It’s finally happened. The social media bans that many have feared are coming out, but people wonder just how effective they will be. Australia recently banned social media for children 16 years and younger. The ban comes as a response to the drastic increase in teen depression and mental health issues in Australia. This, combined with the country’s poor real estate market and inflation, has made life for anyone under 25 tremendously difficult. And with elections coming up soon in the country, the deeply unpopular government has placed a ban that 80% of the population’s adults agree with as an easy way to gain approval before the people vote. Many around the world have looked at this with shock as this could have major implications for Europe or the US in also placing bans, but other data says different.

Norway, which has gotten rich as a country through oil deposits, has already put into place social media bans on children aged 13 years and younger and China has tried similar measures by limiting video game usage to certain hours of the day and regulating your play time. The trends that have come out of these countries are good indicators for clothes looking to ban technology. What they found in Nowtray is that 70% of 11 year olds still use social media, finding ways around the ban and going to other websites. And in China where the videogame limits were supposed to increase studying and outdoor playa similar result happened where children instead just found other things to do on their tablets and consoles other than game. In fact the only proven thing to reduce the effects of social media has been banning phones in school which has actually led to reduced depression and bullying along with increased engagement and productivity from children. 

Australian plans to roll out their bans over the next year and are going to be enforcing the policy through fines on social media companies. Whether or not this will be enough for the companies to limit underage users is up in the air as they also don’t have great ways to track anyone underage as you can lie about how old you are with most parents not caring what their child does. The solutions to this may not be what everyone wants, requiring government id when you access the web or giving the companies access to government records on how lod their citizens are. Either way this is a big step to regulating a large issue facing today’s society that social media has created which is how much internet access should kids have and do they need it? This is the debate at the heart of the bans and has caused major tension between the companies and the Australian government. Whether the bans will be effective is yet to be determined and we will follow this story closely as it develops.