Social media ban splashy headline with no substance

Were you ever told as a kid that you couldn’t do something, but you found a way to do it anyway? 

People tell stories about sneaking out at night or stealing from their parents’ alcohol stash. I was a stickler for the rules, but every Friday night, I’d stay up late past my bedtime and sneak around to watch television. The more I was told I couldn’t do it, the more determined I was to do it.

And things won’t be any different for today’s teens with the proposed ban on social media. 

The Albanese Government plans to save teenagers one megabit at a time by banning teenagers from using social media. And there’s good intentions at the heart of this. But I haven’t seen one person address the elephant in the room; how do you actually put something in place to stop kids getting on social media? 

Most of the ideas put forward require you to hand over some form of ID. After all, how else would a platform know if you’re lying about your age or not? But are we really going to put our most valuable form of ID in the hands of the internet?

Both the Liberals and Labor have repeatedly spoken about their concerns around privacy and data online. So it’s a bit ironic that they’d turn around and ask you to hand over your ID to social media giants. And tell you that it’s to keep you safe while you do it. 

Banning kids from social media doesn’t stop the problems this is trying to solve. Tech-savvy teens will find ways around the ban and tell their friends how to do it. They’ll find new platforms outside the scope of the ban and the problems will continue there instead.  It cuts off kids in remote areas from their communities online. For many of them, this push to try to save them from the internet could do more harm than good. Not to mention the dozens of experts who say it’s a bad idea.

I know I’m old fashioned but this is where parental advice or mentors come in. Educating kids about the potential pitfalls of being online. Turn on the parental controls. Talk to them about the kinds of things it’s appropriate to use the internet for and the things that it’s not. 

I did this with my own kids. I set them up with social media accounts when they wanted them even though they weren’t quite old enough. The deal was they had to be open and honest with me about what’s going on. 

It’s the same way some parents choose to give alcohol to their kids at home before they’re sixteen. It’s a way for them to experience it and understand the consequences in a safe environment. Social media was the same for me and my kids. 

This proposed social media ban is nothing more than lip service to parents who vote. There’s no real thoughts on how it can be enforced, but it’s a great headline leading into an election. If this was really about kids, we’d give them the tools they need to make their own decisions online. 

Instead I just feel like I’m trapped in that Simpsons episode, with Helen Lovejoy screaming ‘won’t somebody please think of the children’.