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://news.ucsb.edu/2025/022293/brain-science-social-media-and-modern-moral-panic
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.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://www.humanrights.unsw.edu.au/students/blogs/australia-social-media-ban-under-16s
https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/social-media-regulation-is-being-shaped-by-fear-not-evidence
Cite your sources or stop making these claims
Fill your boots, mate - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=social+media+developmental+effects
You.... sent me a search result for keywords... you want to be specific?
Nope!
Have you cited a single thing anywhere in this entire post?
Yes