Peter Malinauskas, the 45-year-old premier of South Australia and father of four children aged ten and under, was at home with his wife. She had just read the final page of The Anxious Generation, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s best-selling book about the dangers of social media to young people. “I will never forget one night, she finished the book, she turned to me and she said: ‘You better bloody do something about this,’” Malinauskas recalled.

It prevents anyone under the age of 16 from opening a social media account, while existing accounts have been deactivated. Anthony Albanese, the prime minister, gave his full-throated endorsement. “I’ve had the sombre experience of meeting with mums and dads who have seen their child’s wellbeing crushed by the worst of social media, many living with the devastating pain of losing a child,” he said. “We’re doing this for those parents and for every parent.”

This message was sent to hundreds of thousands of teenage Instagram users last week

AFP

The reactions have been mixed. Many teens are outraged at being barred from their favourite apps. Social media companies have deployed AI, face scans and even required photo IDs to verify or remove users who fell below the new threshold. However, some have managed to stay online, by either lying about their age, making up aliases or finding other ways to circumvent the crackdown. Two High Court cases have been brought: the first by two teenagers who have claimed the ban infringes on their human rights; the second by Reddit, one of the ten tech companies affected.

Thousands of miles across the Pacific, the ban detonated like a bomb in Silicon Valley, not because of the potential financial fallout, but with the framing of social media as a public menace that, like cigarettes or guns, must be kept out of the hands of the young.

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Last week Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s former chief of staff and potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, called for America to follow Australia’s lead. “When it comes to our adolescents, it’s either going to be adults or the algorithms,” he said. “One of them is going to raise the kids, and I think we need to help the parents.”

‘Instagram’s a drug. We’re basically pushers’

Britain’s Online Safety Act, which came into effect in July, forced companies to impose age verification and new content moderation standards, under the threat of fines of up to 10 per cent of global revenue should they not comply. The law prompted a record surge in virtual private network (VPN) downloads, which mask the location of a device and allow people to evade the rules.

In California, more than 2,000 lawsuits against social media giants from schools, parents and state attorney generals, have been combined into an enormous multidistrict litigation in a federal court in Oakland. Its four defendants — Meta, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube — have failed to get it thrown out.

At the core is a simple argument: social media giants have knowingly created addictive products to attract children with disastrous results. So they should fundamentally change their products, and pay for the damage they have caused.

In messages released as part of the case, one Meta researcher wrote: “Oh my gosh yall [sic] IG [Instagram] is a drug.” Another responded: “We’re basically pushers.”

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According to the now unsealed 5,800 page filing, in 2019, Meta carried out a “deactivation study”. The study found that after one week, people who stopped using Facebook and Instagram “reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison”.

• Some primary school pupils ‘can swipe a screen but can’t speak’

The suit alleged: “The company never publicly disclosed the results of its deactivation study. Instead, Meta lied to Congress about what it knew.” A company spokesman dismissed the allegation, claiming instead that the result was due to the “expectation effect” — the idea that if someone believes something is bad for them, then they would feel better when they stopped doing it.

What the studies say

Meta, and the rest of the industry, has long argued that there is no hard scientific evidence linking social media use to the rise in youth depression, anxiety or attention problems, but the catalogue of studies into the “impairments” caused by excessive social media use is growing.

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, for example, followed nearly 12,000 American children for three years from age nine or ten. It found that a rise in social media use was “associated with greater depressive symptoms a year later”. This and other studies continue, heeding the call from America’s surgeon general who in 2023 made an urgent public request for research into the “profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents”.

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Meta has been doing such work internally for years. Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager turned whistleblower, went public in 2021 armed with thousands of pages of internal documents that she argued proved that Meta (then called Facebook) knew that its products were detrimental to young people. One internal presentation from 2020 stated that 32 per cent of teenage girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.

Frances Haugen, the Meta whistleblower, addresses US senators in 2021

STEFANI REYNOLDS/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES

A year later, another internal study found that nearly half of teens (49.2 per cent) who reported getting bullied felt “unsupported” by Instagram. One in eight children between the ages of 13 and 15 had received an unwanted advance on the app in the previous seven days. These were disclosed by another whistleblower, Arturo Bejar, a former senior safety executive and consultant.

Lobbying machine

There is something of a playbook that Meta follows when such allegations are levelled; the methodology is dismissed as flawed or misleading. Lawsuits that allege it is a “breeding ground for predators who target children for human trafficking” are met with rebuttals about “cherry-picked” evidence.

Meta will instead point to the many dozens of tools it has rolled out in recent years to make it easier for people to control their experience, and for parents to impose guardrails. Last year, it brought in mechanisms to allow parents to manage settings and see who their kids are messaging and made teen accounts default “private”, so that strangers could not reach out to them. The underlying question was why hadn’t they been private by default from the outset? In the real world, age-based restrictions apply to everything from drinking to pornography consumption to driving. The internet, however, is different. It is the one place where an eight-year-old is treated little differently from a 28-year-old.

And the social media industry and its lobbyists have proven successful at (mostly) keeping it that way. Last year Meta spent a record $24 million on lobbying, putting it among the top ten corporate influence peddlers in Washington. Those efforts have been focused on safeguarding a statute known as section 230, a 29-year-old law conceived for a different internet and which shields website publishers from liability arising from what others might post on their sites. Despite at least 25 hearings into online safety, section 230 remains untouched.

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Mark Zuckerberg of Meta

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Chris McKenna, founder of Protect Young Eyes, testified at the first of those 25 hearings in 2019. He said: “The inability in Congress to do anything meaningful, to put reasonable barriers between our children and harm, is so maddening. So what do you have? You have other countries trying to compensate for our lack of action.”

The Australian measures feel extreme, but others are following suit. Malaysia plans to raise the minimum age to open a social media account from 13 to 16 next year, and is also pondering an under-16 social media ban.

Baroness Kidron, founder of the 5Rights campaign group, who led the passage of Britain’s age appropriate design code, is not surprised. “These companies are addicting kids, they’re rolling out stuff that grabs their attention, and commodifies their childhood,” she said. “At a certain point, Australia goes, ‘Look, either do better, or get out of our kids’ lives.’”

Yet the fight to rein in social media is a bit like climate change. Smaller countries can introduce tough rules, but without the participation of the country at the heart of the problem they are fighting an uphill battle.

There is some movement at a state level in the US; in September, New York city’s public school system became the largest in America to ban smartphones in schools. But on a federal level, movement remains slow. For frustrated parents, one hope comes from the Kids Online Safety Act, which gained ground in Washington last year, winning a landslide vote in the Senate before getting stuck in the House of Representatives. A core goal of the bill would be to impose a “duty of care” on tech companies.

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This would would make tech companies legally liable, just as say, a maker of medicines or car seats is, for faulty or damaging products. Whether a muscular version of that safety bill makes it to President Trump’s desk intact is far from certain. Republicans in the House of Representatives have already sought to water it down. And the president’s public and newfound affection for Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow tech bros make that hope feel faint.

A Meta spokesperson said: “We strongly disagree with these allegations and are confident the evidence will show our longstanding commitment to supporting young people. For over a decade, we’ve listened to parents, worked with experts and law enforcement, and conducted in-depth research to understand the issues that matter most. We use these insights to make meaningful changes, like introducing teen accounts with built-in protections and providing parents with tools to manage their teens’ experiences. We’re proud of the progress we’ve made, and we’re always working to do better.”