Young people in Australia can no longer use popular social media platforms.Credit: David Gray/AFP via Getty
This week, Australia became the first country to ban children under the age of 16 from using most social-media platforms. Many teenagers in the country are furious, but for social scientists, the policy offers a natural experiment to study the effects of social-media restrictions on young people.
Technology companies have had a year to come up with ways to stop teenagers in the country using their platforms, including Facebook, X, Reddit, YouTube, Threads and Snapchat. From Wednesday, companies must take reasonable steps to prevent young people from creating or keeping accounts, or risk fines of up to Aus$49.5 million (US$33 million).
Do smartphones and social media really harm teens’ mental health?
Other countries, including France, Denmark and Spain, have introduced social-media restrictions for young people, or announced plans to, but no policy is as far-reaching as Australia’s. Its government says that social media is harming young people’s mental health, causing teenagers to lose sleep because of addictive design features and exposing them to harmful content. But some researchers say the evidence that social media causes harm is mixed. Communicating with peers online is a crucial support system for some young people, particularly those in minority groups and those living in remote areas.
Nature spoke to researchers who will study the effects of the ban.
New avenues of research
For Susan Sawyer, a physician-researcher specializing in adolescent health at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia, the start of the social-media ban this week meant entering the next phase of her research. Over the past two months, Sawyer and her colleagues interviewed 177 teenagers aged 13–16 about their social-media use, screen time and mental health before the ban came into effect. She and her colleagues plan to survey the teenagers again in six months, to see whether the ban has affected their use of the platforms or their mental health. The researchers will also survey the participants’ parents about problematic Internet and social-media use by their children.
Another research collaboration between the Kids Research Institute Australia, the University of Western Australia and Edith Cowan University, all in Perth, will examine whether the ban is presenting new parenting challenges and what family conflicts have arisen as a result.
Amanda Third, a researcher at Western Sydney University in Australia who studies how children use technology, says the ban is an opportunity to collect data about the effect of policies that restrict young people’s access to the Internet and social media. She is going to investigate how teenagers engage with technology and the Internet, and how their face-to-face interactions might change following the ban.
But, she says, it might be hard to tell whether any changes are a direct result of the ban or other policies designed to make the Internet safer: for example, later this month, new industry standards will come into effect for tech companies to prevent children being exposed to sexually explicit or violent content on the Internet. The social-media ban could undercut some well-thought-out efforts to keep children on social media and positively impact their experiences online, she says. “The ban is about booting them out.”
Zareh Ghazarian, a political scientist at Monash University in Melbourne who studies the role of social media in young people’s political development, says online platforms can be an important way for teenagers to engage with politics. Teachers can discuss contemporary issues, political debates and policy issues that come up on social media, he says. Now that the ban is in place, he plans to interview teachers to find out how it is affecting students’ political knowledge, and what alternative platforms they are turning to. “Part of education is to be able to engage with issues and ideas that may not be covered in the classroom — and that was the benefit social media was bringing,” he says.
