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

In a recent conversation with a good friend, I was told the bipartisan support for a social media ban for kids under 16 was a bad move. 'It should be up to families to govern access to social media,' he said. It's a fair and reasonable point, one with which, on a matter of principle, I would normally agree, but today's culture of breakneck busy parenting makes that a painfully optimistic view. Families do not govern access to social media. Parents are flat chat working two jobs to cover their surging mortgage repayments, and, in Melbourne, 36 weeks of digital homeschooling smashed all semblance of digital diet moderation.

From the time Facebook and Instagram introduced the 'like' button, creating an immediate dopamine loop, social media's maxim has been user engagement. The addictive qualities of these attributes get their richest rewards from those whose prefrontal cortex, regulating human impulses and driving reasoning, is as yet underdeveloped—those who are under 20. To capture an audience, each scroll or autoplay serves up slightly more scintillating or extreme versions of whatever it is the user wanted to watch. This is why, as Reset Tech was able to prove recently, a teenage boy will move from a self-actualisation motivational talk by Jordon Peterson to violent misogynistic content from Andrew Tate within 70 minutes of scrolling. With each autoplay, the content just gets more scintillating or more extreme.

According to the Australian Gaming and Screen Alliance, the average Australian child spends nine hours a day on screen-based leisure time—nine hours a day! We need to think about the opportunity cost of those nine hours. In The AnxiousGeneration, Jonathan Haidt talked about the loss of the play based childhood. In her work iGen, Jean Twenge's list was even longer: the loss of adequate sleep, physical health, face-to-face socialising and the rites of passage of adulthood, including getting a job or a car licence or even a boyfriend or a girlfriend. As Haidt argues in his other works, we have entered an era of 'safetyism', thinking that kids are safer on the couch with their digital toys than at the shopping centre or on the footy field, but they are not safer. The Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society heard evidence of the real harm done by social media, and it was nothing short of heartbreaking. I recommend to all the testimony of parents Ali Halkic, Dany Elachi, Emma Mason and Wayne Holdsworth.

Young people will of course protest—they want their online lives—but the world will not end. Children will go back to being children, and maybe, in time, social media platforms will take their responsibility to our children more seriously. It will right; I am confident. There will be ethical social media one day, as the French postulate in their Enfants et ecrans report, released earlier this year, but we will not get there without some form of regulation. Leave things as they are, with the huge profit that comes from commodifying our kids and their concentration, and we will just get more of what we have today: social media that is driving our children to distraction and stupidity at best and to real harm at worst, via bullying, sextortion, scams and fraud as well as radicalisation, extremism, child sexual abuse and other illegal activity. (Time expired)