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

I don't often stay up late to watch Q&A on the ABC, but last night I made an exception to catch an important national and, indeed, local debate about social media and its impact on our society and, particularly, on young people. It featured two women I have worked closely with in the last two years: Frances Haugen, the US based Facebook whistleblower who recently came to my electorate and met with young people in a secondary school to talk about their social media use, and Alice Dawkins of Reset. Tech, with whom I've done some work on rabbit holes, the radicalisation effects of algorithms and autorecommender systems.

Last night's show followed an article published in News Corp papers earlier in the day which told us just how embedded social media is in our children's lives. It revealed that nearly half of all 10- to 15-year-olds spend two hours a day just on TikTok. Almost half of seven- to nine-year-olds use the platform X, formerly known as Twitter. Seven-year-olds on Twitter—a platform we know is riddled with misinformation, hate and easy access to pornography. The article also told us that kids in their early teens spend, on average, 93 minutes a day on Snapchat. Where do they find time for school?

Dr Jean Twenge is a professor of psychology at San Diego State University. In 2017 she produced the first full body of academic work on the impact of social media on the generation growing up with smartphones in their hands—the generation she termed 'iGen'. In her book of the same name, Twenge showed that heavy social media use is linked to higher rates of anxiety, depression and loneliness. It creates fewer opportunities for face-to-face interaction, resulting in feelings of isolation and disengagement from high-interaction activities like parties or sport. Children are reading less because slow books which require imagination and reflection are far less dominating of the attention than bright, funny, 15-second bites of video. Children are taking much longer to grow up. They live less independent lives and delay taking on elements of adulthood like getting a job, getting their drivers licence, going on dates and moving out of home.

Her subsequent book, Generations, released last year, further sought to explain generational and societal change by examining the impact of technology on our lives over the last 100 years. There she found evidence of even greater mental health decline among those with heavy social media use, a higher incidence of polarised views and echo chambers, and a greater resistance to discordant views and values. Twenge will be speaking at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at UNSW in Sydney this weekend, and I look forward to hearing her and meeting her at this event.

The Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society, on which I serve, gives us the opportunity to ask the right questions about social media's impact on children, including on their brain development, and on adults, our social cohesion, our national security and our until-now vibrant and robust democracy.