Unwelcome Internet: A Youth Ban on Social Media?

This article is going to touch on all kinds of painful and unpleasant subjects - eating disorders, self-harm, suicide, grooming, anti-Semitism, anything that brain of yours can think of - so consider if you feel okay right now about proceeding; it’s perfectly fine not to.

Yesterday, Meta agreed to settle a court case driven by, uh, the everything. 

1. Social media causes lots of harm

(Oh, yeah, that’s the way we’re gonna be formatting today’s article. Headline - simple truth - elaboration underneath.)

Social media connects users to information and perspectives they would not have otherwise encountered in person, good or bad. Our negative bias drives us towards the negative, and the social media companies know that, and their algorithms are designed for that. For instance, a girl feels insecure about her body; she engages more with posts where others share their relatable negative feelings about their own bodies; the algorithm shows herr more and more posts that get more and more negative; and she is inculcated in the ideas of other users with eating disorders, developing one herself that hurts her health and makes her feel worse.

In the past couple years, a new call has gathered momentum around the world: to prevent the harms of social media to children - trading off a focus on a specific kind of problematic content for a focus on a specific group. Australia has banned under-16s from social media. Other peers like Canada and the UK are cooking up their own bans. And here in New Zealand, after much wrangling by National, a ban is on the table: though both ACT and NZFirst have ultimately refused to support the policy, Labour has indicated that they will provide the votes needed to get a majority on the bill and advance it to first reading. 

I don’t do much policy analysis. I just don’t know enough to in most cases. Without subject area knowledge, such analysis typically boils down to hearing out the argument for something and simply deciding whether I am convinced by the strength of that argument or not. My strength is in political analysis (for which a social media ban provides a childishly simplistic playing field: National and Labour are obviously pandering to parents before the election, without a clear plan on how to proceed afterwards).

Social media, however, provides far more scope for me to expand into, because for all the talk about the ban, all parties in Parliament haven’t actually had much to say about social media itself. For how ever-present it is in our lives today - and how it has been there for almost the entire lives of Gen Z, let alone Gen Alpha - people don’t actually discuss social media that much. Today, I’d like to run through a bunch of facts that we can all agree on about social media, and follow those facts to their conclusions. So cue up some more.

2. Social media does lots of good

Ironically, our negative bias leads us to basically never appreciate the unique benefits of social media. For instance, when I was a teenager, most of my friends did not go to my school. Being able to keep up with their lives and chat through social media met my need for social interaction and got us meeting more in person, such as by planning with Facebook’s Events feature. Plenty of my Gen Z friends still use that feature to this day... 

3. Social media is very embedded in the lives of all people

…and using Facebook’s Events feature is notable because, other than that and birthday reminders, young people have almost entirely gravitated off of active engagement on Facebook; for older generations, Facebook is where it’s at, and TikTok is the land they dare not tread in. entire society is plugged into this, even if we’re running different cables to different ages - see the generational splits between Facebook versus the likes of Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok.

This leads to very different understandings of what social media is, compounded by the algorithm recommending different material to users of different ages due to their diverging interests. Older generations mainly form their perception of what the younger generation are seeing from news reports and gossiping with one another.

4. The big social media companies whose products we use are all based out of the US

Hence, the consequences of this lawsuit - Facebook and Instagram committing to limiting their hours of access for minors and improving age verification - are dictated by American authorities and interests, not yours. They set the norms, and we accept them.

5. Those companies have a financial incentive to let kids use their platforms as much as possible

The entire reason that we have this issue in the first place is that it’s a net positive for these companies if they do not effectively self-regulate. The American lawsuits will change the paradigm on this. That is clearly going to be a long war, and tech has a truckload of money lying around, and there is not much standing in the way of paying off an American politician.

6. Those companies, as well as their and our governments, have access to an enormous amount of information on us all

The war that the privacy advocates fought into the 2010s failed to rouse most voters. The cat is out of the bag. There is no deleting all that data. Companies use that data to more effectively profit, just as governments do to more effectively implement policy. 

7. Non-social media media from outside the US is also very embedded in the lives of young people 

Kids and teens don’t just watch TikToks and Reels, they also watch Netflix and Disney+ and satellite TV. Websites are still a thing. 

8. The proposed ban is only for under 16s

Were this bill to pass, as soon as a child turns 16, that teenager with an underdeveloped brain could legally create an account on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok - you name it.

9. We have a recent precedent in Australia

Australia is basically the perfect country to compare ourselves to: they’re large enough that you get a meaningful sample size for millions of people reacting, and as culturally and legally similar to us as is possible. (Update: A legal professional has corrected me that this assertion is nonsense and that the closest legal system to ours can be found in England, by virtue of the fact that our courts literally follow their precedents.) And this just happened, so it’s very fresh and relevant.

10. Teenagers have thoughts about their lives

Teenagers have opinions and motivations and plans and all the things that adults do? Formed differently, sure, usually for the worse, but hear this hypothetical: picture a teenager one month after the ban is passed, sitting down with an interviewer they totally trust. That interviewer will be able to ask and get answers as to - what that teenager makes of the negative content they see; whether they overall think social media is good for them, or something bad that they keep coming back to; if they have ideas for how to get around the ban, or are resigned to it - you name it, there will be thoughts in their noggin. Social media is such a big part of all our lives - we just don't have these conversations out loud!

What conclusions do these ten facts lead us to? I’ve got eight for you.

1. If users under 16 stop using social media, it does not follow that this will sever contact between them

There is this little thing called texting? And calling? And while there was a time where those options were not always accessible or affordable, now everybody has unlimited texts and a bunch of minutes they’re generally not using, and the ban currently exempts WhatsApp anyway. If everybody under 16 stopped using social media, then we would see a huge resurgence in texting culture, preserving the best part of social media. 

2. If users under 16 stop using social media, it does not follow that harmful online ideas and perspectives will be eliminated

The ban trades attention spans on crowdsourced anything-could-happen media for media that is produced by studios and artists. Traditional media is accountable to more regulations and societal expectations and profit motives to not be The Worst. Traditional media can still be pretty bad. Ban away all the eating disorder content off social media. Under-16s will still be watching decades of movies and shows framed around “hahaha wouldn’t it SUCK to be FAT! Being skinny is what you should try to be!” And they will still be watching all of that through the lens framed for them by having seen eating disorder content on social media for years.

Ban away the cesspools of online anti-semitism. I remember years of kids randomly calling peers "a Jew" as an insult. Given how oblivious Kiwis generally are about Jewish people, and that I didn’t see this phrase going hand in hand with related tropes, the only obvious explanation is that lots of kids liked to watch South Park, where they would hear Cartman call Kyle (or anybody really) “a Jew”. 

This is still a clear upgrade from how absolutely out-the-gate online anti-Semitism gets. Saying this not as an anti-Semitic stereotype but a simple acknowledgement of success: lots of Jewish people have made it in Hollywood, and consequently created plenty of traditional media that provides positive role models and thoughtful reflection for Jewish kids to grow up on.

That's not going to be the case for every kid already starting to feel the weight of bigotry and bullying. The first time I saw an episode of an adult cartoon rolling was, by complete chance, the episode of Family Guy in which Brian learns that the woman he had sex with was transgender, and then vomits for thirty seconds straight. There are, like, two openly trans blockbuster directors and zero showrunners over in the States. Social media has been a clear upgrade on net for trans kids, amongst many others. In fact, social media users can provide the riposte that some kids can’t on their own to unpleasant and nasty traditional media mocking those kids and making them question their futures.  

3. Some kids under 16 will not stop using social media, and some will

Precisely because of what’s so bad about social media - call it addictive or whatever substitute synonym you prefer if you think that’s strictly inaccurate, the point is that people get hooked - lots of kids and teens will not want to go cold turkey, will miss what they have lost, and will search for ways to recreate what they were previously getting through the social media platforms that are now banned. 

That being said, some kids will just be kinda lazy, or the shock of the social media ban will make them reevaluate their priorities, or more likely have that impact on their parents. Many won’t be as attracted to alternative formats that are more text-based with less bright colours and swiping algorithms and visual stimulation. Above all, I think we underestimate how tech-illiterate many kids are outside of the narrow band of what they interact with, and how bad they are at learning how to exercise control over technology. Do I really think that the entire Junior First XV at every school in the country is going to know how to work a VPN by the end of 2027? No. 

4. Social media companies have a financial incentive to only comply with the law up to the minimum possible requirements, and otherwise allow under-16s to continue to sneak on

What will the process be for the government to identify violations? How can they prove that the social media companies are accountable? Drawn-out legal challenges wallowing in ambiguity will always be preferable for these companies, unless the fine is so pitifully small that they may as well just violate the law and pay the fine, in which case we’ve accomplished nothing. The cost for the legal team will be less than any meaningful fine. And social backlash only matters insofar as it affects government responses - practically nobody is boycotting social media, because it’s embedded into our lives across all generations.

5. Pathways will remain to access the same social media platforms

The classic example is VPNs: a way to make your online presence seem different from who you are, in order to change your access to an app or website. It’s not like everybody under 16 is a whiz kid hacker, but given the strong motivation we’ve discussed for staying on social media, anybody who does know how to apply VPNs now has a golden social currency to spread to as many people as they can in return for the attention and in #swag defiance of authority.

And this is just one example of a single technique to completely defeat the ban, at minimal additional difficulty. Eliminate that and they turn to another. And so on. As we've seen in Australia, the model is already hitting the rocks. The social media ban will catch and eliminate some under-16s who aren’t that motivated, but the kids we are most concerned about are the ones who are most invested in social media. They will be sticking around.

6. Other social media platforms will remain, and rise

Consider a certain class of under-16s. These under-16s are highly invested in social media, but not highly adept at accessing it: they ceebs a VPN, or whose particular model of phone is having problems getting onto the same social media, or who have simply consciously for the first time considered their options on social media thanks to the ban. They will look for alternatives to get the same hit - in the same way that some kids try to smoke despite the law, and some kids try to vape.

There are some bizarre exemptions from the ban: YouTube Kids is still freely available to continue mushing up the brains of children. Discord - a place to host social forums on which to message and share media - remains. So does Roblox - an expansive sandbox video game. And for the same reason I laid out above about understanding of VPNs spreading, we can expect obscure social media platforms I wouldn’t know the name of to see some uptake.

Creating a law that just means that some kids get a VPN and stay on Instagram and Facebook is merely stupid; it’s inconsequential. But anything that means that more children end up on the likes of Omegle, or whatever occupies the space left behind by Kik, would be disastrous. Especially once the first kids on these new platforms having a blast create a social trend of desirability for others to follow them - even for kids not planning on making a wholesale switch to at least check out the platform for a week in order to keep up with the joneses. The tradeoff would be sacrificing those kids in order to knock some kids off of Facebook and Instagram and TikTok. I think that is a terrible trade to take. 

Why?

The common thread in most of the social media platforms being banned is that on Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat, you are expected to have some kind of personal presence: you show your face, you add your real name, you provide updates on where you’ve been and what you’re up to lately. If you don’t, then you stand out against the norms and people won’t interact with you: you look suspicious, or, worse, boring. 

Kids uploading their details like this is the sort of thing that gives parents hives, but…what detrimental things can actually be done with this information by the average bad actor? As I discussed earlier, the cat is out of the bag on this already: while perhaps regrettable, everybody can get tracked down - it’s just that the vast majority of bad actors aren’t, like, fanatical stalkers or master scammers who randomly lock in on twelve year olds.

Flip this concept around. Stop thinking about the information of under-16s being available on the internet, and start thinking about everybody else’s. What do you do when the online interactions of under-16s are entirely with people who do not have to disclose their face or real name or location - who are hidden behind usernames and strings of numbers and Roblox outfits?

There is still a misconception here easily summarised as “stranger danger”. Heaps of under-16s do this all the time without anything bad happening. The average person on Roblox or Discord is interacting with people around their age due to shared interests. Even when interacting with a broader band, most adults on the internet are still regular people not crossing any lines of appropriateness. (Though they frequently cross the line of what would be considered polite or socially acceptable behaviour, in the sense of all the misogyny and racism and yadda yadda yadda.) I played online video games sometimes when I was under the age of 16, I would interact with people well older than me, and there was plenty of toxicity and absolutely zero suspicious behaviour.

But there is another side, and to approach that we need to flip around our understanding again - back inside the minds of kids and teens, where there are thoughts and plans and motivations:

7. Under-16s, like people of any age, engage with harms for a reason

This is not a victim-blaming argument. When a kid interacts with a groomer on social media, I do not give a singular hoot how that kid engages, even if they express sincere enthusiasm or send nudes or try to protect or obscure the groomer from being found out by adults. No child is to blame for the choices entirely on a groomer of going after a child. Shaming and blaming kids for this only drives them further into embarrassment and defensiveness, and further away from escaping from this hole.

This is a plea to understand children. Kids go to social media because it's fun and interactive and stimulating - because they're lonely or isolated and seeking attention and community - because life at home sucks and they want a distraction. And this diverse range of motives is what leads to the parallel world that none of these parents' groups seem to remotely understand. 

Harmful interactions on social media do not usually look like stalkers discovering your location and appearing in a dark van. They look kids and adults forming bonds on social media, where kids become defensive about their attachments to those adults, who they often believe are sincere in their intentions and worthy of trust, or whose ill intent they sometimes just disregard. These interactions obviously cause all kinds of harms - from being used as the dumping ground for adults’ emotional issues, to recording and sending nudes, to meeting up in person.

Banning social media platforms does nothing to address this. These kids still have problems in their lives and in their minds that they are seeking short-term solutions to. They are forming an understanding of these interactions as solutions, as good things, when they are bad things. 

And this is just one example of a particular kind of highly damaging and dangerous behaviour. The same logic applies to tutorials on self-harm - you can ban those from Instagram, but kids will still be looking for a release and find that Discord server with the same - or eating disorder communities - drop the kids from TikTok and they end up repeating the same verbiage on 4chan.

The kids we are most concerned about are not the ones who are already on track to form a healthy self-conception, who have a decent idea of how to look after themselves, who come from stable homes without major traumatic events in their lives. The kids we are most concerned about are the ones who will blunder forward because they are feeling defiant and have an overwhelming surge of feelings they don’t know what to do with - who already have trauma stacking up in their lives and no release for it - our Omelas kiddos.

But is it “we” who are concerned about this?

Because I just don’t think the older generations get it.

8. Kids are not responsible for these problems, parents are

B416 are right when they call for teaching cyber awareness. As a general principle. Of all the net awareness talks and presentations and TV specials I've heard in my life, I've never heard anything in touch with the experiences of young people or applicable to change my behaviour, instead of marketed at panicked older generations with a certain conception of what online harm looks like. “Stranger danger”.

These problems cannot be solved by applying blunt force to kids - the government exerting its control as a first-order solution. The best progress we can reach here - not complete progress, some kids are still going to see awful stuff and be hurt, but so long as these tech companies are US based, we can’t change that - will come from expecting parents to change their behaviour. 

There is such a confrontational and showdown-y tone to the way in which many of the most concerned parents talk about this - that there is wicked material out there that innocents might get exposed to. It’s a mentality which makes them poor partners to cooperate with kids who, like anybody in a difficult situation, wants to talk to somebody about mistakes they’ve made or bad experiences they blame themselves for, guilt or discomfort they feel. 

I scratch my head when I hear people talking about seeing people die online because I haven’t done that, but I don’t judge any kid who has because, uh, their brains are underdeveloped and they make poor decisions. But a simplistic mentality that delineates online into poor innocent children exposed to things they don’t want to see, and diabolical barbaric bad actors who traffic in extreme and unsettling content, can’t fit in those kids who are curious to see bad and disturbing and extreme things. 

Those kids struggle to trust parents who won't candidly communicate that it's okay to fess up and admit you've kinda screwed up in what you chose to see, or, shoot, you ignored that presentation the other month and sent a nude to somebody you thought you can trust, and now in some way - your mental health, your reputation, your body - social media has put you in danger. We can’t stop social media existing anymore, and we can’t stop the kids going to it. We can only create forgiving and trusting environments for those kids, so that being hurt will not destroy their lives; so that they can rebound.

What needs to change is not the simple flip of a policy switch. This is a much harder ask: a cultural changing of tracks, led by parents’ groups and communities, to encourage parents into a greater recognition of their offspring as autonomous, curious individuals - ones who absolutely should be cared for and protected, but for whom no ironclad guarantee of a cotton-wool life can be made. They need to know - not the impossibility that they will always be safe - but that, when they are put in danger, when they are hurt, that is not them permanently broken; that is a temporary pressure that can be relieved - that kids are not uncomplicated innocents pure from the damage of the world, but able to discuss and process bad things and able to get back to the good. These are the tools they will require for life, best learned at a young age, instead of learning the opposite in these formative years: how to conceal what they've seen online, how to bury their feelings, how to mask the distinction between who they are in person and who they have been online.

But then you remember that, away from the world of concerned parents’ groups, there’s also the other world of parents who are part of the problem - who are neglectful or abusive , whose inability to process the complexity of their kids tips over into victim-blaming and mistrust. They are creating that pressure that drives children into destructive engagement online. And so, unfortunately, I end up with the entirely unsatisfying and unhelpful answer at the end of this discussion of social media policy that the solutions really cannot lie with social media at all. What we are looking at is not the prime villain in the piece at all - it’s that social media is a villain of the week which preys on children who already existed in our society the rest of the time, and the whole system needs change.

I’m not going to write out some manifesto for societal change. You just invested your time in reading my little discussion essay on social media, and I appreciate that, so I want to conclude on a couple paragraphs in keeping with the themes we’ve been talking about. I’m issuing the personal pitch: for goodness’ sake, we can’t keep carving up society between our safe, cozy, normal homes and the incomprehensible menaces that lie out there. We all have an obligation to Aotearoa’s tamariki and we are all part of this cycle. 

Depressed kids, suicidal kids, kids with eating disorders, groomed kids, traumatised kids, they are all part of our society - they go to our schools and they hop on Fortnite and they pop into the theatre to watch Spider-Man, they have fun and they cry and they learn things, they freeze up or lash out under pressure - and they grow up into adults. There is not one model for what a vulnerable or exploited child looks like, and continuing to imply that is precisely what denies kids the chance to recognise how they’ve been hurt and the chance to get help.

They’re not over there. They’re not somebody else’s problem. We need to get on the same page and start treating people like anybody can be hurting and complicated, or the hurt will continue. And deepen; because ultimately, however nasty and awful and extreme strangers and the strange things they present on the internet can be, few things are more hurtful to our rangatahi than feeling like the people they know and care about do not really know or care about them. Dare to care, and start listening to what they really have to say. We all interact with social media all the time. We have thoughts to share on our lives. We're just waiting for somebody to ask, and show that they care about what we have to say.