We’ve been covering Australia’s monumentally stupid social media ban for kids under 16 since before it went into effect. We noted how dumb the whole premise was, how the rollout was an …

We’ve been covering Australia’s monumentally stupid social media ban for kids under 16 since before it went into effect. We noted how dumb the whole premise was, how the rollout was an immediate mess, how a gambling ad agency helped push the whole thing, and how two massive studies involving 125,000 kids found the entire “social media is inherently harmful” narrative doesn’t hold up.

But theory and data are one thing. Now we’re getting real-world stories of actual kids being harmed by a law that was supposedly designed to protect them. And wouldn’t you know it, the harm is falling hardest on the kids who were already most vulnerable. Just like many people predicted.

If you thought this was a good idea you are part of the harm against these kids, wake the fuck up and use your brain, this is a moral panic, you are hardly different than villagers yelling for a witch to be burned at the stake and you should feel ashamed of your stupidity.

Do better fediverse and if you are one of those people who casually waxes lyrical about denying kids access to the tools you use everyday because you honestly believe letting young people on social media is equivalent to giving them physically addictive drugs and that this place should have young people restricted from it because it is fundamentally unhealthy, please leave. You bring this place down and you undermine any sense of optimism about digital communities that motivates the rest of us to be here.

“The current research does not support the usefulness of banning kids from social media. Research studies do not suggest there is a correlation between time spent on social media and youth mental health. Further, reducing social media time does not improve mental health. This ban is likely to be a waste of time and resources. Further, it prevents opportunities to teach kids how to use social media responsibly. Like most moral panics, these kinds of efforts do harm in distracting us from real sources of youth mental health problems, mainly families in distress and failing schools. We have to remember we’ve been through this all before many times from video games, to rock and roll, books to the radio. These panics over media and technology never do anything to help kids.”

…

“Perhaps because of that balance and because many other factors are known to have a much larger impact on childhood, current evidence suggests very small effects at a population level when it comes to associations between social media/smartphone use on wellbeing e.g., McCrae et al., 2017; Vahedi & Zannella, 2021; Yoon et al.,2019). Note that not all the above reviews involve children. Also, that these are all reporting associations, not cause and effect.

“When it comes to the general use of social media and smartphones, the effects on mood or wellbeing are so small ‘that they require implausibly large behavioral changes to produce even minor mood shifts.’ (Winbush et al., 2025; p6)

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-comments-on-evidence-on-benefits-and-harms-of-social-media-and-social-media-bans-on-young-people/

https://news.ucsb.edu/2025/022293/brain-science-social-media-and-modern-moral-panic

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-media-time-does-not-increase-teenagers-mental-health-problems-study

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2026/01/26/social-media-age-bans-toxic-business-model/

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2026-01-23-expert-comment-under-16-social-media-ban-right-course

https://www.aap.org/en/patient-care/media-and-children/center-of-excellence-on-social-media-and-youth-mental-health/the-good-and-bad-of-social-media-what-research-tells-us/?srsltid=AfmBOoojcZwZjG9eD7lPvXtLXnzx9iLkcNaJ0r5jbUdJZsW-ntK8HmpM

https://www.businessinsider.com/kids-parenting-social-media-bans-meta-2026-2

https://cacbrevard.org/should-teens-be-banned-from-social-media/

https://publications.ieu.asn.au/ie-220/article1/help-or-harm?cookies=true

https://medium.com/@pradeenmania123/banning-social-media-for-teens-is-dangerous-and-doomed-to-fail-7e4946f08561

https://theconversation.com/i-research-the-harm-that-can-come-to-teenagers-on-social-media-i-dont-support-a-ban-273835

https://www.humanrights.unsw.edu.au/students/blogs/australia-social-media-ban-under-16s

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2026-01-27/a-social-media-ban-for-under-16s-would-be-popular-but-would-it-be-smart

https://www.jezebel.com/social-media-bans-teens-europe-uk-spain-greece-elon-musk-traitor-x-ai-chatbots-twitter

https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/social-media-regulation-is-being-shaped-by-fear-not-evidence

  • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    Seeing as how the linked article is an editorial, I took a look at the link from the Guardian.

    And it’s all people saying how it’s more difficult to talk to their friends now. But how? You still have a phone that dials numbers. Your parents, presumably, have the ability to access social media and obtain any numbers you need if you inadvertently failed to do so. You have email. And it’s free.

    The last line reiterates how, while this is ultimately a parental failing, the parental failing has been so astronomical and the harm to kids’ cognitive abilities and mental stability so profound that regulation is essential.

    I look forward to the day when social media use is banned globally for all underage people, and if you need more information as to why, go speak to any schoolteacher in America who can’t get their students to pay attention for more than 60 seconds, or who can’t retain information that is literally written on the board in front of them. And it’s getting worse because most parents just park their kid in front of a screen all day.

    Like recycling, this is a problem that cannot be solved by expecting individuals to act. Government regulation of social media platforms is necessary.

    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      0·
      9 days ago

      Why are you here then?

      How the hell are you going to ban all underage people from social media, who are you going to bestow complete authority over our digital identities to and who gets the authority to decide the details of how it is done?

      You are being intellectually lazy and it shows.

      if you need more information as to why, go speak to any schoolteacher in America who can’t get their students to pay attention for more than 60 seconds, or who can’t retain information that is literally written on the board in front of them.

      https://edspace.american.edu/thecfebeat/2025/01/01/the-myth-of-the-shrinking-attention-span-shed-siliman/

      Spring 2025

      A few weeks ago, a YouTube short caught my attention. The short was yet another commentary on how Gen Z supposedly can’t focus on a particular thing for more than a few seconds. I scrolled through the YouTube comments and noticed a refrain: studies prove it. Everyone’s attention span is shorter, studies prove, as we become more deeply immersed in a digital, screen-filled world (insert unknown source here). Today’s teens, studies prove, bear the brunt of this crisis with an attention span shorter than that of a goldfish.

      Something about that claim gnawed at me. After years of experience in the field of educational development, I knew the reality was more complicated than these sweeping generalizations. Where were these studies everyone kept referencing? What evidence existed behind this seemingly universal belief about our shrinking ability to focus?

      I suspected I might find only a few studies to support the claim. I was not prepared, however, to find absolutely no evidence.

      …

      The only substantive research I found came from Gloria Mark, who studied digital screen use and multitasking. Her work suggested that people today switch between screens more rapidly (see her studies on attention to screens in 2004, 2012, and 2016), but this hardly proves a universal decline in human attention. The notion that attention can be measured in simple “spans” is itself questionable: as Yoo et al. (2022) state, “there is no singular neural measure of a person’s overall attentional functioning across tasks,” adding, “attention is not a unitary construct but rather multi-faceted” (p. 782).

      • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        9 days ago

        For starters, requiring ID verification. That is something that is very obviously easy for an adult to provide and for a child not to. At the end of the day, that will be for each individual country to decide.

        Though I imagine over the long-term there will be more nuanced solutions.

        The problem of people losing their cognitive abilities is far more consequential than a small group of people having a more difficult time because they don’t socialize easily. I’m just looking at the bigger issue here.

        • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
          0·
          9 days ago

          The problem of people losing their cognitive abilities

          Cite your sources or don’t casually assert such claims

          • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            9 days ago

            I don’t exist to entertain you, and I don’t find your ideological bent worth more of my time.

            Have a pleasant evening. :)

            • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
              0·
              9 days ago

              I don’t want entertainment, I want you to think harder before you resort to kneejerk reactions and I want you to cite your sources when you make bold claims.