“More moral panics will be generated … our society as presently structured will continue to generate problems for some of its members … and then condemn whatever solution these groups find” 

—  Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) 

Cohen might have been writing about Australia in 2025. By banning every child under 16 from social media — the world’s first, due to take effect on December 10 — the Australian government is not protecting youth. It is spooking its own population, provoking widespread anxiety and amplifying scrutiny over teenage behavior.

In attempting to regulate digital life, policymakers have sparked the very fears they claim to contain. This is textbook moral panic, in which misconceived legislative overreaction has generated attention, consternation and, of course, resistance. There are bound to be unintended consequences.

Rationale

Australia’s legislation is the culmination of a year-long political build-up of concern over online harms, including cyberbullying, sexual predation, self-harm content, algorithmic manipulation and addictive scrolling. Ministers sold the new legislation as a lifeline for parents. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese puzzlingly suggested the law is about “letting kids be kids.” Communications Minister Anika Wells added that parents deserve “peace of mind.” 

Publicized cases of teenage suicide linked to online abuse, combined with national apprehension about the wider digital world’s opacity, created an open goal for decisive intervention. But the intervention was as crude as it will be ineffective.

Nine platforms are affected: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Threads, X, YouTube, Reddit and Kick. They must block new accounts for under-16s and deactivate existing ones. Noncompliance carries fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars ($32 million).

Platforms had initially protested, warning that mandatory age verification would be intrusive, inaccurate and pretty easy for a teenager to circumvent. The compromise relies on behavioral age-estimation tools, using engagement metrics such as “likes,” with third-party age-assurance apps invoked only for disputes. Teens will receive notices inviting them to download their data, freeze accounts or lose them entirely. The government reckons the measure is fail-safe. 

Interestingly, public opinion largely agrees: a poll last November found that 77% of Australians over 18 support the ban. Internationally, the legislation is being watched closely: New Zealand is considering similar restrictions, Florida attempted a comparable law and European countries are experimenting with age checks on social media.

Australia has become a global crucible, potentially setting a precedent for future restrictions elsewhere, though It is unlikely that such a contentious measure would receive comparably emphatic support elsewhere: analogous research from the USA and Europe reinforces the sense that Australia is out of step with global opinion (55% of Americans favor banning children under 16 from using social media platforms, while 42% of Brits aged 18-27 would support, relative to 50% who would oppose such a ban).

Forbidden fruit

The ban rests on a naïve assumption: that teenagers will quietly accept exclusion. History suggests otherwise. Adolescents grow up in a culture in which a ban is not so much a prohibition as a challenge. You don’t have to be familiar with Genesis 2:17 to know that anything becomes more desirable once it’s not allowed. It’s called forbidden fruit.

Young people are wired for risk-taking and boundary-pushing, culturally inclined to resist adult overreach and technologically literate enough to bypass nearly any restriction. Cohen’s spiral is already becoming evident: officialdom suppresses, youth respond by circumventing and media attention magnifies both behavior and, by implication, anxiety.

Every generation of adults seems either to forget or ignore what youth entails. This is a developmentally crucial period: experimentation, novelty-seeking and testing limits are essential to forming adult judgement (or at least they were mine). Social media is not simply the communication toy adults assume it to be: It is an organic space, a venue for the formation of identities, connecting with peers and performativity — by which I mean presenting to audiences. Policymakers’ assumption of adolescent passivity,  that young people are childlike innocents who need to be insulated from “danger,” is patronizing and just plain wrong.

Savvy teenagers are inevitably going to find ways around blocks using virtual private networks (VPNs), multiple accounts, peer sharing or app workarounds. Attempts at enforcement will generate not compliance, nor even frustration, but clandestine use, probably promoting the very thing the Australian government is trying to curb. The ban, while intended as a protective measure, will inadvertently amplify attention, defiance and risk.

Australia’s discourse around the online dangers of youth often exaggerates risk while underestimating teens’ capacity for ingenuity and critical engagement. Social media is an uneven terrain: simultaneously treacherous and empowering, unintelligent and educational. By understanding it only as a hazard in the hands of the young, policymakers manufacture fear and fuel anxiety, rather than addressing specific harms in a targeted manner.

Wonderworld

Let me declare an interest: as I see it, the internet has introduced us — and I mean everyone with access to a functioning keyboard — to a wonderworld. It might at times appear dystopian, but it is a beguiling, exploratory, shapeshifting encyclopedia-cum-almanac that fascinates us and will continue to fascinate, no matter how hard misguided politicians try to put young people off.

What Australian legislators have ignored is the immense educational and cultural value of social media and the broader internet. For many adolescents, these platforms are not booby-traps but jetpacks to the stars, taking them to places where they can explore identity, pursue interests and access knowledge unavailable in school.

YouTube hosts Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) lectures on physics, creators offer language lessons from Seoul to São Paulo and online communities nurture everything from coding to calligraphy. Teenagers today learn, connect and experiment in ways literally unimaginable to previous generations.

For all the scares surrounding it, social media is not merely a funfair of distraction; it is a gargantuan archive of human knowledge, a site of peer support, creative collaboration and social cohesion. Adolescents do not merely consume content; they negotiate, reinterpret and contribute. The internet has become a vast, decentralized educational system that surrounds and inhabits us. To cordon off adolescents from this is not protection; it is denial, cutting them off from resources essential to their development.

We humans have historically reacted to new technologies with suspicion: the telephone was once accused of distracting women from productive endeavors (like housework); radio of corrupting the young; television of shortening attention spans; film of unleashing delinquency. Every trepidation now seems ludicrous. The hostility to social media follows the same script: a mix of fear of novelty, fondness for stability and conviction that younger generations must be defended from innovation.

Australia’s ban will do little to stop young people from navigating the wonderworld. It will only make that navigation more secretive, more fragmented and potentially more hazardous. In attempting to “let kids be kids,” lawmakers risk stunting the curiosity so integral to growing up. As Stanley Cohen warned in 1972, “Moral panics, once launched, develop a life of their own, becoming more about the panic than the actual event that started it.” Australia is about to learn this.

[Ellis Cashmore is co-author of Screen Society (Macmillan).]

[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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