The Tweens Down Under: Life Without Social Media in Australia

Starting on December 10, many Australian teenagers will no longer be as online as their peers in other countries. The Social Media Minimum Age Bill, passed in 2024, stipulates that a person must be at least 16 years old to have an account on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube.

Across the world, people young and old are increasingly recognizing the negative impact that social media has on adolescents. Nearly half of teenagers in the US claim these platforms harm people their age; parents are even more concerned. While several US states have introduced legislation to safeguard kids online, a national ban seems far off.

Australia, by contrast, fast-tracked its prohibition: Annabel West, a lawyer and mother in Adelaide, read Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation, and told her husband—South Australia premier Peter Malinauskas—that he had to do something. He proposed legislation in his small state, and it rapidly gained support across the country. A few months later, the social media ban was signed into law, making Australia the first country in the world to make such a move.

“Parents want their kids off their phones and on the footy field,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation last fall after the national ban was proposed. “So do I.”

The legislation has seen resounding support among Australian parents and legislators. It passed in Parliament with an overwhelming, bipartisan majority; 77 percent of Australians support the ban. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s less popular with tech companies—who may face fines if they can’t keep kids off their platforms—and with teenagers themselves.

“At first it seemed like a good idea, but over time, I’ve become more and more against it,” says Elena Mitrevska, an 18-year-old who lives in Melbourne. “I honestly think it is removing spaces for connection and community.”

More than most teens, Mitrevska has a say in how the social media bill’s provisions take shape in real life. She’s a member of the eSafety Youth Council, a group of 17 Australians, ages 13 to 24, who advise the country’s eSafety office, which will enforce the new legislation when it goes into effect in December. They didn’t vote on the bill, but now they have input on how it’ll be enacted. (Mitrevska and the other teenagers quoted in this article are expressing their own views, not the views of the eSafety Youth Council or Commissioner.)

Like other members of the council, Mitrevska believes that social media can be harmful for young people, especially in terms of addictive design and graphic material shared in online communities. But she worries an outright ban won’t get to the root of the problem. “It seems really disingenuous to me to remove entire online spaces for young people, versus just talking and trying to fix those particular issues,” she says. “It really feels like an attempt to bury young people’s heads in the sand.”

Australian regulators disagree. They believe the ban will give adults the chance to teach kids some internet literacy one-on-one before they are fully immersed in social media. The goal is to improve mental health outcomes while putting the onus on tech companies to verify the ages of their users.

“We’re aware that delaying children’s access to social media accounts won’t solve everything, but it will introduce some friction in a system that has previously had none,” eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant tells WIRED via email. She emphasized that it’s designed to let parents set the ground rules, “giving them valuable time to help their children develop the resilience, critical thinking and digital literacy they need.”