Dave Sharma (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on Senator Roberts's motion today because it is an important and topical issue. I must confess that I approach this issue as someone who is a liberal—that is, someone who supports the rights of individuals to manage their own affairs, who instinctively mistrusts or dislikes the government interfering in the private lives of individuals and who trusts parents to make their own choices about raising their children, the values they should instil in them and the sorts of technology they should have access to. I approach the issue of regulating access to anything in people's private lives as a sceptic. But I cannot—and I don't think you can—fail to read Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation without being concerned about some of the quite deleterious impacts and at least a high degree of correlation, if not causation, proved between widespread use of social media amongst younger people and social harm.

In his book, Jonathan Haidt talks about four foundational harms. He talks about social deprivation—that is, children being excluded or missing out from social circles or social opportunities because of the ability for people to organise on social media. He talks about sleep deprivation. The straight addictiveness of certain social media and the desire to always get the next dopamine hit, to see the next message, to see the next post and to see how your own posting is trafficking can lead to children staying up all night and staying on their phones.

There's attention fragmentation. There's, again, the inability to focus on longer term tasks, to do things like read a book, for instance, and even to sit down and watch a movie. If you have young children, you'll know that they're often grabbing for their device to have something that ups their dopamine or attention levels. Indeed, as we all know, we are programmed as humans to be super alert to changes in our environment and incoming pieces of information, which means we are incentivised, psychologically and neurologically, to prioritise newer, novel information over something else we might be doing. Then, of course, there are the addictive properties of social media.

I think it's been well documented and well understood by most people intuitively that social media can supercharge ostracisation and humiliation—especially a problem amongst girls—and that it can lead to behaviours like audience capture, which is you as a social media persona trying to exacerbate the characteristics that seem to be popular with your audience, and prestige bias, which is modelling your behaviour on those who seem to enjoy high social status on social media and whose posts or profiles get high engagement or high content. There are even what people refer to as sociogenic epidemics. It's the idea that there is a viral character to depression, anxiety and mental health, and the ability for it to spread through society can be supercharged by the use of social media.

I think, on balance, the evidence is that social media is not making our children's lives better. It would be difficult to make that case. I think that the evidence, on balance, suggests it's probably making it worse—from the more benign impacts, like irritability, distraction and social ostracism, to some of the more sinister ones, like the development of eating disorders, incessant online bullying, self-harm and suicidal ideation. I think most parents tend to know or intuit this, but they face obstacles in dealing with this themselves. If they take away their children's phone or disable access to their phone, they're worried about isolating their children, because every other child is on the phone, and they're worried about their children missing out on social opportunities and conversations. Even if they do cross that Rubicon, it can be difficult to manage. Parents quite rightly want their children to have phones these days to stay in touch and to let them know where they are. Children are ingenious and very clever at getting around any screen time limitations, app bans or anything else. It's a collective action problem. No parent tends to want to act alone on this, but they would welcome some assistance from government.

That is why I think, on balance, this is the right thing to be doing. I think we need to be careful, firstly, to protect privacy and identity, and I respect that Senator Roberts has legitimate concerns in that regard, which other senators here will share, but also unintended consequences. We don't want to cut children off from sources of information and their ability to feed their curiosity. But I do believe this is an area this parliament should be addressing.