Australia has been in the news for the most tragic of reasons this weekend, when a father and son opened fire on Jewish people attending a Hanukkah event at Bondi Beach. Fifteen people were killed, including a ten-year-old girl and a Holocaust survivor. The attack is regrettably part of a worldwide rise in assaults on Jewish people. In recent years Jews have been indiscriminately targeted, indicative of an antisemitism which has always been there.
The country was also in the headlines last week, this time for a wholly good reason. Australia has enacted the world’s first social media ban for under-16s. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, X, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, and something called “Kick” are all now banned for the age group. For budding entrepreneurs, LinkedIn has been spared.
The law, fortunately, will not see swathes of teenagers sent to correctional facilities. It will be entirely up to the companies to take “reasonable steps” to prevent underage users from accessing their apps. If they do not, they could be fined up to 49.5 million Australian dollars, or 33 million US dollars. The response from providers like Meta has been, in part, to assess a user’s age through their account activity. Presumably, the overuse of words like “bussin” and “skibidi” will flag a potential under-16, whereas sharing a Wordle score or complaining about “adulting” will place someone safely in the realm of millennials.
Governments have intervened in their citizens’ social media use before. Several totalitarian countries around the world prohibit or severely restrict the use of social media for their people. Turkmenistan, Iran, Eritrea, and North Korea restrict its use significantly, while China bans Western platforms and replaces them with state-controlled alternatives. France and Italy require parental permission for under-15s and under-14s respectively, and in the United Kingdom the Online Safety Act requires platforms to prevent children from accessing harmful content.
But Australia is the first country to introduce a blanket ban which specifically targets children, acknowledging the harm social media can have on the young brain. It is a pioneering move which, in its infancy, will likely be largely circumvented, with sanctions rarely imposed. It nevertheless represents a radical change in governmental policy which will hopefully lead to other countries following suit.
The criticism and pushback to the ban has been weak, with some claiming that its imposition will lead children to access less regulated parts of the web, with the potential to push them into contact with would-be predators. Presumably such critics are unaware that X allows pornographic content on user accounts and generates it through its AI.
They might also not know that child grooming is already taking place on a tremendous scale across the current platforms. For example, in the UK, online child sexual exploitation and abuse increased by 26 per cent in 2024 and now accounts for 42 per cent of total abuse. Snapchat, a single app banned under the Australian ruling, was responsible for 54 per cent of online abuse. This means that in 2024 Snapchat facilitated 23 per cent of the UK’s child abuse. These apps are not the lesser of two evils in comparison to the dark web. They have become the dark web.
Elsewhere, the evidence is equally damning. In 2022 the UK Children’s Commissioner found that 60 per cent of children aged 13 to 17 had encountered harmful content online, including self-harm and pornography, often algorithmically promoted. Meta’s own data in 2021 showed that Instagram worsened body image issues for one in three girls. The UK Office for National Statistics has reported that self-harm among girls aged 10 to 14 rose by more than 150 per cent between 2011 and 2021, the years of the rapid rise in social media use.
In Australia, the Catholic Church has taken something of a knock in recent years, falling from 25 per cent of the population in 2011 to 20 per cent in 2021. But the law has been propelled in part by Catholic parents who see a contradiction between unfettered phone access and the Church’s vision for childhood. Dany Elachi, a father of five, has spearheaded the Heads Up Alliance, which pushed for the law to be enacted. Spurred by his faith, Elachi notes: “As Catholics in particular, we wish to raise our children in the values of our family and the faith, not the values of TikTok.”
The law has also seen strong support from the Catholic hierarchy, with Archbishop Peter Comensoli of Melbourne explaining: “Young minds need time to develop and mature to ensure they can use social media safely and well. I hope the new laws will be a help for parents who are trying hard to protect their children from the potential harms of social media.”
The Church is at the forefront of many of today’s moral battles. Exhausted from trying to explain the metaphysical and the communal to a world obsessed with the material and the individual, the task has not been easy. Yet the harm social media inflicts on the young brain is now so obvious, and so widely supported by scientific evidence, that the ground is unusually firm. In this debate, the Church has the chance to speak with clarity and confidence, and to win. If it does, other contested ground may yet become easier to hold.
