STEVEN MILES, PREMIER OF QUEENSLAND: Depression and self-harm is more prevalent because of social media.
PETER MALINAUSKAS, PREMIER OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA: We are talking about the health of the nation’s most precious resource.
WILL MURRAY, REPORTER: Banning young kids from social media has gained a lot of political traction recently.
CHRIS MINNS, PREMIER OF NEW SOUTH WALES: I think it’s a giant global unregulated experiment on children.
WILL MURRAY: With the country’s leaders eager to come up with a policy response to what many see as a growing social problem.
ANTHONY ALBANESE, PRIME MINISTER: Every parent is concerned about the impact of social media.
WILL MURRAY: Toni Hassan is one of those parents.
TONI HASSAN, PARENT: I have three children aged 21, 20 and 14.
Once a kid has the phone, and knowing that it’s designed to be addictive, knowing how the brains are wired to use it compulsively, it just got too hard to manage.
WILL MURRAY, REPORTER: She says access to smartphones resulted in her children becoming withdrawn and anxious.
She’s tried to restrict their access – swapping social media for time together.
TONI HASSAN: My kids will do what they need to do in order to get the phones. So, in the early phase it was “Yeah mum, sure mum”.
And then there were tears, and then there was anxiety and then there were crises.
My gorgeous 20-year-old son has had this love-hate relationship with his phone because of those crises and now has a ‘dumb’ phone.
WILL MURRAY: South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas says parents have good reason to worry and they need help.
PETER MALINAUSKAS: We’ve seen a spike in childhood anxiety, we’ve seen massive growth in young people’s depression, and lots of it is now definitively attributable towards excessive social media use.
WILL MURRAY: Last month his government became the first in Australia to recommend banning children under 14 from having social media accounts.
PETER MALINAUSKAS: We believe the imposition should be on social media companies themselves. You can’t just go on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, you have got to get an account, and that’s where we believe the regulation should come in. No different to getting a betting account.
WILL MURRAY: Premier Malinauskas has just returned from a meeting with the US Surgeon General to discuss the issue.
PETER MALINAUSKAS: The Surgeon General explained to me how they’d done research that shows that while young people are reluctant to give up social media given all their friends are on it, if they know that their friends aren’t on it, they too are giving it up, they want to give up social media themselves.
WILL MURRAY: While many politicians are convinced of the idea’s merits, scientists are still trying to work out what constitutes ‘problematic internet use’ and what it does.
PROF. MURAT YUCEL, QIMR BERGHOFER: If you’re on the internet for long periods you do tend to see behaviours like a lack of movement and exercise, and sleep disturbances, circadian rhythm problems and if you do that long enough, you are going to start hitting mental health problems as well, depression, anxiety, loneliness.
WILL MURRAY: Professor Murat Yucel is an expert in brain development at the QIMR Berghofer in Brisbane.
He’s part of an international team that is putting together a study of 10,000 young people in order to assess the scale of the problem.
MURAT YUCEL: At the moment we’re estimating that as a population across all ages probably 6 to10 per cent of people have a problematic use of the internet, but in young people that may be as high as 25 per cent.
WILL MURRAY: He says the issue has addiction-like qualities and a ban risks isolating young people who need compassion and support.
MURAT YUCEL: There’s big industry working against them with subtle features that have powerful effects on their brain and behaviour.
They have millions of dollars at their disposal, very good science that they’re using to maximise engagement and attention of these young people.
WILL MURRAY: Most social media apps already require users to be 13 to create an account however currently there’s nothing stopping you from just making it up.
Ideas for age-verification include physical ID’s or linking with an online database.
Another is face scanning technology, the companies behind which say can accurately estimate your age through your camera in just seconds.
SAMANTHA FLOREANI, DIGITAL RIGHTS WATCH: All of these approaches come with significant privacy and digital security risks, and I think an important thing to note is that in this scenario, everyone wanting to access social media would need to go about this process, not just people under 16.
WILL MURRAY: Samantha Floreani is from Digital Rights Watch, an organisation dedicated to protecting online privacy and personal data.
She says too much personal information must be shared to make these tools work.
SAMANTHA FLOREANI: Children and young people are in a particularly vulnerable position, because they can’t always necessarily consent to how their data is being collected and used.
WILL MURRAY: Last year, the Federal Government looked into trialling age-verification measures as a means of protecting children from online pornography.
In a report released in August, it found that age assurance technologies are immature, and present privacy, security, implementation and enforcement risks.
SAMANTHA FLOREANI: Now nothing really has changed about the technology in the period since August last year to now. What has changed is the political landscape, so it’s clear that the government is scrambling to try and pick up some ideas to deal with online harms and this is what they’ve landed on.
WILL MURRAY: The biggest problem is preventing kids from hiding their identity through a virtual private network, or VPN which encrypts personal data online allowing users to sidestep website blocks and firewalls.
SAMANTHA FLOREANI: Anyone who thinks that teenagers are not savvy enough to figure out how to get around something like this, I think is kind of kidding themselves.
MURAT YUCEL: Just as many people end up with mental health challenges or physical health challenges or addiction challenges, there are also quite a substantial number of people who are in those circumstances should get themselves out by using the internet or social media.
So we’ve just got to keep a balanced approach.