Creating a policy group to investigate a R16 ban on social media provides the government with a perfectly designed soapbox. The findings don’t have to end up suggesting anything useful, let alone a practical course of action. Yet in the meantime, the issue enables the government to connect with anxious parents about a scary threat that’s supposedly consuming their kids, and turning their brains to mush.

The fact that there is no conclusive research that proves the alleged harms are as widespread or as addictive as claimed - let alone any evidence that a ban would be an effective response - appears to make no difference at all. This issue is all about the stoking of parental anxiety, and political virtue signaling, and how these two things feed upon each other. Across the Tasman, the polls have indicated that 77% of Australians of all political persuasions support the ban. Politically, that’s a slam dunk.

Sceptics therefore, are pushing it uphill. Yet, for the record: before treating a social media ban on under 16 year olds as our starting point, shouldn’t we begin with the kids themselves, and find out who, and how many, feel themselves to be coming under harmful social pressures online that they can’t handle? Maybe we could also ask them what they think is the main cause of their concerns. Chances are, most kids do not experience social media as being a predominantly harmful presence in their lives.

After all, in the years between 10 and 16, anxiety can exist for any number of other reasons: the onset of puberty, over-parenting or under-parenting, violence, abuse, financial hardship and rental insecurity at home, bullying problems at school, rising academic expectations, gender identity concerns, the existential threat of climate change etc.etc. No doubt, some of these worries can be made worse by social media, but sometimes they can also be alleviated by talking about them with someone else, online.

Shouldn’t we try to find out beforehand whether social media platforms truly are a prime source of the social anxieties being felt by some kids under 16? Maybe we should do that before we impose a universal age restriction on access to social media, and – along the way – shouldn’t we try to figure out the balance between the harms and the benefits? After all, we're proposing to take away a right to communicate online that is protected by our human rights law, and acknowledged by the UN. Surely, we first need to know whether the draconian action being contemplated is at all justified.

Will it work?

As to whether such a ban could ever be effective...the problem here is not simply to do with tech-savvy kids being able to get around the ban, although that should be kept in mind. (The most “addicted” kids are the ones most likely to find ways around the online access barriers.) There’s an even bigger problem. For the ban to be effective, every user of social media of any age is going to have to verify and re-verify their age, which will probably require a massive transfer of personal data to the social media platforms, thereby enabling the algorithms to target their content even more effectively than they do already.

Also, if an R16 ban is instituted...in order to be effective it will also have to carry penalties for those breaching it. How will these punishments be levied, and on whom – the kid, or the platforms? If it is to be the kid, do we really want to criminalise a child – or their parents – for them trying to get access to TikTok? And if it is to be the platform, then – again – this will make it imperative for the age verification process to be extensive, and intrusive. How many adults really want to empower Mark Zuckerberg to get his hands on even more of our personal data, to add to what he has already?

In this moral panic, what seems to be going out the window is any sense that kids need to learn how to develop their own critical faculties and discern what is or isn’t harmful online, and what is and isn’t useful, educational and positive about their use of social media. In Australia, anti-bullying campaingers have called the ban a “distraction.” Other youth groups have expressed their concern that a ban could prevent at-risk youth from accessing online mental health services.

Overall...turning social media into a bogey and making it forbidden fruit until one’s 16th birthday hardly seems like a healthy, practical or desirable way to teach kids how to become independent and responsible digital citizens.

Lovin’ Haidt

Personally, I feel a certain level of anxiety about joining any moral crusade launched by Rupert Murdoch. Meaning: in Australia – which has been the prime mover on this R16 legislation – the idea of a social media ban was initiated by Murdoch’s News Corp chain. It emerged as payback to Meta (which owns Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp) for ending its news agreements with Australian media, under that country’s news media bargaining code.

In a timeline tracked by the Crikey website, News Corp went ballistic on losing this cash flow, and ran headlines in March 2024 in News Corp publications, such as ‘Tech Tyrant Goes To War With Australia” and “ Facebook Unfriends The Nation.”

By mid-May 2024, News Corp had launched its “Let Them Be Kids” campaign that called on the Australian government to police the scourge of social media, raise the age limit on platform access to 16, and “give our kids back three years of childhood.” News Corp ran a popular online petition to that effect. South Australia then picked up the idea, and by August 2024 the Albanese government had quickly embraced it nationwide, with bi-partisan support coming from the conservative opposition led by Peter Dutton.

Not that South Australia premier Peter Malinauskas told RNZ this week about the Rupert Murdoch origin story. According to Malinauskas, some of the credit was due to his wife, after she read Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation. Much of the popular/political discourse around this issue has been shaped by Haidt’s book. Even ACT Party leader David Seymour cited Haidt’s work approvingly,while explaining why – on freedom of expression grounds – ACT would oppose an R16 legislative ban.

However, the science does not support Haidt’s blanket assertions. A panel of four experts who specialise in the effects of digital media on physical and mental health has found fault with Haidt’s work, citing his alleged “cherry picking” of research to fit his premises, and his repeated tendency to treat co-relations as causes.

Another research study found “little evidence of substantial negative associations between digital-screen engagement – measured throughout the day or particularly before bedtime – and adolescent well-being.” Ditto with this research study. It is headlined “There Is No Evidence That Associations Between Adolescents’ Digital Technology Engagement and Mental Health Problems Have Increased”:

Technology engagement had become less strongly associated with depression in the past decade, but social-media use had become more strongly associated with emotional problems. We detected no changes in five other associations or differential associations by sex. There is therefore little evidence for increases in the associations between adolescents’ technology engagement and mental health.

Moreover, a clinical researcher in the field has written this extensive, footnoted review in the Nature science journal, and in it, she points out:

...The book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science. Worse, the bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people.

Moreover:

Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers.

And finally:

These are not just our data or my opinion. Several meta-analyses and systematic reviews converge on the same message. An analysis done in 72 countries shows no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the roll-out of social media globally.. Moreover, findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the United States, has found no evidence of drastic changes associated with digital-technology use.. Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, is a gifted storyteller, but his tale is currently one searching for evidence.

Similar concerns about Haidt’s book – and with the digital absolutism that he preaches as the cause and cure of the problems faced by modern adolescents – can be found in this New York Times review, which expresses misgivings about Haidt’s readiness to blame smartphones for so many of society’s ills:

“I’ve been struggling to figure out,” Haidt writes, “what is happening to us? How is technology changing us?” His answer: “The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescents, but in all of us.” In other words: choose human purity and sanctity over the repugnant forces of technology.

That sounds like a religious conviction, not a scientific conclusion. All up, Haidt’s book is not the place to look for reliable evidence to justify a piece of legislation that would deprive young New Zealanders of fundamental rights and freedoms. Yet does this issue give politicians a convenient soapbox from which they can pretend to care about the social ills over which they preside? You bet.

Basically, this is another example of performative politics, funded by the taxpayer. Like the Treaty Principles Bill, the R16 social media ban will probably be discarded once its failings become evident - but only after it has served its real purpose, of polishing the image of the politicians promoting it.

Ya Got Trouble

The best song about moral panics comes from a musical called The Music Man, set in 1912. Listen up, parents! Here’s some sound parental advice if your kids are beginning to hang out in smoke-filled pool-rooms, and are starting to re-buckle their knickerbockers below the knee :

Needless to say, the cynical “professor” who performs this song is a professional con man, out to create a moral panic so that he can fleece the worried parents of River City. There’s a political parable in there somewhere.

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