Link: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/02/17/australias-social-media-ban-is-isolating-kids-with-disabilities-just-like-critics-warned/

We’ve been covering Australia’s monumentally stupid social media ban for kids under 16 since before it went into effect. We noted how dumb the whole premise was, how the rollout was an immediate mess, how a gambling ad agency helped push the whole thing, and how two massive studies involving 125,000 kids found the entire “social media is inherently harmful” narrative doesn’t hold up.

But theory and data are one thing. Now we’re getting real-world stories of actual kids being harmed by a law that was supposedly designed to protect them. And wouldn’t you know it, the harm is falling hardest on the kids who were already most vulnerable. Just like many people predicted.

If you thought this was a good idea you are part of the harm against these kids, wake the fuck up and use your brain, this is a moral panic, you are hardly different than villagers yelling for a witch to be burned at the stake and you should feel ashamed of your stupidity.

Do better fediverse and if you are one of those people who casually waxes lyrical about denying kids access to the tools you use everyday because you honestly believe letting young people on social media is equivalent to giving them physically addictive drugs and that this place should have young people restricted from it because it is fundamentally unhealthy, please leave. You bring this place down and you undermine any sense of optimism about digital communities that motivates the rest of us to be here.

“The current research does not support the usefulness of banning kids from social media. Research studies do not suggest there is a correlation between time spent on social media and youth mental health. Further, reducing social media time does not improve mental health. This ban is likely to be a waste of time and resources. Further, it prevents opportunities to teach kids how to use social media responsibly. Like most moral panics, these kinds of efforts do harm in distracting us from real sources of youth mental health problems, mainly families in distress and failing schools. We have to remember we’ve been through this all before many times from video games, to rock and roll, books to the radio. These panics over media and technology never do anything to help kids.”

...

“Perhaps because of that balance and because many other factors are known to have a much larger impact on childhood, current evidence suggests very small effects at a population level when it comes to associations between social media/smartphone use on wellbeing e.g., McCrae et al., 2017; Vahedi & Zannella, 2021; Yoon et al.,2019). Note that not all the above reviews involve children. Also, that these are all reporting associations, not cause and effect.

“When it comes to the general use of social media and smartphones, the effects on mood or wellbeing are so small ‘that they require implausibly large behavioral changes to produce even minor mood shifts.’ (Winbush et al., 2025; p6)

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-comments-on-evidence-on-benefits-and-harms-of-social-media-and-social-media-bans-on-young-people/

https://news.ucsb.edu/2025/022293/brain-science-social-media-and-modern-moral-panic

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-media-time-does-not-increase-teenagers-mental-health-problems-study

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2026/01/26/social-media-age-bans-toxic-business-model/

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2026-01-23-expert-comment-under-16-social-media-ban-right-course

https://www.aap.org/en/patient-care/media-and-children/center-of-excellence-on-social-media-and-youth-mental-health/the-good-and-bad-of-social-media-what-research-tells-us/?srsltid=AfmBOoojcZwZjG9eD7lPvXtLXnzx9iLkcNaJ0r5jbUdJZsW-ntK8HmpM

https://www.businessinsider.com/kids-parenting-social-media-bans-meta-2026-2

https://cacbrevard.org/should-teens-be-banned-from-social-media/

https://publications.ieu.asn.au/ie-220/article1/help-or-harm?cookies=true

https://medium.com/@pradeenmania123/banning-social-media-for-teens-is-dangerous-and-doomed-to-fail-7e4946f08561

https://theconversation.com/i-research-the-harm-that-can-come-to-teenagers-on-social-media-i-dont-support-a-ban-273835

https://www.humanrights.unsw.edu.au/students/blogs/australia-social-media-ban-under-16s

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2026-01-27/a-social-media-ban-for-under-16s-would-be-popular-but-would-it-be-smart

https://www.jezebel.com/social-media-bans-teens-europe-uk-spain-greece-elon-musk-traitor-x-ai-chatbots-twitter

https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/social-media-regulation-is-being-shaped-by-fear-not-evidence

Seems like something easy to fix considering the massive damage social media has been doing

Seeing as how the linked article is an editorial, I took a look at the link from the Guardian.

And it's all people saying how it's more difficult to talk to their friends now. But how? You still have a phone that dials numbers. Your parents, presumably, have the ability to access social media and obtain any numbers you need if you inadvertently failed to do so. You have email. And it's free.

The last line reiterates how, while this is ultimately a parental failing, the parental failing has been so astronomical and the harm to kids' cognitive abilities and mental stability so profound that regulation is essential.

I look forward to the day when social media use is banned globally for all underage people, and if you need more information as to why, go speak to any schoolteacher in America who can't get their students to pay attention for more than 60 seconds, or who can't retain information that is literally written on the board in front of them. And it's getting worse because most parents just park their kid in front of a screen all day.

Like recycling, this is a problem that cannot be solved by expecting individuals to act. Government regulation of social media platforms is necessary.

Advocacy group Children and Young People with Disability Australia (CYDA) says social media and the internet is “often a lifeline for young people with disability, providing one of the few truly accessible ways to build connections and find community”.

In a submission to the Senate inquiry around the laws, CYDA said social media was: “a place where young people can choose how they want to represent themselves and their disability and learn from others going through similar things”.

“It provides an avenue to experiment and find new opportunities and can help lessen the sting of loneliness,” the submission said. “Cutting off that access ignores the lived reality of thousands and risks isolating disabled youth from their peer networks and broader society.”

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/feb/06/ive-lost-my-friends-advocacy-groups-warn-australias-social-media-ban-risks-isolating-kids-with-disabilities

You sure about that buddy? Confident enough to maim the fragile social networks that young people living in hostile environments may rely on imperfectly in favor of another solution you haven't even come up with yet?

Leave this place if this is how you see social media, by your own viewpoint digital communities aren't good for people so why are you here?

Why are you here then?

How the hell are you going to ban all underage people from social media, who are you going to bestow complete authority over our digital identities to and who gets the authority to decide the details of how it is done?

You are being intellectually lazy and it shows.

if you need more information as to why, go speak to any schoolteacher in America who can't get their students to pay attention for more than 60 seconds, or who can't retain information that is literally written on the board in front of them.

https://edspace.american.edu/thecfebeat/2025/01/01/the-myth-of-the-shrinking-attention-span-shed-siliman/

Spring 2025

A few weeks ago, a YouTube short caught my attention. The short was yet another commentary on how Gen Z supposedly can’t focus on a particular thing for more than a few seconds. I scrolled through the YouTube comments and noticed a refrain: studies prove it. Everyone’s attention span is shorter, studies prove, as we become more deeply immersed in a digital, screen-filled world (insert unknown source here). Today’s teens, studies prove, bear the brunt of this crisis with an attention span shorter than that of a goldfish.

Something about that claim gnawed at me. After years of experience in the field of educational development, I knew the reality was more complicated than these sweeping generalizations. Where were these studies everyone kept referencing? What evidence existed behind this seemingly universal belief about our shrinking ability to focus?

I suspected I might find only a few studies to support the claim. I was not prepared, however, to find absolutely no evidence.

...

The only substantive research I found came from Gloria Mark, who studied digital screen use and multitasking. Her work suggested that people today switch between screens more rapidly (see her studies on attention to screens in 2004, 2012, and 2016), but this hardly proves a universal decline in human attention. The notion that attention can be measured in simple “spans” is itself questionable: as Yoo et al. (2022) state, “there is no singular neural measure of a person’s overall attentional functioning across tasks,” adding, “attention is not a unitary construct but rather multi-faceted” (p. 782).

For starters, requiring ID verification. That is something that is very obviously easy for an adult to provide and for a child not to. At the end of the day, that will be for each individual country to decide.

Though I imagine over the long-term there will be more nuanced solutions.

The problem of people losing their cognitive abilities is far more consequential than a small group of people having a more difficult time because they don't socialize easily. I'm just looking at the bigger issue here.

Ok so let's use that logic of who gets the authority to decide.

As a child would it be ok for you to watch porn all day? I mean what's stopping you? The government with their R, MA, NR ratings? Why not just let children smoke? Who has the authority to question what we do with our bodies? We should be selling smokes and alcohol to minors cause why listen to anything the professionals and government says?

Why are you following those rules? That's just being intellectually lazy since others are telling you what to do.

The problem of people losing their cognitive abilities

Cite your sources or don't casually assert such claims

I don't exist to entertain you, and I don't find your ideological bent worth more of my time.

Have a pleasant evening. :)

As a child would it be ok for you to watch porn all day?

How does this relate to the conversation at hand?...... further do you honestly believe porn isn't accessible to people under 18...???.........??????????...........????????????????????

Why not just let children smoke?

What evidence do you have that letting kids access social media is equivalent to exposing them to one of the most physically addictive cancer causing agents on earth?

Let me state the obvious, letting kids smoke cigarettes would lead to many many many many MANY young people dying prematurely. What you are suggesting, cutting off young people from social media, will likely also kill kids who are ostracized in their local in-person social networks when they become desperately isolated from anyone who isn't bigoted.

I know this seems silly to state explicitly because it is so obvious but social media does not prematurely end people's lives by massively raising the risk of a terminal illness that can't be cured, to equate them is an offense to anyone who has lost a loved one to lung cancer or some other health complication from cigarettes.

Children. Tons of studies show that social media for people under 25 does developmental harm to the brain because the part that hits the brakes does not develop then. Instead, for teens it is a dopamine factory with doom scroll

Cite your sources or stop making these claims

The real issue is that most social media is for-profit addiction machine breeding more and more anti-social behavior, not that kids have access to it. This is just a another example that liberals are incapable of seeing any ill in rampant capitalism or much less intervene in it's mechanism for the common good. Everything is framed around profit seeking bringing out the greatest good and individuals choice. They are very at a loss when having to to do any systemic analysis why social-media has ill effects on social fabric. The best they can come up is that kids are not yet fully formed adults able to do the right choice, so they must be guided.

Who could have possibly guessed that cutting kids off from means of communication would have negative consequences?

I don't want entertainment, I want you to think harder before you resort to kneejerk reactions and I want you to cite your sources when you make bold claims.

This whole article seems fishy.

While some young people were exposed to harmful content and bullying online, for Indy, social media was always a safe space. If she ever came across anything that felt unsafe, she says, she would ask her parents or sisters about it.

If thats the case why dont her parents just use their I'd to verify an account for her? Also it only blocked a few platforms and there are still plenty of ways to communicate with friends.

Giving citations is too much work for people who react based on feelings and not reality.

I said this would happen, and got downvoted.

Have you cited a single thing anywhere in this entire post?

Yeah. I'm pretty sure for profit social media isn't good for anyone. Adults shouldn't use it either. But we decided long ago that you can't stop adults from drinking or smoking weed, so adults are just mature enough to handle it or approach lies and manipulation with more skepticism, but I look around and see it's not true.

I feel like at least things like Lemmy and Mastodon are much easier to filter or walk away from when you aren't in the right emotional space.

You mean like OP, who's clearly having a temper tantrum calling people "fucking idiots" and telling them they need to "leave" if they don't agree with them, all the while demanding sources from everyone while providing none of their own other than a single editorial written by a college student?

How about this tidbit from the article you linked in the OP? I'm guessing you didn't actually read any of it past the headline because it certainly doesn't say what you seem to think it does. What an intellectually lazy thing to do.

In 2018, the World Health Organization recognized gaming disorder as a mental health condition that intrudes detrimentally into an addicted gamer’s sleep, work, education and ability to foster and maintain relationships in real life, while also impacting memory, attention span and stress management.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media addiction hasn’t been officially recognized, Falcione said, “but it’s pretty clear – at least within the literature – that it seems to be transposable to the extent that all the criteria for gaming disorder also apply to a social media or smartphone addiction.”

There are three main criteria, she explained. The first is that the person feels a need to use that media more and more, which can build a tolerance similar to that experienced by drug addicts. Second, she continues, “there’s a salience that it becomes the most prominent thing in your life — it’s what you think about the most, it’s what you want to do the most, and even if you’re not on your phone, you’re thinking about it, craving it and choosing it over other activities that may need your attention.” The third criteria is that its use creates internal conflict or turmoil as it interferes with relationships or obligations to work or school.

“For teens and college students, when you see those grades drop, that’s a big signal that the media use is actually becoming detrimental,” Falcione said.

Yeah, I included that to show some breadth in my evidence, but the evidence for gaming addiction is fraught with structural issues as well. Certainly people get addicted to video games, but it is also decidedly a moral panic and thus comparing social media to it weakens the case for banning it in my opinion.

Yes

I was not prepared, however, to find absolutely no evidence.

Hold up, hold up.

Here are plenty of studies - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=attention+span+social+media&btnG=

Fill your boots, mate - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=social+media+developmental+effects&btnG=&oq=social+media+developmental

You.... sent me a search result for keywords... you want to be specific?

Nope!

I want to ban everything conservatives and corporations love. All drugs legal except alcohol, ban billionaires, ban lobbying, keep doing that until their heads explode.

We know that social media is designed to be addictive and needs to be regulated the same way any addictive or dangerous substance or activity should be. Harm reduction and education is the best way in general.

Because lemmy and mastodon don't have manipulative algorithms! Maybe we should just outlaw those kind of algos? /showerthoughts

Bud, you're stuned. It's bad, its fucking up kids. You are in denial flat our running the tobacco playbook.

Don't feed the dipshit troll. It is trying to get people bent out of shape with a long-term agenda.

There is nothing more low effort than linking to search results for words without any additional context or any indicators which of the search results are relevant or even necessarily support your conclusions...

I don't think that uploading a government ID makes anyone safer online, especially when those IDs are guaranteed to be exposed online, and used to abuse people the legal way (through hyper detailed profiles).

Australia also lacks common-sense free speech protections, so it's easy for powerful people to target anyone they dislike. Just ask Friendlyjordies.

Thats fine, uploading the ID doesnt have to be safer. The parents can judge the risk of their child using that platform and upload their ID to verify if they want. I'm pointing out that the child isnt prevented from communicating with friends or even using social media.

Can you rephrase, "doesn't need to be safer"? Maybe I'm misunderstanding. Because this is just making people more unsafe.

If you trust parents with giving (or not giving) their children access to the internet, then we don't need a nanny state or ID uploads at all.

The claim was that there is no evidence. To disprove that all I had to do was find one piece of evidence. I found several with 5 seconds of work. Why are you not putting in that amount of effort? Is it because you are too angry to consider alternative points of view?

It is a search result for four words, not a list of positive evidence supporting your argument....?

I could have linked to the studies individually but I am not your research assistant and owe you nothing.

Right but you did not show me positive evidence. Pointing at a forest and saying "Bigfoot is in there, that is proof, I don't have time to show you, find Bigfoot yourself!" doesn't count as proof Bigfoot exists..

In your original post you demonstrated an ability to collect a nice pile of links to support your argument. Use that skill to build the opposite argument and see what happens. If your original argument was a good one it should stand up. I've given you a starting point but I'm not going to try to change the mind of an angry person, that's just stupid.

I may agree with your point but you need to be a lot nicer with how you word your message. Stop insulting the people trying to read your post and calm the hell down. The fediverse isn't your dumping ground for rage and abuse. Nor is anyone here obligated to respond to your vitriol. It only serves to hurt whatever you're trying to convey.

Fair enough, but for the record I am not just arbitrarily mad about this.

This is the fediverse.

We should be excited about the possibility of social media when it is employed in a kind way for adults and younger people.

How am I supposed to feel optimistic when even here people resort to kneejerk reductions about social media moral panics without engaging with the nuance?

Yeah it is frustrating, but you aren't wrong. I am angry because I care.