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Australia’s teen social media ban is a flop. But there’s no joy in ‘I told you so’
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
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It was never designed to protect children
Glad to see it's not even working. Let's keep fighting aginst these evil laws
I mean, social media should be banned for everyone, not just teenagers. It's a great evil in the world today, and in a functional democracy that wasn't braindead, we should ban them outright for the mass harm and destruction they have caused.
That being said, I fully understand that the motivations of countries for these kinds of bans have little to do with the harm of social media and are much more about surveillance.
Which type of social media are we referring to here?
Doesn’t Lemmy count as social media?
There's a list of 10 or 12 social networks that are banned: YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
Lemmy is still legal.
Lemmy is legal because it’s too small for them to notice.
And YouTube is an incredible resource for finding information. It’s not social media at all.
Its also an incredible resource for finding misinformation and disinformation unfortunately.
That's an issue with any form of information sharing, though. Your local library is full of false information as well, whether that's because it's outdated or because you live somewhere like the US where all school curriculum books have to be approved by a Texas based group per federal law.
Lies spread faster than the truth, and the internet is great at spreading information.
To be fair YouTube Sharts is a thing
Given they have been clear they want you addicted then it counts. Their days of being information were long ago. It’s tat now.
It's so bonkers how most of the older generations agree that being on the internet cannot make you social, yet became the default method to communicate.
Ban it for everyone? I mean, lemmy itself is a social network platform, if you want it to be. But I know what you mean: social media being the most used platforms, Google, Facebook, Tik-Tok, etc . . . And for that, yeah, I do agree with a full ban. We need a cultural reset, where we aren't being fed sensationalist bullshit and pure brainrot as entertainment via an algorithm trained on our insufficient capacity to regulate our attention.
In my view social media is probably not the problem, but the algorithms they use that are designed to be addictive and manipulative.
I saw an article once arguing that the algorithms should be regulated in a similar way to medicine. Give some base ingredients they can use freely (e.g. sort by newest first), then require any others to run studies to prove they are not harmful.
There would be an expert board that approves or declines the new algorithm in the same way medicines are approved today (the important bit being that they are experts, not politicians making the decision).
This is the correct response. Social media, as a construct, is not evil and dos not do harm to anyone. The commodification and commercialisation of social media by capitalistic companies is what has caused the harm we see today.
All of the harms and evils of social media can be boiled down to a single concept: the algorithm. Because algorithmic recommendation of content wants to encourage people to stay on a platform (for capitalistic reasons), and the most enticing and attention-grabbing content is hate-content, these companies have forced hate-inducing concepts down the throats of people in an endeavour to make more money and destroyed individuals and families/friends in the process.
If we regulate the algorithms, we regulate the harm without disempowering anyone. We can, and we should, regulate algorithms on social media to turn it back into what it was 20-odd years ago - a measure to keep in touch with people you know or care about.
I wish I saw this kind of insightful point of view more often in the discourse over social media. It's stopped being about being social once algorithmic content curation became the norm to drive engagement and advertising money which is the real evil.
excellent take, I never thought of regulation on something digital like an algorithm (concerning social media) to be, I guess, possible when some government officials barely understand what an IP address is.
But that's the thing, where's the motivation for this board of experts to exist coming from? There is already plenty of empirical evidence to support the claims of the harms of social media, but in spite of this, change is glacial.
That is why I just generalize and say that social media is the problem, because most people won't care to hear anything deeper. They are already addicted, and don't care for a cure.
I think at one point you could make the same argument about medicines. The problem is that politicians are appointed with a popularity contest.
I don't remember all the arguments of the article, but when you think about it, the harms of social media are medical. It's possible that we could expand the scope of the current medicine approval boards to include algorithms, with their job not being to understand the algorithm but to understand the research on mental health.
I don't have all the answers, but I do think it's an idea worth exploring.
I agree, and neither do I have all the answers. It is worth exploring, I'm just pessimistic most of the time.
If you take such a broad definition of social media, then nearly the entire Internet becomes "social media" and the term loses its meaning, IMO.
Broad? Is youtube not social? Facebook? Tik-tok? Forums like reddit or lemmy, where people communicate directly, abiding by social norms and etiquette?
The internet and it's myriads of networks is all information relayed globally via copper, fibre and radio waves. Never did I say that the internet itself is a social network.
Do you realize you posted this very comment on social media ? Do you think they should ban the fediverse as well !?
I agree, social media is harmful for all, no matter the age. We shouldn't be destined to further segment and disfranchise individuals solely because they're "inferior", based on age or any other discriminatory factor - the thing is, who is the victim and who is the abuser in this case? Because the situation at hand seems like the victims are getting punished for the wrongdoings of the abuser.
This is where we are at, the corporations flipped the script, and we as a society gulped it all down, tightening the handcuffs around the wrong hands.
But besides the point, relating to the logic within your statement, who are you trying to ban here? Because you mention both "everyone" and "them" - which consequently makes it ambiguous, which introduces double meaning.
I don't think they are evil. A bunch of people with good intentions who didn't understand the problem are trying to solve it with a gut feeling rather than analysis and evidence. It's really disappoi ting that they would waste so much of our time and money like this.
Former Facebook higher ups have gone on the record to say the Facebook uses destructive algorithms to keep people hooked, they know exactly what they are doing and don't care how it affects us as long as they can squeeze more info from us for more profit. Thinking Silicon Valley tech billionaires actually care about you? Bro, you need to wake up.
We're talking about Australian legislation not social media itself. The problem is real, the legislation is ineffective and poorly implemented. Calling the legislation evil is a stretch. Modern social media is most certainly evil.
https://agelesslinux.org/citations.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
The “good intention” was the packaging. The real intent was population control.
The packaging was just a taster for what's to come, I.e. discrimination leading to fascism.
Good intentions without the spirit of cooperation or respect for consent is still evil.
The main problem with all of these internet surveillance tools being marketed as ways to protect children is that people are engaging with them on that basis.
As far as I'm concerned they haven't done anything to establish that they actually intend to protect children or that this is a reasonable way to do it. This seems like a solution to a different problem that ignores all of the problems it creates.
Parents should be responsible for their children. A random website creator shouldn't have to be responsible for your children.
Websites aren't stores where people walk in off of a public street. They are services that people reach out to and engage with specifically and intentionally. If we can address the non-consensual non-intentionality part of internet tracking and surveillance a lot of this stuff goes away. So maybe rather than regulating the website to protect your children we should be regulating the website to protect consent.
I don't agree that the legislators left the spirit of cooperation or respect for consent out because they are evil, I think they left them out because they are ignorant. I think they are inexperienced with both technology and social media and have failed to appropriately engage people that might have helped them come up with a functional solution rather than an ineffective brute force.
I do however agree with everything else you've said above.
And those guys are being led on by the evils.
Sounds like a conspiracy theory.