When you think of children and teenagers using social media today, what comes to mind? Teenage boys being pushed down the alt-right or manosphere pipeline? Girls validating their disordered eating by watching pro-ana content? The proliferation of deepfake or AI nudes as the latest form of revenge porn?
It’s a dire picture, for sure. Social media can be a dark place if left unregulated and unsupervised. But for the largely voiceless group that is children, it can also be a place to express identity, find community, and access alternative news in a country with some of the most concentrated media in the world — a fact that seems largely forgotten by the poorly planned social media ban that will knee-jerk its way into Aussie homes on 10 December.
As it looms over today’s teenagers, my dread worsens because all I can think about is: what about the kids who have nowhere else to go for community and understanding?
A double-edged sword is still a tool
My main choice of social media platform when I was a teenager was Tumblr — a site that was notorious for content which romanticised disordered eating and self-harm. It was also the place I learned about left-wing politics, and in many ways, it made me who I am today.
Being a visibly Muslim, brown-skinned girl in a post-9/11 Australia meant I was constantly navigating racism and Islamophobia that I didn’t always understand. I couldn’t tell you what colonialism or white supremacy was, but I had an innate understanding that being white was desirable, and I wasn’t ever going to measure up. Not just in the outside world, but at home too — I had the darkest skin of all of my siblings, and my friends and family never let me forget it. Colourism is one hell of a beast.
It was through social media that I learned what colourism even was. Phrases like “internalised racism” and “intersectional feminism” made their way into my vocabulary, allowing me to make sense of experiences I had suffered from and thought were normal. It was on Tumblr that I first saw brown skin described as beautiful and luminous, rather than as something to be bleached and painted over. It was seeing women and girls like me who loved themselves unapologetically that made me realise I didn’t have to feel like this. That another way of living was possible.
Social media gave me the tools needed to overcome the self-hate I — and many other brown girls in Western countries — suffered long before we ever had social media.
In many ways, social media radicalised me. I was on social media in the 2010s — I watched the Black Lives Matter protests unfold live on Twitter in 2014 and learned about Israel’s occupation of Gaza amidst its renewed attacks that same year. Social media was formative in my understanding that I was part of something bigger than myself, that there was a whole world of people out there with whom I was in solidarity. I wasn’t alone.
It’s a feeling I know many marginalised youth — especially queer kids who rely on social media for a safe space — relate to.
In more recent years, we’ve seen entire political movements take off thanks to social media. On March 15, 2019, 150,000 Australian school students skipped class to attend the School Strike 4 Climate as part of a global movement of 2,000 protests, in which an estimated 1 million people took part across 125 countries. By September, the Australian School Strike 4 Climate protests had swelled to 300,000 — a historic feat made possible by social media.
In 2023, after Israel began its renewed genocide in Gaza, social media became an important tool for Arab and Muslim kids (as well as adults) to circumvent the racist and Islamophobic bias in most of Australia’s reporting. Four companies own 84% of our country’s newspapers — social media gives independent news a chance to cut through, as we’ve seen with viral journalists like Bisan Owda and Plestia Alaqad.
Not only is social media important for marginalised kids to find others like them who they can learn from, but it’s also an important space for young people to access information that can be heavily censored, if not outright erased, from traditional news media.
Leo Puglisi from @6NewsAU gave evidence to the parliamentary inquiry on the social media age ban – I asked him about the real impacts on young people. This isn't about protection, it's about control. You can't lock kids out of news and social connection and call it safety. pic.twitter.com/mMKhWPz4tp
— David Shoebridge (@DavidShoebridge) October 13, 2025
For non-white teens in Australia, social media is a place to find connection in a predominantly white and colonial country. The social media ban will cut off young people from online communities where they are seen and validated, and I fear what it will mean to lose such a precious window into a world that can otherwise feel impossible to access.
Left to their own devices
I know that in the decade since I turned 16, the fabric of the internet has changed. Once, anonymity and aliases were the norm for profiles on social media, but now, with the rise of influencers and personal brands, children and teenagers are using their real names and faces in ways that leave them especially vulnerable to cyber-bullying, data mining and sexual exploitation. On top of this, personalised algorithms are funnelling young, lonely boys into the arms of manosphere grifters, and right-wing radicalisation is a growing threat.
These are all pressing issues that need to be addressed, but I fail to see how the social media ban addresses them. All it does is delay the inevitable: when teenagers turn 16, they’ll get back on the apps and fall into the very same traps we’re supposed to protect them from. On a fundamental level, nothing is actually changing.
We are failing youth in media literacy and internet safety, but more than that, we are failing to hold the corporations accountable that are victimising them in the first place.
Instead of listening to experts or enacting laws and policies to make social media safer for teenagers, we are preaching an abstinence method that we know won’t work — eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman herself admitted the ban won’t be “100 per cent effective” because teens will find alternatives.
Teens are already getting around the teen social media ban by scanning their parents' faces or uploading their ID, after the government was warned that a third of parents were planning to help their kids dodge the minimum age. pic.twitter.com/EgEWmLrTB4
— CAMERONWILSON – CROSS-POSTED FROM OTHER PLATFORMS (@cameronwilson) December 3, 2025
Why are we risking children’s social groups, access to information and community for something that we admit is not going to be effective? Instead of kicking kids off social media, we should be putting the onus on corporations to make social media safer for them. But that would require our government to actually do something, and we know how much our government loves a cop out — just look at the fact that, at the same time we’re being fed the idea that under-16s aren’t mature enough to use social media, multiple states are trying to make it legal for 14-year-olds to serve adult time. Make it make sense.
What is also seldom acknowledged in this conversation is that social media isn’t just a concern for children — grown adults are also vulnerable to the predatory nature of addictive algorithms and data-hungry corporations. I’m sure I’m not alone in the fact that I don’t want to be served ads for gambling or have rage-bait content on my feed either.
Chanel Contos, the founder of Teach Us Consent, has recently launched a new push to require social media platforms to offer an “opt-in” option to algorithms — a practical solution to help prevent young boys (and adult men!) from falling into misogynistic spaces that could actually see results. It’s this kind of thinking that holds social media platforms accountable for the content they expose us to, which we need to combat the harmful side of social media.
There are experts and advocates alike who are out here campaigning for meaningful change that won’t hurt kids, if only the government would listen. But instead, we’re relying on purely symbolic gestures over evidence-based solutions. I fear seeing the consequences.