Australia banned kids from social media. Now what?

When Australian policymakers began discussing social media age restrictions in 2024, Amanda Third was part of the Australian Child Rights Task Force that co-authored an open letter calling on the government to center children’s needs, rights, and aspirations in the legislation they were proposing. After playing a role in the public debate about the new law, she now sits on the expert advisory board overseeing its scientific evaluation.

In this Q&A, we ask for Amanda’s perspective. As countries around the world consider similar legislation, the Australian law might be a warning to heed rather than a template to follow.

The new law has an important backstory. Australia had been struggling to regulate social media companies ever since passing a 2021 law requiring large digital platforms to pay domestic news publishers for their content. In 2024, Meta declined to renew its agreements under that law, and legacy media giant News Corp subsequently launched “Let Them Be Kids,” a nationwide campaign to ban children under 16 from social media. The ensuing legislative process was fast, emotionally resonant, and offered a simple solution to a complex problem. In her research, Amanda argues that the rush to legislate was “regulatory theatre,” using “the figure of the public child” to generate political momentum while sidelining both the evidence base and children’s own voices. With governments in Europe and beyond now treating Australia as their model, getting those lessons right matters.

Question: What’s the critical issue?

Amanda Third: Social media bans have gone viral: Currently, 42 countries around the world have either enacted or are considering similar legislation.

While bans are an incredibly seductive idea — because they promise to resolve the issues associated with children’s digital media use once and for all — there isn’t evidence about whether bans can or can’t work. Decision-makers will need to wait for the results that come out of the eSafety Commissioner’s two-year evaluation of the implementation of the new legislation to have that evidence.

At the time the legislation was introduced to the Australian parliament, over 140 experts expressed concern that removing children from social media may not be the best way to genuinely hold platforms to account for children’s rights and wellbeing, because they potentially remove the incentive for platforms to design for children. Experts also expressed concern that age-based restrictions would prevent children from accessing a range of benefits associated with social media use, and that they may have a range of other unintended consequences that intensify the challenges children face online, rather than solve them. And, perhaps most importantly as decision-makers move to introduce stronger regulation — which is sorely needed — they need to be wary of regulating in the name of an abstract idea about who children are (what I call, following Robbie Gilligan, the “public child”) and instead take the time to consult with living, breathing children about the benefits and harms they experience on social media. Doing so will ensure that regulation can genuinely respond to children’s needs, rights, and aspirations.

Q: What are people getting wrong?

Amanda: Governments, NGOs, parents, educators, and children themselves want children to be much safer than they currently are. And stronger regulation plays a critical part in achieving that. But as decision-makers move to better protect children online, we need to resist the impulse to legislate from a place of deep anxiety.

What we haven’t thought about carefully enough as a society is what we want for our children. It’s a good thing to want to protect them from harm. But the conversation that we keep failing to have is: What does an optimal experience for children online actually look like? If we could have any kind of online world for our children, what would we build? What would they tell us to build?

For example, children use social media as the key way they learn about, organize, and take action on the issues that they care about. At a time when faith in democracy is declining around the world, when children and young people say that adult decision-makers aren’t listening to their concerns about the issues that confront the planet, when young people are saying they’re not disengaged from politics — but that they feel alienated from democratic decision-making processes — I have really big questions about how removing their right to access a key mechanism that facilitates their civic and political participation serves children’s best interests, both now and into the future.

In addition to preventing children’s exposure to harm, decision-makers need to be guided by a holistic and positive vision about what the next generation needs to support their full and proper development — as individuals and as a collective. The problem, as I see it, is thus a failure of imagination.

Q: What research is there?

Amanda: A lot of people around the world are doing high-quality work to understand children’s digital practices. That’s obviously something that we specialise in with our work at the Young and Resilient Research Centre at Western Sydney University.

I also look to the Digital Futures for Children centre, led by Sonia Livingstone at the London School of Economics. Jess Piotrowski‘s lab at the University of Amsterdam is doing really nice work around the kinds of platform features that are harmful, which could help governments regulate harmful features as opposed to banning platforms. Amy Orben Buckley at the University of Cambridge is doing high quality quantitative research about psychological impacts and their drivers. Andy Przybylski at the University of Oxford and Jeff Hancock at the Stanford Social Media Lab are doing similar work. Of course, the work of the Connected Learning Alliance takes a very child-centered approach. And the Center for Scholars & Storytellers, run by Yalda Uhls, is trying to find mechanisms for young people to have a platform on some of these issues.

These are all entities that have a very expansive view of the challenges and are thinking about how to bring the science to bear in constructive ways, with young people’s insights and experiences at the center of their approaches.

That said, scholars and decision-makers internationally face some big challenges in realising the ideal of evidence-based policy. Often the evidence base can’t keep pace with public concerns about this issue, or it hasn’t anticipated the questions that are being asked. Decision-makers still need to be able to formulate responses when public concerns reach a peak. And they need ways to draw on the evidence to decide whether and how to act. So, around the world, we urgently need better processes for translating evidence into policy and practice. How, for example, might scholars come together to consider the existing evidence, distill it into recommendations, and share those with decision-makers of various kinds? We need scholars around the world to work collaboratively to activate the evidence base to support good, practical outcomes for children online.

Q: What should we be doing?

Amanda: As nations move to strengthen social media regulation, they need to think carefully about how to best hold technology platforms to account for their responsibilities to care for children in proprietary spaces. Regulation should ideally incentivise platforms to center children’s needs and rights. For example, regulation could mandate safety and privacy by design, a duty of care for children, robust data protection and streamlined reporting mechanisms for children, or it could prompt platforms to rethink their business models.

Evidence shows that some platform features are more harmful than others, like infinite feeds, gambling features, or algorithms that serve up violent or sexually explicit material. It would be fantastic if regulators could draw down on this evidence base to develop technical standards that prevent children’s exposure to those features that are known to be more harmful. This would incentivise platforms to design out these features from children’s experiences online. Even better, regulators across jurisdictions could come together to agree on technical standards that could then be legislated in individual countries. In this way, regulators could begin to enact transnational digital governance mechanisms that can hold technology platforms to account at the scale at which they operate. I see a very important role for regional alliances such as ASEAN, the African Union and the European Union here, as well as for global coalitions like the Global Online Safety Regulators Network.

Crucially, we all need to orient ourselves not just to the question of protection, but of what high-quality, brilliant, inspiring and exciting participation looks like for children online. We need to be much more imaginative, much bolder, and we need to work with our children to envisage and then implement the digital world we really want.