527
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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Or we could focus on preventing the addiction to begin with.
Great examples include making people wait until adulthood to smoke nicotine or cannabis, or to drink alcohol.
You say that, but evidence shows its not a working solution. Its a piece of legislation that doesn't actually achieve anything close to the desired outcome of stopping a significant number of people under 16 from accessing social media. Further than that, there isn't an actual way to make this work without banning VPNs and implementing a Chinese style great internet filter.
Nicotine, Cannabis and alcohol are all banned in Australia for under 18s and you are kidding yourself if you think that has had any significant impact on stopping under 18s from getting their mits on them.
Well, thats what you get when non-tech people try to regulate tech. At least we have correctly identified a problem, and are now trying to solve it.
Tech companies taking advantage of regulators lack of knowledge to continue abusing their customers is a different problem.
This solution might not work but we will learn and try something else or refine it until it does work, or until social media somehow isn't predatory and doesnt need the guard rails.
I don't know how you solve problems, but I certainly don't go all in on the first highly expensive dumb idea I have without researching the fuck out of it first. If our politicians are listening to anything the the social media companies are saying and not assuming everything they say is an attempt to make more money for themselves then we have much bigger problems, namely the suckers we have elected.
Refining this solution is a terrible idea. It flat out doesn't work, its a non-starter. Prohibition has never worked effectively. The only path this leads to is pushing even more of Australian population's personal data into honey pots and breaking our financial system.
I mean, I agree with you, but highschool is a thing... these laws are basically useless to my knowledge. I think about 50% of my grade had smoked weed by tenth grade, and half again were addicted to nicotine by 12th. The only reason I didn't fall victim to those (as many of my friends did), is because I was educated, by my parents, from an early age, about addiction and these substances. I never even tried them, because I knew better, thus never got addicted.