Australia’s great social-media experiment

Late last year, Australia's parliament, reacting to concerns about the effect of social media on children's mental health, amended the Online Safety Act to require users to be at least 16 years old to open an account on social-media platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and X. The amendment is expected to come into effect by the end of 2025.

The law received widespread support in Australia, both in parliament and among the public, but it has also been criticized. Some dispute the link between social-media use and mental-health problems in teenagers. Others see a violation of the right to freedom of expression. Even those who support the effort wonder how it can be enforced.

There is little doubt that the mental health of teenagers, especially girls, has deteriorated sharply since the introduction of smartphones and the emergence of social media. The digital platforms targeted by the law design algorithms to keep people on their sites, because more clicks mean more advertising revenue. The result? A Gallup survey showed that US teenagers spend an average of 4.8 hours per day on social media.

That is a big slice of a teenager's free time, which could otherwise be spent interacting with friends in person and with places and objects in the real world. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and the author of The Anxious Generation, has said that social-media platforms have "rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale."

Heavy teenage social-media use and higher levels of depression and anxiety clearly go together; what is disputed is whether this is merely a correlation or a causal relationship. Good studies that test whether sufficiently long periods of reduction in social-media use reduce depression and anxiety are difficult to carry out, because trials in which individual teenagers leave a platform while their friends remain on it can be expected to produce less benefit – and could even cause harm to the children who are now isolated from their friends.

It is important that groups of teenagers all go off social media together, so that social media use is replaced by real-world interaction. In addition, one would need other, randomly selected control groups whose members do not reduce social-media use. In the absence of such rigorous trials, the evidence we have does suggest that heavy social-media use causes anxiety and depression, but it is not conclusive.

Australia may therefore be doing the world a service by effectively running a national experiment. This assumes, of course, that Australia does substantially reduce the time young teenagers spend on social media. Policymakers plan to achieve their goal by imposing heavy fines on companies that operate the newly age-restricted social-media platforms if they fail to take "reasonable steps" to prevent those under 16 from opening accounts. The law assigns the task of outlining what counts as "reasonable steps" to Australia's eSafety Commissioner, an independent statutory office.

WhatsApp and similar messaging apps, as well as some online health and educational services, will be exempted from the legislation. Young people will continue to be able to view YouTube videos or pages on social media, such as business landing pages on Facebook, without an account. On the other hand, the government has announced its intention to introduce further legislation creating a "Digital Duty of Care" that will put the onus on digital platforms to prevent known or foreseeable harms.

Paradoxically, the Australian law may benefit social-media executives and programmers who are sufficiently aware of what they may be doing to children's mental health to be uneasy about it. Given the current lack of regulation, any social-media platform that gets serious about ensuring that children are not opening accounts will simply lose business to less scrupulous rivals. The law creates a level playing field for all platforms, thus overcoming the collective-action problem.

The Australian constitution does not make sweeping statements about basic rights. In general, and in contrast to the United States, courts accept the supremacy of the elected legislature. The High Court of Australia has, however, ruled that the provisions of the constitution establishing representative and responsible government imply that parliament should not place an undue burden on political communication.

One possible response to those who have suggested that Australia's legislation violates this principle is that children under 16 do not vote and hence have less need for political communication. Moreover, it could be argued that the burden is not disproportionate, because the harm caused by social media is sufficiently serious to justify the modest restriction contained in the legislation. The Australian government could also exempt social-media platforms that are limited to political communications, although that would require someone in government to determine which communications are political and which are not.

Peter Singer, Emeritus Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the National University of Singapore, is co-host of the podcast Lives Well Lived, Co-founder of the charity The Life You Can Save, and the author of Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, The Life You Can Save, and, most recently, Consider the Turkey.

Sketch: TBS

Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and founder of the non-profit organization The Life You Can Save. In 2013, he was named the world's third "most influential contemporary thinker" by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute.

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Project Syndicate, and is published by special syndication arrangement.