“Australia is actually doing this. As of December 10th, no one under 16 will be allowed to have an account on TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram, or basically any other platform an average teen might care about.”
That was the lead in an article appearing in December 4th online issue of The Atlantic.
Called the Online Safety Amendment, the law will follow the same logic as tobacco and alcohol restrictions in the United States and other countries. The inspiration for the policy came from the wife of Peter Malinauskas, who’s South Australia’s premier, which is like a governor. His wife had just finished reading The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, which is a best seller by Jonathan Haidt. But there are varying opinions about how effective this measure can be at limiting adolescent access to social media.
Julia Inman Grant, an American ex-pat, serves as Australia’s e-safety commissioner. Inman Grant is responsible for administering the Online Safety Amendment.
“So on December 10, what we should see is not that every social-media account is going to magically disappear; we know that it will be imperfect. What we’re really hoping for is that there will be a significant normative change for parents so that being on social media all the time is not a battle. And I think, for young people, just to free them up to read more books, to engage face-to-face with their friends, to enjoy Australia’s beautiful beaches, to get out on the footie field.”
“And it’s worth noting – this was a very quickly deliberated bill. So there wasn’t really an evidence base about why 16 was chosen.”
Not surprisingly, the Online Safety Amendment has earned mixed reviews with the Australian teens interviewed for The Atlantic story:
“My name’s Harrison. It’s gonna be sad, but it’s also gonna be good for it to happen because I won’t be as addicted, and yeah.”
“I am Annie. I’m gonna be quite bored. If I’m just at home and have nothing to do, usually, I just go on my phone, and I can’t do that.”
“I’m Rachel. I feel like I would feel more productive because I’m not staring at a screen for two hours, so I will go out and hang out with my friends and do all that instead of going on my phone for hours.”
“I’m Cheyenne and I’m 15. It’s going to be annoying because that two-month holiday that we have for summer, I’m not gonna be able to use social media, connect with people. I think that will be quite annoying because I’m gonna struggle to find entertainment because I’m gonna be at home all day.”
“At least I can message people and call people still, but it’s gonna be very different.”
Dr. Jo Orlando is a researcher in digital well-being and author of the book Generation Connected:
“The reality is, if you’re talking to young people, a lot of them will admit to spending too much time on their phone or on a screen. Another reality is that social media is not just something that they watch and flick and scroll through.”
“It’sm something that is kind of completely threaded through this generation of adolescents’ social, cultural, educational – every other element – kind of world.”
Orlando doesn’t think the ban is going to work out.
“See, a ban is a technical response. So, Turn it off-that’s just a technical response. But when you think about how all-encompassing culturally, psychologically social media is, just switching it off isn’t gonna work. It’s just part of the culture. So if we actually wanna protect young people online, we need strategies that kind of address exactly the multifaceted thing that it is.”
“We have to think about, culturally, how do we shift this so the content on there or how they’re responding to the content on there is safter? We have to think psychologically, from a brain development, how do we do it? And then from a tech-design element. So there are three big factors that are feeding into this.”
“Simply switching off social media for young people is one part, of just the technology side of it. But we’re missing the social and cultural side, and the brain-development side here.”
How kids learn is part of their cultural milieu. The missed opportunity here of assigning value to social media as a learning tool is just mind boggling.
Orlando is right. Just turning social media off probably won’t work. The answer is more complicated than that, and it involves what we value putting on a screen for our young learners to access.
But let’s see what happens in Australia.
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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