Zoe McKenzie (Flinders, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

When I got to my feet in this place for the first time two years ago I talked about the trauma my electorate, my community and, indeed, my family had just come through. Between 2020-22 Melbourne endured 262 days of lockdown and 36 weeks of homeschooling. In my maiden speech here I said:

My kids' generation is intrinsically digital.

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Their access to information is limitless.

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The 262 days of lockdown in metro Melbourne … embedded their generation's relationship with screens, social media and other online content. Whatever systems our households had in place to balance online time with offline time in the form of study, sports, sleep or social activity collapsed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Worse still, the school system became the dealer of the digital drug, putting laptops and tablets into every lounge or bedroom.

I said:

… data shows us that today's adolescents—24/7 connected to devices, addled by algorithms and autoplay—are showing signs of stress and, indeed, in some cases, distress. Self-control difficulties, impulsivity, family conflict, sleep disturbance, inactivity, concentration impairment and poor language development are often observed among those children whose technology use is above the recommended two hours a day. Of highest concern is the well-documented epidemic of anxiety and depression in teenage girls, which we know correlates with high use of social media.

When I gave this speech in this place in 2022 I admit there were few fellow travellers on this topic. Now, there are so many—the Leader of the Opposition, who has been so clear, so determined and so persistent in relation to this issue; my friend the member for Fisher, who has carried his determination to see proper age verification for online gaming and pornography into age verification for social media, which we know, of course, is a means for sharing so much pornography and child sexual abuse material; and, finally, in the last month, the Prime Minister, who has met our demand to act to address the harm that social media is doing to young people.

We know Australian children consume nine hours of leisure based screen time every day. That is the figure that the Australian Gaming and Screen Alliance will shortly publish—nine hours a day! Based on US studies, we estimate that half of that is dedicated to social media. That should come as no surprise because social media is designed for addiction, a feature which no-one has made much of an effort to hide. Indeed, Facebook's first president, Sean Parker, said in an interview with Axios in 2017:

"The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, … was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'" "And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you … more likes and comments." "It's a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology."

Earlier in his interview, he said:

"God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains."

University professors and researchers started studying the effects of social media on our children in the early 2010s, shortly after this dopamine loop was embedded into the platforms. In their 2015 Atlantic essay 'The coddling of the American mind' Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff started to identify the behavioural, societal and cultural changes of the generation which had grown up with a smartphone in their back pocket. Chief amongst them was an obsession with safety—that is, physical and emotional safety, which included safety from people who disagreed with you.

In their later book of the same name, they referred to the work by Jean Twenge—iGENwhich connected 'safetyism' to two attributes: the extension of childhood and the delayed transition into adulthood manifested in young people not getting their drivers licence or a job or a first boyfriend or a first girlfriend, not even drinking alcohol or having sex until well into their 20s. She also remarked an explosion in rates of depression and anxiety, which were first identified in 2012, especially for girls and young women. Jean Twenge's book iGEN, published in 2017, served as the first real scientific study of the impact of technology and specifically smartphones and social media and what it was doing to young people worldwide.

Jean Twenge has visited Australia twice this year, the first to talk at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, where I spent a couple of hours with her talking through her work, and the second to talk at the Social Media Summit, hosted by the governments of South Australia and New South Wales last month. At these events she explained that psychological distress more than doubled in young Australian women aged between 16 and 24 between 2013 and 2020, and the percentage of Australian girls who feel lonely at school has almost quadrupled between 2003 and 2022. Similarly, boys have increased markedly from around seven per cent to a high of 17 per cent in 2018.

In her presentation to the Social Media Summit, which you can watch on YouTube, she goes through the evidence proving that this plummet in wellbeing is directly related to social media and harm online. Her data was brought to life in the hearings of Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society. We heard testimony of parent after parent of how their confident, sensible, sporty, popular, hardworking, balanced, wise kids had gone down the social media slide into misery as a result of scamming, sextortion, bullying, ostracism and abuse. These were not inattentive parents. They had talked to their children about social media, tried to engage schools and other parents in addressing its worst effects, but no meaningful measures were taken to address it and these parents and the hundreds of thousands of silent parents that stand behind them are begging us for a solution.

The question is: is this bill the right solution? Let's look at what the bill does. It refers to age-restricted social media platforms, social media platforms being one to facilitate social interactions online between two or more users, but with scope to reduce or expand the scope through legislative rules. At a minimum it will capture TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, Instagram and X, formerly known as Twitter.

These services will now be obliged to take reasonable steps not prescribed by government to prevent persons under 16 years of age from creating or holding an account on the platform. The government has announced it will use rule-making powers to carve out messaging services, online games and services that support the health and education of users. And while I strongly support the latter, I'm not yet convinced about the former, but in the interests of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, this is a sensible starting point. It sends a clear message to the market that if you want to find a way to reach teenagers, you'd better find a better design for safer platforms with which to do it.

Other platforms that will be exempted include Facebook Messenger Kids, WhatsApp, ReachOut PeerChat, Kids Helpline, My Circle, Google Classroom and YouTube. We will all need to keep a keener eye on the extent to which some of the most harmful behaviour on social media moves to these exempted platforms. For that reason, as well as others, it is sensible for there to be a two-year review of the whole scheme.

The coalition's additional comments to the joint select committee report released on Monday recommended the establishment of a Joint Standing Committee on Online Safety, Artificial Intelligence and Technology, tasked with investigating the strengths and weaknesses in Australia's regulatory framework, legislative tools, industrial base and technological capabilities. This regulation cannot be set and forget, and the advent of generative AI will create new risks. In February of this year, a 14-year-old boy took his life after forming a deep emotional attachment with an artificial intelligence chatbot created on the character.ai website. Sewell knew that the chatbot wasn't a real person and that he was interacting with a large language model, but over months that LLM had become his best friend. 'Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love,' the chatbot, called Dany, wrote to Sewell. 'What if I told you I could come home right now?' Sewell replied. He picked up his father's handgun and pulled the trigger. From here it just gets worse. Today this parliament sends a big signal to big tech that it will not accept reckless damage being done to our young people.

Could the bill be better? It is no doubt the case that the bill could be better. We on this side have been calling for this legislation for over six months, and at five minutes to midnight, two or three months from an election, the government brings in a bill with great haste and expects us to improve it. But, thanks to the deep industry knowledge and engagement of our shadow minister for communications, we will indeed improve it, removing concerns that this is a backdoor for the ubiquitous use of Digital ID, which the coalition opposed when it came through the parliament earlier this year. Equally, our shadow minister has ensured that no government issued identification, whether passports or drivers licenses, can be demanded. Furthermore, through that vigorous discussion, it has been confirmed that reasonable steps to ensure under-16s do not have accounts on platforms will not be targeted at 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds, 40-year-olds, 50-year-olds, 60-year-olds or 70-year-olds.

Do not think the platforms do not know your age. By golly, they do. TikTok admitted this year it had removed 78 million accounts for under-13-year-olds, of which a million were in Australia. Instagram launched Instagram Teen Accounts overnight. Mind you, they didn't mention that they were going to do that at any time during the inquiry's hearings, but overnight they moved Australian teens under 16 to their teens platform. You see, it can be done. Additional privacy measures include preventing any material used for age verification being retained by the entity that does the verifying.

Finally, I want to address what I feel has been the best argued point among those who have raised concerns about this bill and one with which I have enormous empathy: the question of whether this bill usurps parental authority. To this point, I have received many sensible contributions. One was from a constituent in my electorate of Flinders with whom I've been corresponding all weekend. I found her approach to this issue inspiring. I have edited her comments to protect her identity and for brevity, but she describes with such care the efforts she has made to protect her child from the perils of social media. She wrote to me:

One of the rules for having this phone is she is not to join any social media groups like Facebook, TikTok or Instagram and I have taken the time to sit down with my daughter to explain my reasoning behind it.

My daughter very eloquently had relayed back to me why it is not the time for her to access it and understands that she is not yet ready to be exposed to it. When it is the right time for her will (CURRENTLY) be my decision!

The right time for her will NOT be the same time as the right time for my younger son.

Right now, I do however sit with her and go through my own social media pages with her and discuss with her the elements of my feed. This has been enormously beneficial because it has shown her what she needs to look out for, the pitfalls, but also the benefits.

The key is learning how to navigate it, what the pitfalls are and what to watch out for. This cannot be achieved without the conversations and without the access.

Remove social media from their hands and they will get it anyway! But without the guidance from the parents, without the support, without the teachers from school teaching them how to properly navigate it. They will be ON THEIR OWN and will be prone to all the pitfalls, they won't have anyone to discuss this and very unlikely to seek help out of fear of getting into trouble.

It is my responsibility to ready my child for this world.

I have unbridled admiration for this mother, her patience, her diligence and her kind exploration of these issues, not to mention the remarkable presence of mind of her 12-year-old daughter. I recognise that parents who have made real and enduring efforts to control technology and guide the use of social media have a reason to feel frustrated with us.

But this experience from my Flinders mum is the exception and far from the rule. The experience of most parents was beautifully put in a post by Heads Up Alliance, one of the many organisations and people, including News Corp's Let Them Be Kids and Melanie Pilling from the Courier-Mail, who have expressed so beautifully what parents have demanded of us. Heads Up Alliance said in a post:

As a general principle, except in cases of neglect or abuse, it isn't the role of government to interfere in everyday parenting decisions.

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Isn't allowing your 14-year-old access to Instagram just another of those parenting decisions that families should be free to make without government interference?

This question sounds fair enough, but it rests on two significant assumptions …

Firstly, it assumes that parents allow their tween and early teen children on social media of their own free will. In reality, most parents have serious reservations about social media use for their children. They feel pressured to allow it too early …

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Case in point: a recent survey of over 20,000 parents conducted by the NSW government revealed that parents believe social media should only be given to children at 16.2 years of age. And yet, how many parents are able to actually follow through with that? This law won't take away parental autonomy. It would strengthen it because it aligns with what most parents already feel is right but find almost impossible to enforce.

Secondly, the question assumes that social media is a healthy or at least benign activity, like playing piano or basketball. It isn't. Whereas music and sport nurture growth and development, social media is inherently harmful for the vast majority of children for the vast majority of the time. It disrupts brain development, interferes with sleep patterns and negatively impacts psychological well-being. It is addictive by design, exploiting vulnerabilities in young minds, pitting them against some of the most cunning and manipulative corporations the world has ever known.

That survey surveyed 21,000 people, and 87 per cent supported implementing age restrictions for social media use, but that rose to 91 per cent when you limited respondents to parents of children aged five to 17. This week, in this place, we give parents what they have been asking for—something, anything, to strengthen their arm around the dining room table, a judgement call, a line in the sand, a clear signal that at 15 and below you do not have the mental wherewithal to resist the addictive qualities of the platforms and that the impact of social media harms can be so great and so resistant to reversal or a fix that, on balance, a ban until age 16 is the most reasonable option to mitigate its detrimental effects and to help build peer and cohort support among the parent community to disconnect from social media at this most pivotable time for brain and social development. I commend this bill to the House.

See this speech in context