Australia’s Social Media Ban Is Isolating Kids With Disabilities—Just Like Critics Warned
from the who-could-have-seen-this-coming? dept
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.
The Guardian has a deeply frustrating piece about how Australia’s ban is isolating kids with disabilities—the exact population for whom social media often serves as a genuine lifeline.
Meet Indy, a 14-year-old autistic girl who used social media to connect with friends in ways that her disability makes difficult in person:
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.
“I have autism and mental health things, it’s hard making friends in real life for me,” she says. “My online friends were easier because I can communicate in my own time and think about what I want to say. My social media was my main way of socialising and without it I feel like I’ve lost my friends.”
As the article notes, the ban started just as schools in Australia let out for the summer, just when kids would generally use communications systems like social media to stay in touch with friends.
“I didn’t have all my friends’ phone numbers because we mostly talked on Snapchat and Instagram. When I lost everything I all of a sudden couldn’t talk to them at all, that’s made me feel very lonely and not connected,” she says.
“Being banned feels unfair because it takes away something that helped me cope, where I could be myself and feel like I had friends who liked me for being myself.”
This is exactly what critics pretty much across the board warned would happen. Social media isn’t just “distraction” or “screen time” for many young people with disabilities—it’s their primary social infrastructure.
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.”
This goes beyond people with disabilities, certainly, but the damage done to that community is even clearer than with some others. We were among those who warned advocates of an age ban that nearly every study shows social media helps some kids, is neutral for many, and is harmful for some others. The evidence suggests the harmed group is less than 5% of kids. We should do what we can to help those kids, but it’s astounding that politicians, advocates, and the media don’t seem to care about those now harmed by these bans:
Isabella Choate , CEO of WA’s Youth Disability Network (YDAN), says they are concerned that young people with disability have been disproportionately affected by losing access to online communities. “Young people with disability are already isolated from community often do not have capacity to find alternative pathways to connection,” Choate says.
“Losing access to community with no practical plan for supporting young people has in fact not reduced the online risk of harm and has simultaneously increased risk for young people’s wellbeing.”
A few years back we highlighted a massive meta study on children and social media that suggested the real issue for kids was the lack of “third spaces” where kids could be kids. That had pushed many into social media, because they had few unsupervised places where they could just hang out with their friends. Social media became a digitally intermediated third space. And now the adults are taking that away as well.
Ezra Sholl is a 15-year-old Victorian teenager and disability advocate. His accounts have not yet been shut down, but says if they were it would mean “losing access to a key part” of his social life.
“As a teenager with a severe disability, social media gives me an avenue to connect with my friends and have access to communities with similar interests,” Ezra says.
“Having a severe disability can be isolating, social media makes me feel less alone.”
There’s a pattern here: every time kids find a space to gather—malls, arcades, now social media—a moral panic emerges and policymakers move to shut it down. It’s almost as if adults just don’t want kids to gather with each other anywhere at all. But the kids still figure out ways to gather.
As Ezra notes in that Guardian piece, most kids are just… bypassing the whole thing anyway:
But he adds that many of his friends have also evaded the ban, either because their original account was not picked up in age verification sweeps or because they started a new one.
“Those that were asked to prove their age just did facial ID and passed, others weren’t asked at all and weren’t kicked off,” Ezra says.
So the kids who follow the rules, or whose parents enforce them, lose their support networks. The kids who figure out the trivially easy workarounds keep right on using social media. And the politicians get to take victory laps about “protecting children” while the most vulnerable kids pay the price.
It doesn’t seem like a very good system.
Remember, this is the same Australia where that recent study found social media’s relationship with teen well-being is U-shaped—moderate use is associated with the best outcomes, while no use (especially for older teenage boys) is associated with worse outcomes than even heavy use. Australia’s ban is taking kids who might have been moderate users with good outcomes and forcing them into the “no use” category that the research associates with worse well-being. Even if you’re cautious about inferring causation from that correlation, it should, at minimum, give policymakers pause before assuming that less social media automatically means better outcomes.
And yet, the folks who pushed this ban remain unrepentant. The Guardian quotes Dany Elachi, founder of the Heads Up Alliance (one of the parent groups that advocated for the ban), taking credit for starting the “debate” and saying that it’s a “win” in his book that kids are suffering now, because… that’s part of the debate, I guess?
“So the fact that this was a debate that was front and centre for over a year means that the message got through to every parent in the country, and from that perspective alone I count it as a win,” Elachi says. “What happens further from that is a bonus, we are trying to change the social norm and that takes years.”
He’s essentially shrugging off the actual harms as collateral damage, which is quite incredible, because you know that he would be screaming loudly about it if any tech company ever suggested any harms to kids on social media were collateral damage.
“Ultimately we don’t want to have platforms policing what is going on, we just want parents themselves to say ‘this is not good for you’ to their twelve or thirteen year old children, and saying the new standard is that we don’t get on social media until we’re 16 – just like we don’t think twice about not giving cigarettes to kids any more or about not giving them alcohol to drink in early teens.”
Right. Except the law doesn’t let parents make that call. It makes it for them. That’s… the entire point of the ban. Parents who think their autistic kid benefits from social media connections don’t get to decide their kid can keep using it. The government has decided for them.
This is what happens when you build policy on moral panic instead of evidence. You end up with a law that:
- Cuts off support networks for kids with disabilities
- Does nothing about the kids who just bypass it
- Ignores the actual research on what helps and harms young people
- Was pushed by an advertising agency that makes gambling ads
- Lets politicians claim victory while vulnerable kids suffer
But sure, think of the children.
Filed Under: australia, kids, kids and social media, social media, social media ban
Comments on “Australia’s Social Media Ban Is Isolating Kids With Disabilities—Just Like Critics Warned”
Isolating kids was always the goal. Keep them desperate, ignorant, and easily exploited.
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Same reasoning behind not teaching sex ed, incidentally.
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Actually, isolating kids was never the goal. It was the intention – no doubt about that – but the goals were:
1. Australia is having a problem with online gambling advertising to children. The advertising in question is inserted into televised games, old media, and of course social media. A lot of rich people and organizations don’t want this to change, hence a sock-puppet front for a gambling advertiser running the anti-social media campaign.
2. Australia’s major political parties are conservative and of course don’t want to upset old media. That made the whole under-16 social media ban an attractive “win” for them. They’re seen to be doing something about a “major problem” (as per a long-running campaign emblazoned across the front pages and websites of said old media) without impacting anyone they care about (i.e. elderly voters or donors).
I’d also like to point out that The Guardian spent months prior to the ban writing articles supporting it.
Yeah that’s my bet.
Kids have a strong sense of Fair, no dependents to worry about, and have yet to be broken. I can see how that would scare those trying to control them.
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Kids used to be able to meet and communicate without parental approval or supervision; see any number of 1980s films. This seems to have gone out of style. Some parents demand to schedule and monitor everything that’s going on (“play dates”, internet monitoring, etc.).
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And can you even imagine kids in the 1890s?
(Er, the ones who weren’t forced labor in some manner, at least not all the time.)
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What has gone out of style is actual parenting. Parents are off-loading their parenting on others, like social media or TV or whatever. Then they get all angry when their kids end up in trouble or do things they don’t like, all because they abdicated their parental responsibility. Then, to top it off, they want politicians to fix the problem, abdicating even more of their parental responsibility.
If you have kids, be a fucking parent. If you can’t then you shouldn’t have kids. It’s that simple.
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In the 80’s, my schoolyard was open 24/7. They fenced if off a couple years ago to control access. But they never opened any public area to allow kids to play after school or on the weekends.
Some people want kids to have the same childhood as they did but don’t want to provide the same freedom or trust.
The “We need to keep kids off of social media” cult are 100% lying child abusers just as much as antivaxxers are.
The “it’s all a moral panic” thing hasn’t worked out.
Social media companies tweak/A-B Test/Research ways to keep people scrolling and clicking and looking for the next hit of negative or positive emotional stimulation. They have admitted as much in testimonies and memos, much the same that they’ve admitted to exploiting the current nightmare situation for their own gain.
Continually equating legitimate concerns over social media to the genuinely bad moral panics over D&D, Rock & Roll, and violent videogames is how we reached this point where age verification/age assurance/age-ban legislation has become the go-to. Telling parents to parent harder or asking for better media literacy education all while equating Rock & Roll with always-on, always-changing apps made by multi-billion-dollar, insanely-above-the-law corporations who continually and intentionally tweak stuff to get just the right response or level of engagement? The “it’s all just a moral panic” strategy of shooting down practically any and all social media regulation over the last decade/decade and a half hasn’t worked out. So now we’re here.
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..I don’t buy it, because you know which moral panics said “No, no, we’re not like the other moral panics, this time our issue is real, we’re punching up actually!” in response to their critcs? All of them.
Like, I remember people saying the same sort of “It’s different, we swear!” in regards to violence in videogames, even directly using the argument that the differences in technology and the corporate scale of the medium legitimized their fears.
And it was bullshit. There were problems with games to be sure, certain reactionary movements show us that, but they weren’t the ones those moral guardians were targeting, and it’s the same here and now.
Everything about this is disgusting.
It’s easy to say that, but I don’t think it’s really true. You never saw movements to ban things like the park. There is some overlap between third spaces and “places kids might do something monumentally stupid”, but it’s not a circle. People can be dumb, and taken advantage of with a moral panic, but they really do actually care about kids.
And it’s worth noting, there are social services that aren’t covered by the ban. Stuff like Roblox, Discord or Whatsapp. It’s still disruptive, mind you, not everyone is going to be aware or port their networks over overnight. But it’s worth mentioning when evaluating the impact.
I mean yeah, there are things that are worth collateral damage. Corporate profits are low on the list of things people are willing to tolerate collateral damage for.
The explicit point is that parents weren’t actually doing that, and just going on autopilot. And none of the critics tried to actually come up with something that wouldn’t just end up rendering things the previous status quo.
You gotta admit, it did move the needle on what was considered possible. Maybe now we can get take some evidence based alternatives a bit more seriously, instead of falling back on doing nothing?
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Agreed. Critics just want parents to parent harder which feels like it comes from a place of 1) Extreme privilege where the critics have the time, resources, and knowledge to absorb info about all these dangers and issues as they pop up and teach their kids, and 2) Libertarian ideological leaning where they expect individual responsibility and free markets to solve all the issues.
Critics also lean on the idea of media literacy education as a panacea which I firmly disagree with. “Look at Finland!!!” They say. Ignoring that Australia, as well as America, have school boards where the fighting over such education would be fierce and rabid.
The critics have an expectation that a plurality of overworked, underpaid parents and teachers will be able to deliver the education and information needed for themselves and their kids to push back against multi-billion-dollar corporations and the near free reign they get to tweak their own apps and manipulate the public.
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Basketball hoops removed from Truscott Reserve in City of Greater Bendigo .
Many skate parks are being removed
While they may not be removing the park they are removing things that teens like to use.
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Yeah, to be clear, I do think there is an issue with preserving third spaces. But I don’t think those are being done because people hate kids gathering.
For instance, in that example, it was due to after-hours noise complaints, and residents were worried about taking away a space. (They were also supposed to be restored after a new sign/some landscaping is/was done to address the concern. If Google StreetView is to be believed, the hoop is back up as of Dec2024, after being removed in 2023)
There are a lot of dumb/selfish reasons we’re losing third spaces (noise complaints, not wanting to pay taxes, wanting to use the space for something else, etc), but it’s generally not intentionally going after kids gathering. It’s just the usual hiccups with maintaining communal spaces.
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I don’t know where you live, but I’ve seen quite a lot of moral panic efforts to remove places where kids (especially teens) can gather. Every schoolyard in my county went from an open place where kids can hang out to ones surrounded by locked fencing. Every park in my county has put up signs saying it’s only for kids under 12 accompanied by an adult. No teens allowed. Basically every place where teens could gather is now gone.
This is censorship not merely because the government did it
(Let me make it very clear that I do not support this law, or that the government should deplatform minors without compelling evidence of severe harm.)
The smart people have always argued that a person is not truly “deplatformed” when they are merely silenced by a few private companies. Then why do you think these kids are being deplatformed? They are only barred from 10 services. There are a million other online forums these kids remain free to speak. The internet, not a single site, is the true marketplace of ideas.
The smart people will find similar censorship completely justified in an alternate universe where these same 10 services made their own independent decisions to deplatform someone. It is well within their first amendment right to make decisions to not serve anyone. Last time I checked, people aged 16 or less is not a protected class.
They keep saying it is censorship when the government does it, while it is not when a company does it. Even when there are actual people suffering such censorship. No matter how dominant and oligopolistic the company is. Even when these companies act like an oligopoly. Do they now see the irony?
When a person is silenced, even to the slightest extent, they are silenced. Even when they have alternate soapboxes. Just imagine whether you condone censorship to even one of the many physical soapboxes.
Parks in my area close at 5PM for six months (essentially fall through early spring) and sunset during the summer. For someone who has to leave school at 3pm walk 20 minutes to the park that leaves only a couple of hours to play on the equipment that probably is for elementary kids only. That sure looks like a ban on parks for teenagers and people who work during the day.
I don’t agree with blanket social media bans for anyone, and I do think that autistic teenagers in particular can benefit from interacting online. I also was that autistic teenager, and I regret a lot of the time I’ve spent online and wish an adult had taught me basics of online safety and media literacy before I got online myself. Autistic people are uniquely vulnerable to predation (not just online) because one of the key facets of autism is a lack of understanding of the intentions of others. We often have to work really hard to remind ourselves that just because our intentions are good, other people’s may not be. Autism also comes with a lot of black and white thinking, which at least for me resulted in some radical views I needed to work really hard to deprogram. I feel for Indy and all disabled kids losing access to online lifelines, but I’ve also worked with children and adults with disabilities for years. For every story of online acceptance and community, there is another of horrific exploitation and abuse. Social media may not warrant a moral panic, but that does not mean there are not real risks and trade offs to using it, especially for populations that are highly vulnerable to abuse.