The government’s blanket ban is a knee-jerk reaction to a complex problem and risks severely disadvantaging Australian teens in their creative and entrepreneurial pursuits compared to their international peers.
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All over the world young people are building skills, audiences and careers online. A 16-year-old in Seoul can launch a fashion label from their bedroom and sell to millions through TikTok. A teen in Los Angeles can turn a YouTube channel into a production company. These kids are developing the digital fluency that future economies will demand. When we cut off Australian kids from those platforms, we don’t protect them; we sideline them.
Imagine if, in the 1980s, we’d banned kids from using personal computers because we thought the screens would ruin their eyes. We’d have lost a generation of coders, engineers and designers. The same risk applies now. The next generation of entrepreneurs, artists and content producers is being forged online, not in band rooms or on the landline.
There’s no doubt that social media is more pervasive for teenagers than the video games of the ’80s, and the risks of harm are far greater. But rather than banning it outright, we should be focusing on how to make it safer and smarter. That means setting minimum standards for algorithm transparency, enforcing genuine age verification, holding platforms to account for harmful content, and embedding digital literacy in schools, so kids learn to navigate the online world with critical thinking, not blind trust.
The social media world is not some alternate reality our children “escape” into – it is the reality they live in. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we can help them thrive within it.
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Nostalgia is a comforting emotion. It’s lovely to imagine our kids riding bikes until dusk, calling friends on the family phone and discovering music by browsing shelves instead of feeds. But nostalgia is a terrible basis for legislation. If we legislate for the world as it used to be, we’ll leave our young people unprepared for the world as it is.
We don’t need the landline to return; smartphones really are so much better. We need leadership that understands that the future is already here and that helping kids thrive in it is far more powerful than wishing them back to the past.
Shaun Rowland worked in the digital industry for many years and is the father of two girls aged 12 and 14.
