Instead of a blanket ban on social media for under 16-year-olds, listening to young peoples’ ideas about how to tackle the harm would be more effective.
A US study for the National Bureau of Economic Research released in late April found that some three quarters of young people aged 14 and 15 are finding ways around the Australian Government’s social media ban. Any policy facing 75 per cent non-compliance is going to struggle and could frustrate other efforts to counter the harms that social media can cause.
There is evidence that extensive social media use can have harmful impacts. In March, two juries in the United States decided that technology companies are liable for damaging the health of young users of their platforms. In Los Angeles, a 20-year-old woman successfully sued Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, and YouTube. She argued the tech giants designed their platforms with addictive features that targeted teens and children. A jury awarded her $3 million on 25 March. Just days later, a New Mexico jury found that Meta had violated state consumer protection law, by failing to safeguard minors from online sexual predators and misleading the public about its safety. The jury ordered the company to pay $375 million in damages.
The scope for a more fertile approach to addressing these negative impacts on young people was laid out in various contributions to the latest World Happiness Report: Happiness and Social Media. The report notes three significant areas of complexities that militate against an outright ban.
First, there is no simple link between social media use and harm to young people. Patterns of internet and social media use by under 25-year-olds differ little across much of the world. But there are markedly different trends in wellbeing between developed English-speaking countries, Europe and Latin America. On a standard 10-point ‘life evaluation’ scale, wellbeing among US youth has declined 0.98 points since 2011. In Australia and New Zealand, the drop has been a smaller 0.65 points. The UK report showed a decline of 0.39 points, similar to the decline across Europe of 0.30. In contrast, under-25s in Latin America are now significantly happier, despite similar usage of social media.
The second set of complexities centres on the extent and type of usage. Across most countries, young people using social media for one to two hours a day typically have higher life satisfaction than non-users. However, more than five- or six-hours usage a day is associated with lower average levels of life satisfaction, especially for girls and for some gamers. Adolescents reporting higher social media use are also likely to experience more psychological complaints
The type of platform matters too. The Latin American evidence shows positive benefits from social connection platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook. However, algorithmic content platforms such as X (Twitter), Instagram and TikTok can have negative effects, particularly for mental health.
Third, impacts also vary according to young people’s levels of resilience and the resources available to them. Extensive social media usage is associated with significantly more psychological complaints among 11–12-year-olds than among 15–16-year-olds. Older adolescents seem relatively more resilient – possibly due to their greater emotional strength, digital experience or coping strategies.
Impacts vary across the wealth spectrum. Young people from low-SES households are the most vulnerable. Better off peers with more resources in middle-SES families, and even more so those from high-SES households, report less damage to wellbeing from extensive social media use.
Such complexities informed a comprehensive 2024 report, Social media and adolescent health, from the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). NASEM studied 287 reports in the field. It concluded that the literature did not, overall, support the conclusion that social media damages adolescent health at the population level. Rather, social media can both harm and improve adolescent health.
The mounting evidence thus paints a complex picture, one which a blanket ban, for all its good intentions, is struggling to deal with. The evidence also suggests some promising ways to progress, such as targeting heavy users and assisting at-risk groups to develop skills in coping and resilience.
And young people themselves have ideas. In the NBER study, a majority of the 835 teenagers surveyed preferred a self-limiting application – one that allows use with built-in time controls – to an outright ban. That could target the heavy use most responsible for the harms, while preserving the social value of moderate use.
Rather than treating under 16-year-olds as mugs who need to be protected, a more useful approach may well be to listen to their ideas and work with them.
Tony Ward is, since 2011, a research fellow in history at the University of Melbourne. Prior to that, he had a varied career in academia, senior executive positions in the state public service, and 17 years as principal of an economic consulting company. Tony has published two books: Sport in Australian National Identity (Routledge, 2010) and Bridging Troubled Waters: Australia and Asylum Seekers (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2017). He has also published numerous articles in academic journals, ranging across the economics of inequality, sports history, and Australian migration history. In addition, he has written several well-read pieces on The Conversation website, and contributed to several submissions to the government on economic and social impacts of public policies. Tony has a PhD in economic history from Monash University (1984).