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By Prof Paul Bernal
A new ban of under-16s from social media in Australia comes into action in a week or so. Australia has been a pioneer in interventionist regulation of the internet for some time – its Online Safety Act 2021, including its requirement for age verification, pre-dates the UK’s equivalent by two years. The new social media rules, brought in by the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024, is the first major attempt to ban all under 16s from social media, and is being watched with interest by lawmakers around the world, not least in the UK. The UK, of course, enacted its own Online Safety Act 2023, with a view to making the UK ‘the safest place in the world to go online’. Though that placed significant restrictions on what children can do online – the age verification requirements that came in over the last few months are the most direct part of this – it did not include a ban on children using social media. That, however, could well be under consideration if the Australian ban ‘works’.
The idea that social media is essentially harmful for kids is a longstanding one, but one that has been lacking in either understanding or nuance. It is easy to list horror stories about trolls, cyberbullies, paedophiles and stalkers, and about kids being drawn into self-harming or eating disorders and worse – they make attractive stories for our sensationalist media – but that is not the whole story at all. The coverage of the issues in the media has been largely terrible, the comments from politicians even worse, based on ignorance and cliché. The simplistic view, and social media is terrible and damaging, and we need to keep kids away from it, is highly seductive. This is not a simple subject, however, no matter that both media and politicians very much want it to be.
Simple ‘solutions’, like banning kids from social media, or enforcing age-verification or ID-verification throughout the internet do not and will not provide real answers, primarily because they are missing the key points, and are answering the wrong questions. For example, whether a social media ban for kids would actually prevent kids from accessing social media, or whether they would be able to find ways around it, or alternative forums in other places such as the dark web, is not really the point. We should be asking first of all whether banning kids would be a good idea at all. There are many reasons to believe that it might not be. Indeed, that banning kids from social media would (and probably will) do far more harm than good.
It is nearly 20 years since American scholar danah boyd (danah spells her name without capitalisation) wrote her seminal book ‘it’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens‘ (available for free online here), and despite the excellence of its scholarship and the importance of its conclusions, very little seems to have been learned. I call danah’s book seminal because it offered something different from all the discussions before – the view from the kids themselves, through interviews and analysis. It was not seminal in the sense that it changed the perspective of the politicians and the media. They are still making exactly the same mistakes. They still haven’t learned. They still do not understand what kids get from their online lives, and do not listen to the kids themselves. That, more than anything, had been danah boyd’s hope, as she put in the introduction to her book.:
“As you read this book, my hope is that you will suspend your assumptions about youth in an effort to understand the social lives of networked teens. By and large, the kids are all right. But they want to be understood. This book is my attempt to do precisely that.”
‘By and large, the kids are all right.’ That was boyd’s conclusion in 2006, and it remains, by and large, true. For the most part, most kids, most of the time, are able to navigate the internet – and in particular social media – in ways that work. Rather than being a cesspit of trolling and misinformation, the internet mostly works. Just like for the grown-ups, the internet is simply part of their lives – how they organise themselves, how they get information, how the socialise, how they do their (home)work, how they find entertainment, how they listen to music and watch television and movies, how they date, how they shop and much more. They’re not that different from the grown-ups. Indeed, in many ways they are better able to deal with the internet than the 50-somethings who are not just as likely to fall for misinformation and be steering into extremism but who actually vote accordingly and have the ability to shape the world into the fantasies that are damaging us so much.
Boyd’s book was titled ‘it’s complicated’, drawing from the old ‘relationship status’ category in Facebook back in the day, because teenagers’ relationships to the internet were and are complicated. The internet – and social media in particular – has good aspects and bad aspects. Working out how to regulate it well means understanding both the good and the bad. When deciding how to regulate kids’ access to the net, we need to take that seriously. The public debate is all about the harm that can come from social media, whether it’s access to pornography or being bullied, pro-anorexia and self-harm sites or addictive games and sites like TikTok – and if this is all you see, of course a ban on kids from social media makes sense. That, though, is an incomplete and misleading picture of what the internet and social media provides for kids. We need to talk much more about the good things that the internet provides for kids – and for vulnerable kids in particular.
This is one of the key points: there are a great many good things about the internet and social media for most kids. It is critical to how they socialise – both online and in the ‘real’ world. They organise meet-ups, they work out what they can do together and much more. They communicate with each other, provide support to each other, solace when things go wrong, advice about how to deal with problems and so forth. This matters for all kids, but for particular kinds of kids especially. The internet provides a way out of loneliness, a way to distract yourself from what are often hard lives in the real world. An escape. People often talk as though the internet for kids is all about bullying – but it can often be exactly the opposite, a way to escape bullying. If you’re being bullied for your appearance, your ethnicity your name, your family, your poverty, any health condition – this is particularly important for many disabled kids, neurodivergence, sexuality, religion and much more, the internet can help. None of that has to show – you can create a life where the first thing that people see isn’t the thing that the bullies use to target you. For some kids, social media was and is the key to keeping happy and positive. It’s the real world where the pain comes, whether from bullies, from families, from schools and so on. This is another omission from much of the debate – not all parents are good and protective, attentive and well-meaning. Some are arrogant, ignorant, aggressive, oppressive, bullying, bigoted or hateful. What some kids need most is an escape from their parents.
Take away social media from these kids, you put them into a disastrous situation. And yet these kids are not the ones talked about. They should be. Instead, we see stereotypes and archetypes rolled again and again: nice kids with loving parents who are sucked into bad situations, uncaring internet giants designing algorithms to force them to watch terrible videos and so forth. There is of course truth here, but it’s not the whole truth, and before we do drastic things we should consider the wider implications.
Moreover, there seems to be an illusion that if we took social media (and phones) away from kids they would all suddenly take up healthy pursuits, from sports to arts and crafts, to reading Jane Austen or doing embroidery. The reality is that they generally can’t do any of that, because we’ve sold off the playing fields and shut down the youth clubs. We’ve made pursuits like that so expensive and exclusive that the vast majority don’t have a chance to do it. We’ve let our cities become so car-dependent that they can’t easily get to those few clubs that do still function and are affordable. If you want to help kids away from the unhealthy stuff on the internet, the starting point has to be to change all of this. Support the clubs, subsidise the activities and so on – and let the kids use the internet and social media to find out about them! Banning kids from YouTube stops them even using the videos that can help them learn things like cooking, sewing and dancing.
There’s much more to say on this subject – I have barely touched the surface here – but we need to talk about it all more honestly. The good as well as the bad. We need to find ways to address the undoubted harms that are there, without creating new harms by taking away what kids really need. This means being more intelligent, more nuanced, and more targeted. Look at the harms and address them specifically and directly through well-enforced law. Some parts of the Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA) have done this – the sections on cyberflashing, (unsolicited dick pics) added to the Sexual Offences Act 2003 by the OSA, and epilepsy trolling (S183 of the OSA) show how it can be done, though the proof of the pudding will be in the enforcement, and how effective that is has yet to be seen. The attempts to deal with ‘revenge porn’ and things like pro-anorexia sites, also both covered by existing laws, need to be sharpened up and better enforced, and so forth. Similarly targeted approaches are needed for other problems. There is a great deal to do – but blunt instruments like banning kids from social media will do far more harm than good.
Paul Bernal, December 2025
An earlier version of this blog post appeared on Paul Bernal’s personal blog on 3rd December 2025