Latest MRC polling on kids and social media
By Freya Leach
First published in the MRC’s Watercooler newsletter. Sign up to our mailing list to receive Watercooler directly in your inbox.
I’m a typical Gen Z. I got my first social media account at 12 years old (way too young). I remember being on family holidays and constantly looking around, not at the beautiful places we were visiting, but for my next Instagram photo. As my teen years progressed, I noticed girls would return from school holidays dangerously thin and emaciated. The “it girl” confided in me that she had depression. I began to feel anxious and isolated as I watched my “friends” going to parties I was excluded from. I would think to myself; has being a teenage girl always been this hard?
While every generation has had its challenges, Gen Z have been the subject of an extraordinary social experiment; what happens to kids when we give them unrestricted access to smartphones and social media during their formative childhood and teen years?
The results of the experiment are in, and it’s not good.
Since the introduction of smartphones and social media in 2010, rates of hospitalisation for intentional self-harm have risen 62% for young women aged 15-19 and 221% for girls 14 and under. The ‘completed suicide’ rate for girls born between 1999–2003, my age group, is almost two times higher than it was for the Baby Boomer cohort at the same age. Had rates of mental illness stayed consistent with their pre-2010 levels, we would have seen around 260,000 fewer girls aged 16-24 experiencing mental disorders last year. You can read more about the evidence linking smartphones and social media to the mental health epidemic in my previous Watercooler.
The good news is that Australians have started waking up to pockets of poison we’re giving kids.
Polling commissioned by the Menzies Research Centre and conducted by the CT Group last week found that Australians are aware of the corrosive impact social media is having. The survey of 2,275 Australians found that 65% believe social media is having a harmful impact on society. When asked to consider the impacts of social media, respondents acknowledged there were some benefits. For example, social media is beneficial for maintaining contact with family and friends ( +69), access to news and information (+48) and sharing photos and videos from daily life (+36). However, across most issues, Australians feel social media has made society worse particularly bullying (-81), misinformation/'fake news’ (-81), and the wellbeing of children and teens (-70).
Elsewhere, people are starting to acknowledge the negative impact the switch to a phone-based childhood is having. Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation, has remained on the New York Times Bestsellers list since it was released 10 weeks ago. There are grassroots movements of parents uniting to end phone-based childhoods springing up around the world. In Australia, a group of families from Sydney have banded together to form the Heads Up Alliance. They are committed to delaying their children’s access to social media and smartphones until the age of 14. It’s encouraging to see these movements growing because government cannot be the only solution. Parents must take foremost responsibility for raising their children and protecting them from the harms that come from the new digital world we live in. However, where parents fail, children have a right to be protected, and sometimes the government must act to guarantee that right.
Up until now, Australia’s only legislative response to social media has focused on compelling platforms to remove and moderate specific content (e.g. terror-related posts). The Online Safety Act empowers the e-Safety commissioner to issue takedown orders to social media companies that violate content rules.
The most recent example of how misguided this framework is was the debacle involving Twitter, now called X. The e-Safety Commissioner issued a takedown notice and demanded X remove all videos, globally of the recent Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel stabbing. This was despite the Bishop signing an affidavit declaring he wished to have the video remain on the social media site. X agreed to remove the posts in Australia, but not globally. The Commissioner launched a challenge against X in the Federal Court but dropped it earlier this week.
This case highlights the flaws in our current approach to online safety.
An ad hoc content moderation based approach to online safety doesn’t deal with the real harm impacting children; algorithms, social exclusion and isolation. We are wading into fraught territory when it is left to unelected bureaucrats to define what is “harmful” online, and to try and impose Australian content laws on the rest of the world. If children were not on social media in the first place, there would not be as much need to police all content online. Moreover, it is nearly impossible for the e-Safety commissioner to sift through millions of pieces of content and issue individual take down orders.
To truly protect children against the dangers of social media, we need systemic reform of social media platforms. Five pillars of reform Australia could introduce across the regulatory framework include;
Social media platforms should have a clearly defined duty of care to users.
Requirements for risk assessments across all of their systems. This would help platforms realise their duty of care to users. For example, a risk could be children under 16 creating an account.
Requirements for risk mitigation. To address the risk of children creating accounts, platforms would be required to take reasonable steps to mitigate the risk. This could include the use of age-verification technology, parental consent, or requiring ID.
Requirements for transparency measures. Social media companies must publish their risk assessments and researchers must be given access to public interest data, particularly in relation to how the algorithms operate and the effect they have on users.
Enforceability measures to compel social media companies to comply.
We could also look at empowering social media users by giving them the option to switch to a basic chronological algorithm, like in the EU. To stop us getting fed addictive and often toxic content. This would help break the echo chamber and rabbit hole effect. In time, rather than being manipulated by opaque algorithms, users may be able to define and program their own algorithms.
Until social media companies can prove they have redesigned their platforms — whether via a children's setting or for the entire platform — platforms must take all possible steps to ensure children under 16 are not creating social media accounts. In other words, children under 16 should be banned from social media until it’s demonstrably safe for them to use it. Our polling shows there is strong support for age verification laws; 80% of voters support laws that require age verification for new social media accounts, with a majority (51%) strongly supporting this proposal. We now know the harm to kids starts long before exposure to damaging content. Being on social media in the first place is making kids sick. Social media companies must prove their platforms are no longer harming children, and only then should we consider lifting the ban on under 16-year-olds accessing the platform.
Australians have had enough of using our young people as guinea pigs. Parents must continue to unite to delay giving kids smartphones and social media. The Government must show leadership and protect the rights of children when parents cannot. We must demand systemic reform of how social media platforms operate. Until social media companies prove their services are no longer harmful to the health and safety of children, under 16-year-olds should not be allowed access. Kids are not able to drink, smoke, drive or get tattoos, nor should they be allowed unrestricted access to social media. The failed experiment of kids using social media must end now.