A grand social media experiment begins in Australia
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 17 minutes ago
- 4 min read
By VICTORIA KIM
Darcey Pritchard, 15, deleted Snapchat off her phone about a year ago when she felt sucked in by its algorithm.
Her friend Luca Hagop, also 15, recently spent more than 34 hours on Instagram in one week, sharing pet videos and other reels “so random, they’re funny because they’re so unfunny.”
Amelie Tomlinson, 14, keeps up with her friends on Snapchat, and until recently, had almost no one’s phone number.
Her friend Jasmine Bentley, 15, is not allowed on any social media but dreams of being a content creator.
The two sets of friends, living in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, offer a small window into the wildly different relationships today’s teens have with social media. But they are united on one front: They do not think a new Australian law that bars children under 16 from having social media accounts, which takes effect Wednesday, will change their lives much.
Australia passed the law a year ago, setting itself up to be a test case for what many parents say feels like this generation’s Sisyphean task — shielding children from the risks associated with social media until they are capable of navigating it responsibly.
But these teenagers, born around the same time that Instagram and Snapchat were first released, are digital natives. Most know how to use VPNs, which may help them evade the ban. Many fudged their ages when they first signed up, to get around the minimum age of 13 for many social media services. Others have used their parents’ information to get accounts, or have older siblings whose identities they can co-opt.
More than anything, social media is just too deeply embedded into their lives.
“It’s how we communicate,” Amelie said.
Darcey said some of her friends had been talking about migrating to new apps. “You’re not going to stop these people,” she said.
Rewire impulses?
In recent years, parents around the world have grappled with increasing alarm about social media’s detriments to mental health, potential to enable online bullying and effects on developing brains.
Australia was one of the first countries to pass a nationwide law to address those concerns. Last December, it set 16 as the minimum age for social media accounts, meaning hundreds of thousands of younger children would lose theirs. Other nations, like Malaysia, have followed suit with similar plans.
Australia is putting the onus is on the social media companies to keep younger children off their platforms and will not penalize parents or children who violate the law. Officials, including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, have tried to tamp down expectations that the law will be an overnight fix.
They say they are supporting parents who feel powerless against the lure of social media and peer pressure among teens. Anika Wells, the minister for communications, described an almost idyllic new reality with children awash in time for sports, baking or learning a new language.
But it will be far from that simple. The lives and friendships of many 13- to 15-year-olds are enmeshed with social media — even if the children are not on it themselves.
For instance, when Darcey and her friends were playing an online guessing game, many of the clues were memes everyone else had seen on Instagram. When Amelie and a friend got to school 15 minutes before the first bell, they made four TikTok videos. When Jasmine puts on makeup, she will record herself, even though she is not on social media. And when Luca’s mother died a few years ago, he found it helpful to type out his feelings on an anonymous server on Discord.
Can a law rewire those impulses?
Currently, 10 social media services are covered by the ban: Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X and YouTube. The companies have said that they do not believe a blanket ban is the best way to keep children safe, but that they will nevertheless deactivate accounts of children under 16.
“They’re ripping away something that has grown on us and become more part of our lives every day,” Jasmine said.
Two popular apps in Australia in the weeks leading up to the law were “Yope,” a photo sharing app targeting Generation Z, and “lemon8,” a TikTok alternative owned by the same parent company, ByteDance, portending a potential game of Whac-a-Mole with regulators.
‘The horse has already bolted’
When Amelie was trying to persuade her parents to allow her on TikTok, she pleaded her case in a five-page, single-spaced letter about not wanting to feel left out.
Her mother, Catherine Best, said she felt that parents had lost control years ago. When Amelie had just started primary school, Best deleted YouTube off her daughter’s school-required iPad because she was watching toy unboxing videos nonstop. The school insisted on reinstalling it because teachers used educational videos on YouTube in class.
“That was really the gateway,” said Best, who said the law was too little, too late. “I feel like the horse has already bolted.”
Amelie said that, like many of her friends, she had two TikTok accounts, both set to private: one for just close friends and the other for a wider group. The account with her friends has her age set to 19, so she was not worried about losing access.
But she was exchanging phone numbers with friends for the first time in anticipation of losing her Snapchat account. This month, the app prompted her to verify her age — set to 16 — with a selfie, and it approved her as being old enough to continue using her account, she said.
Amelie said she recognized how much she reached for her phone. Her screen time “goes nuts” on school holidays.
“It’s just an instinct to pick up my phone,” she said, “which I don’t like.”