Anthony Albanese's teen social media ban has a shark problem

Years into Australia's quest to get teens off social media, the Albanese government is suddenly in a hurry.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese last month declared it was "outrageous" that the Coalition and the Greens had voted to scrutinise proposed reforms to social media minimum age law at an inquiry.

It was oddly urgent for a policy that had been in the works for more than two years — and one that he declared a "success" a week before it even came into effect.

Now, eight months after the law was implemented, there is a clearer explanation for the government's haste: its world-first policy for Australians aged under 16 has so far produced little visible change.

Early teen social media ban results show little impact

Late last month, the government's independent online safety regulator, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, released the first findings of its expert-led study of the ban's results.

The top line was that use of social media by teens had barely budged. Most teens (81.5 per cent) were still using social media after the ban, down just a few percentage points from 85.9 per cent before the ban.

(It also reported a 20 per cent decrease in teens with accounts on social media, although the ban's law, as written, actually doesn't require social media companies to stop teens from using social media in a logged-out state).

It found little change to kids' offline activities, problematic internet use or wellbeing, nor to parental stress.

A bigger impact found by the research was that parents are now increasingly in the dark about their teens' social media use, with those who were unaware their teens had used social media going from 23 per cent to 33 per cent.

Then, at the inquiry into the ban's amendments on Friday, the eSafety Commissioner acknowledged that the office had also seen a rise in messaging and gaming use — two exclusions from the teen social media ban that, nevertheless, undercut the government's promise to get kids "back onto the footy field".

Now, this is just a policy that's only been in effect for a few months. Online child safety group SmackTalk's founder Wayne Holesworth told the hearing that it would take three to five years for the ban's effects to be fully felt.

But it's still remarkable that, eight months after coming into effect, the most positive case for Albanese's globally celebrated teen social media ban is: Well, we haven't actually done it properly yet so it still might work out.

There were warnings 

It's easy to say that we couldn't have known how this world-first ban would play out.

But if you look back at the public submissions made before the ban was legislated, back in November 2024, some experts and groups concerned about the ban seemed to have a good idea.

The Australian Human Rights Commission warned that technological workarounds would undermine the success of the ban.

The Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth said that bans would drive young people to other places.

Academics Marcus Carter, Taylor Hardwick and Ben Egliston said that they believed children's social media use would become "more private, and more hidden".

One particularly prescient submission warned that age restriction efforts on platforms were already ineffective in practice and that bans by themselves would not teach young people to use the internet more safely.

That was a submission from the eSafety Commissioner, the regulator who's now been tasked with enforcing this law.

Who's to blame?

The government has been quick to blame social media companies for failing to enforce the ban and, by extension, its political opponents for any delay on new powers to help enforce it.

What the teen social media ban actually did was require tech companies to take "reasonable steps" to keep teens off their platform.

The fact that teens are still on these platforms is not proof that the companies haven't followed the law as written. (Inman Grant says investigations into five social media platforms are ongoing.)

In fact, the government made it clear that it didn't want the social media companies to be too strict on enforcing the law. It literally wrote into law that companies couldn't only ask for ID, and had to give the option of other, less accurate methods. Its porousness is by design.

This all makes the government's proposed fix to the ban to double the size of the fines seem ridiculous — maybe it should first use the stick before seeing if there's a bigger one.

But let's assume that the tech companies have broken the law. Why is the government surprised?

After all, it has pilloried the companies, accused them of not caring and of causing social harm — calling them "sharks".

It has a lot of good reasons to do that. Look no further than the US courts finding that companies like Meta are a "public nuisance" causing psychological harm and sexual exploitation, or whistleblower files revealing that the company buried research showing the deleterious impacts of its products on teen mental health.

These are companies that evidently can't be left to self-regulate. And yet, the government wrote the ban in a way that left the details of enforcement to the companies it said couldn't be trusted.

To continue the government's own metaphor, it's like it let the sharks design the shark nets.

Now, it says those companies aren't complying and it needs new powers to prove it.

Which prompts the question: why wasn't the law designed with those powers in the first place? Didn't you say we were dealing with sharks?

The road not taken

Too often, Australia's teen social media ban is evaluated on an all-or-nothing basis: if not the ban, we would've just been sitting around, twiddling our thumbs.

But there other options which demonstrate the real opportunity cost pursuing the ban — look no further than the government's other online safety policy.

Since November 2024, the Albanese government says it is planning to introduce a digital duty of care, a new policy that would give tech companies a broad obligation to mitigate and reduce harms from using their services.

Nearly two years later, that's yet to be brought before parliament. We may be years away from it kicking in.

What of the road not taken? What if instead of years spent developing the policy, promoting it publicly, taking it to the UN, now being tied up in legal battles, Australia had gone full throttle with the digital duty of care?

We can't know for sure but it seems common sense that the ban has taken up oxygen and resources that could have been used elsewhere.

Which brings us back around to the stakes of this whole issue: helping young people.

The reason the ban has and continues to be such a popular idea is that Australians are worried about our teens.

It's that energy that justifies spending more time on the teen social media ban to see if we can make it work. It's not surprising that a world-first ban isn't perfect out of the gate.

But at some point, that same desire to improve the lives of young people means that the government may want to consider its commitment and investment in a policy that's yet to show any results.

It's hard to imagine another high-profile policy involving something as important as our children suffering such obvious early setbacks and not prompting more discussion about whether it's something that we should be single-mindedly pursuing.

If Albanese is right and there's no time to waste, how much more of it can we spend just waiting for the ban to work?