussion. When different groups encounter radically different versions of political information and news, it becomes harder to have meaningful discussions about important issues.

Meta’s shift toward more “personalised” political content could create information asymmetries, where users see vastly different versions of political discussions based on their existing views and engagement patterns. This could make it harder for users to encounter diverse perspectives or verify claims across different communities, especially during election periods. Public discussion requires some degree of shared information – when different groups of voters are seeing fundamentally different versions of political issues, it becomes more challenging to engage in informed debate.

The Australian Context

As the authors of the open letter from fact-checking organisations around the world observes, Meta’s plan to end the fact-checking program in 2025 applies only to the United States, for now. They note however that Meta has similar programs in more than 100 countries covering diverse political systems and stages of development. Hauntingly, they suggest that if Meta decides to stop the program worldwide, it is almost certain to result in real-world harm in many places. For now, we will likely have some comparative case studies to observe the resulting impacts of the professional verses community-lead models of fact checking within the Facebook environment, but this may change at any point.

In the Australian context, timing matters. With our federal election approaching, changes to how information is verified on Meta’s platforms could affect how Australians access and share political information. While we have strong fact-checking institutions like RMIT Lookout, which operates independently, Meta’s platforms play a distinct and significant role in how many Australians encounter and share political information. Australia’s concentrated media market means that changes to Meta’s platforms can have significant effects on what information reaches Australian audiences.

Beyond Content Moderation

Rather than just managing what content is visible, platforms need to support the infrastructure that helps people access and verify credible information. The challenges we face go beyond simple content filtering – they require a comprehensive approach to building resilient information ecosystems. This means:

  • Developing better systems to identify accurate information through a combination of automated detection, expert verification, and community input. These systems need to work proactively rather than reactively, identifying potential misinformation before it goes viral and providing real-time verification tools that users can access directly.
  • Supporting rather than undermining professional fact-checking by providing fact-checkers with better tools, resources, and platform access. This includes maintaining partnerships with accredited fact-checking organisations, ensuring transparent access to content spread data, and integrating fact-checking more deeply into platform architectures.
  • Creating tools that help bridge information divides by making verified information more accessible and engaging. This could include features that surface diverse perspectives from credible sources, tools that help users understand the context and history of viral claims, and systems that encourage cross-pollination of verified information across different communities.
  • Investing in digital literacy through both platform features and educational initiatives. This means building in-platform tools that help users evaluate information credibility, supporting external digital literacy programs, and developing resources that help users understand how information spreads online and how to verify claims they encounter.
  • Ensuring platform accountability through transparent reporting on content moderation decisions, clear appeals processes, and regular independent audits of platform practices. Without accountability measures, even the best systems can be undermined by inconsistent enforcement or political pressure.

This comprehensive approach recognises that effective content moderation isn’t just about removing harmful content – it’s about building an information environment that helps users make informed decisions and engage meaningfully with online discourse.

Looking Ahead

As we approach our federal election, these changes deserve careful attention. While Meta’s commitment to reducing over-enforcement of content moderation is understandable, we need to consider how changes to fact-checking systems might affect Australians’ ability to access credible information about political issues and engage in informed public discussion.

As the Carson et al.’s 2022 study suggests, fact-checkers could more clearly state they are fact-checking a politician’s specific claim rather than the media coverage containing it. They also recommend that journalists may need to more actively adjudicate false claims within their original reporting rather than relying solely on external fact-checkers.

The challenge isn’t just about determining what’s true or false. It’s about maintaining systems that help Australians access reliable information they can use to understand and discuss important political issues. Meta’s policy shift suggests they may be stepping back from this role just when clear, credible information is most needed.

The research evidence suggests that fact-checking, while important, needs to be implemented thoughtfully to avoid undermining trust in legitimate journalism. As we move forward, the key question isn’t just about free speech versus restriction – it’s about how we maintain the integrity of our shared democratic conversation in an increasingly fragmented digital landscape.

What can you do?

While some choose to opt out of social media platforms due to concerns about misinformation and toxicity, this isn’t always feasible or productive, especially as these challenges proliferate across multiple platforms. Given that I am an educator, it should come as no surprise that I think education is key and that I would emphasise the importance of building information and digital literacy skills and capabilities that work across all online environments.

Here are essential strategies for navigating online information:

  • Verify the source’s credibility: Check their track record, expertise, and potential biases
  • Watch for emotional manipulation: Be especially skeptical of content designed to provoke strong emotional reactions
  • Check dates and context: Old content is often recycled and presented as current news
  • Cross-reference information: Look for multiple reliable sources covering the same topic
  • Apply logical scrutiny: Ask yourself if the claim aligns with what you know about the person, organisation, or situation
  • Look for Community Notes: While not perfect, they can provide valuable additional context

This questioning is really the start point for critical thinking.

For AI-generated content and deepfakes specifically:

  • Watch for visual inconsistencies: Look closely at hands, teeth, backgrounds, and reflections
  • Check for unnatural movement in videos: Pay attention to lip synchronisation and eye movements
  • Be especially wary of crisis-related content: Deepfakes often exploit breaking news situations
  • Use reverse image searches: Tools like Google Lens can help identify manipulated images
  • Pay attention to audio quality: AI-generated voices often have subtle irregularities

The challenge of identifying synthetic media is growing as AI technology becomes more sophisticated. This makes it crucial to develop a strong understanding of current events, public figures, and social issues over time. This contextual knowledge becomes our foundation for evaluating authenticity. However, it’s important to acknowledge that building these skills takes time – and that’s okay. Critical thinking and digital literacy are ongoing practices that we develop gradually, not a checklist we need to master overnight.

While individual skills are vital, we shouldn’t shoulder this burden alone. This is precisely why Meta’s shift away from professional fact-checking and reduced content moderation safeguards is concerning. Platforms have access to advanced detection tools, professional fact-checkers, and technical expertise that complement our personal verification efforts. At the same time, we need to acknowledge that AI agents are becoming integral to how we create and make sense of online content.

Rather than seeing AI solely as a threat or feeling overwhelmed by the need to become expert evaluators, we can approach this as a gradual learning process. This includes building our understanding of AI’s capabilities and limitations over time, learning to use these tools productively while maintaining critical awareness, and recognising that our digital literacy will evolve alongside these technologies. However, this individual growth needs to be supported by robust platform policies and professional fact-checking resources – not treated as a replacement for them. As platforms experiment with systems like Community Notes, they must recognise that effective content moderation requires a multi-layered approach combining institutional resources, professional fact-checkers, and community participation.

Beyond Age Limits: What’s Missing in Australia’s Social Media Ban Discussion

~ alexiamaddox ~ Leave a comment

Why are we talking about this now?

The ABC’s recent article “The government plans to ban under-16s from social media platforms” lays out the mechanics of Australia’s proposed social media age restrictions. The timing of this announcement is significant – with only two parliamentary sitting weeks left this year and an election on the horizon, both major parties are backing this policy. This follows months of mounting pressure from parent advocacy groups like 36 Months, and builds on earlier discussions about protecting children from online pornography.
But while the article explains what will happen, there are critical questions we need to address about whether this approach will actually work – and what we might lose in the process. This isn’t just about technical implementation; it’s about understanding why we’re seeing this push now and whether it represents meaningful policy development or political opportunism.
The recent Social Media Summit in Sydney and Adelaide highlighted how this debate is being shaped. Rather than drawing on Australia’s world-leading expertise in digital youth research, the summit featured US speakers promoting what has been referred to as a “moral panic” approach. This raises questions about whether we’re developing evidence-based policy or responding to political pressures.

The Policy vs Reality

Yes, platforms will have 12 months to implement age verification systems and we will no doubt see push back from platforms on this. Yes, the definition of social media is broad enough to capture everything from TikTok to YouTube to potentially Discord and Roblox.

Additionally, the government’s ability to enforce age restrictions on global social media platforms raises significant practical and legal challenges. While Australia can pass domestic legislation requiring platforms to verify users’ ages, enforcing these rules on companies headquartered overseas is complex. Recent history shows platforms often prefer to withdraw services rather than comply with costly local regulations – consider Meta’s response to Canadian news legislation or X’s ongoing resistance to Australian eSafety Commissioner directives.

Any proposed penalties may not provide sufficient incentive for compliance, particularly given these platforms’ global revenues. Additionally, even if major platforms comply, young people could simply use VPNs to access services through other countries, or migrate to less regulated platforms beyond Australian jurisdiction.

Without international cooperation on digital platform regulation, individual countries face significant challenges in enforcing national regulations on global platforms. This raises a crucial question: will platforms invest in expensive age-verification systems for the Australian market, or will they simply restrict their services here, potentially reducing rather than enhancing digital participation options for all Australians?

What is missing from this conversation?

  1. Digital Equity: The broad scope of this ban could particularly impact:
    • Regional and remote students using these platforms for education
    • Marginalised youth who find support and community online
    • Young people using gaming platforms for social connection
  2. Privacy Trade-offs: The proposed verification systems mean either:
    • Providing ID to social media companies
    • Using facial recognition technology
    • Creating centralised age verification systems
    • All of these raise significant privacy concerns – not just for teens, but for all users.
  3. Unintended Consequences: International experience shows young people often:
    • Switch to VPNs to bypass restrictions
    • Move to less regulated platforms
    • Share accounts or find other workarounds

A More Nuanced Approach

Rather than focusing solely on age restrictions, we could be:

  • Making platforms safer by design
  • Investing in digital literacy education
  • Supporting parents and educators
  • Listening to young people’s experiences
  • Learning from international approaches like the EU’s Digital Services Act

Looking Forward

While the government’s concern about young people’s online safety is valid, and is shared by researchers, families, school teachers and young people alike, the solution isn’t as simple as setting an age limit. Young people develop digital capabilities at different rates, and their resilience online often depends more on their support networks, digital literacy, and individual circumstances than their age alone.
The Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child’s research demonstrates that some young people are highly capable of identifying and managing online risks, while others need more support – regardless of age. This is particularly important when we consider:

  • Some younger teens demonstrate sophisticated understanding of privacy settings and online safety
  • Many vulnerable teens rely on online communities for crucial support
  • Digital literacy and family support often matter more than age in online resilience
  • Regional and remote youth often develop advanced digital skills earlier out of necessity

We need approaches that protect while preserving the benefits of digital participation, recognising that arbitrary age limits may not align with individual capability and need.
This better reflects the evidence while acknowledging:

  • The validity of safety concerns
  • The complexity of digital capability development
  • The importance of context and support
  • The need for nuanced policy responses

The Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society is still to deliver its final report. Perhaps it’s worth waiting for this evidence before rushing to implement restrictions that might create more problems than they solve.

EDIT: They have now released their final report, with some excellent recommendations… and no mention of an age ban.

The Bottom Line

Protection and participation aren’t mutually exclusive. We can make online spaces safer without excluding young people from digital citizenship. But it requires more nuanced solutions than age barriers alone can provide.

Navigating the Crossroads: GenAI, Youth Online Safety, and the Future of Web3

~ alexiamaddox ~ Leave a comment

Do you feel like we’re at a crossroads in what the internet is and how we want it to be in the future? But really, I feel like we are down in the weeds, trying to thrash out the details on a minute by minute basis.

Artificial intelligence is argued to reshape our digital landscape, with it being usefully referred to as synthetic media. That stuff is surreal. But sometimes cool. Like isn’t it funny that you could take this post and ask a GenAI tool to make it more spooky, or a fairy tale. Please feel free.

There’s some interesting questions that it gives rise to. For example, how much of our online content is going to actually have any link to our material realities and at what point will it start consuming itself?… and us along with it.

Meanwhile governments continue to grapple with “old” media formats of Web 2.0 and protecting youth online (a risk versus harm debate as danah boyd usefully points out). The intersection of technology and society has never been more complex or consequential. As we stand at this pivotal point, let’s ensure that we are spicing up our opinions about policy and emerging tech trends with expert perspectives.

A shocking perspective, I know. It’s all very emotive, political and important to talk about keeping our kids safe online, however I just wanted to flag a few things. For the debate around the child ban on social media being bandied around by the Australian government currently, I have appreciated the informed commentary by academics and advocates, Tama Leaver, Johnathon Hutchinson and Justine Humphry. If you want to really look at a balanced perspective, they offer it. Just remember that children have digital rights too … and also that if the ban is not enforceable, what impact will it actually have?

For myself, I’ve spent the last year putting all my writing energy into a Web3 case study that unpacks what people care about in the online environment and what the implications are of this for the future of the internet. You ‘ll be able to read all about this from November in my forthcoming book “Insider and Outsider Cultures in Web3″ with Emerald. It was a labour of love and is essentially my wrap up of the last 10 years of research practice talking blockchain, crypto and decentralised technologies pushing at our digital frontiers.

More on this later, this is just a taster post to say, ‘still kicking here’. But I’m probably a bit too busy looking at the impacts of GenAI tools in education and in our schools.