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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)
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.
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.
Its also an incredible resource for finding misinformation and disinformation unfortunately.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.