Can social media bans protect young minds?

Transcript

Intro: This podcast was made on the lands of the Wurundjeri people, the Woi Wurrung and the Bunurong. We'd like to pay respects to their elders, past and present, and emerging. From the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne, this is PsychTalks.

Cassie Hayward: Hi everyone, and welcome to PsychTalks. I'm Cassie Hayward, and I'm joined by my co-host, Nick Haslam.

Nick Haslam: Fantastic to be here, Cassie, and I'm keen to explore more of our colleagues leading research in psychology and neuroscience.

So our guest today is Associate Professor Scott Griffiths. Scott leads the Physical Appearance Research Team in the School of Psychological Sciences. Now, some of you may remember, Scott spoke with us in Season 2 about his research into new generation social media algorithms, particularly TikTok, and what impact they could be having on eating disorders and body image. Well, since then, there's been some radical moves to stop young people from even being on social media, and we're delighted to welcome Scott back for an update on what this all means.

Cassie Hayward: Great to see you, Scott. Thanks for joining us again for PsychTalks.

Scott Griffiths: Thanks for having me.

Cassie Hayward: Scott, last time we spoke, you talked about how TikTok's algorithm might be having adverse implications for young people, especially those who might have body image or eating disorder issues. And I guess those sorts of concerns are part of the rationale for the social media ban that might be happening later this year in Australia. Can you tell us a little bit about the ban and what motivated it?

Scott Griffiths: Sure can.

So the Online Safety Amendment, also called the Social Media Minimum Age Bill was passed in late 2024, and it is going to ban all under sixteens from accessing social media all across Australia. It is the most ambitious law of its kind, certainly the highest age, and unlike some other laws tried elsewhere.

There won't be any parental opt out. So this will apply to every under 16 and any under 16 that has an existing social media account, that will need to be disabled. The onus is on industry to enforce that. So parents, kids, they don't have to do anything.

It's on industry to make sure that they have appropriate safeguards and technology so that anyone under the age of 16 is not on social media, backed up by fines that can hit $50 million if the non-compliance is systemic. And that will come into effect, uh, December 2025, and then we see what happens and how it all goes. It's a world first.

Nick Haslam: Can you remind our listeners what motivated this?

Scott Griffiths: Big general concerns from many countries around the effects that social media is having on young people. For a while, research has been coming out looking at different aspects of psychological wellbeing, like eating disorders, depression, anxiety, a self-diagnosis that have been converging and saying, look, on the merits, on the balance of evidence, probably social media is having an impact.

We're at a point now where there's enough evidence, there's enough different fields converging, that there's action and the ban has come about.

Nick Haslam: So have similar bans been tried elsewhere and have they worked?

Scott Griffiths: Yeah, they have. Ours will be the first to focus on social media per se.

Analogous bans have been tried in Asia looking at gaming. So in particular, China, South Korea, they were very worried about young people spending too much time gaming, kind of focused on reducing the amount of play for under 16s or under 13s. So in China, for example, they tried to reduce gaming to 1 hour on a Friday, 1 hour on Saturday, 1 hour on Sunday.

And, the evidence around the effectiveness of that has been, look, not completely effective, but effective in part. So they did get a reduction in the amount of people playing games and the, the length that they were playing, but motivated young people can get around that. Important to note those laws were passed, you know, over 5 years ago, and the kind of technology that's being trialled now to ensure that you've got people who are, who they say they are, the correct age, playing a game at the times you want them to play, that has developed considerably, but yeah, there is a background of partially successful bans on related things coming from overseas.

Cassie Hayward: So thinking about the implementation of the Australian ban, you've mentioned age assurance, so maybe we can talk a little bit about that and whether you have any concerns about how that will be implemented and used to enact the, the age restrictions on social media.

Scott Griffiths: I mean, sure, I have concerns, but I'm also quite excited for what's happening in this space. So, the Australian government has tasked, um, a UK based company with running their age assurance technology trial.

And this will involve, you know, overtures to a whole bunch of technology companies who will then try and submit their ideas, their pilot testing of various technologies for age assurance. The actual trial itself is being run in a way that I think is quite, um, admirable, respectful, it's all completely transparent.

Any technology company that's in these trials, they have to agree beforehand that their, their technology, along with the outcomes, how successful it is, where its failures are, that will be publicly released. And I, I appreciate how transparent that is, and it's important to, to know that the kinds of technology that are being trialled first and foremost are intended to be the least invasive of the potential technologies you could use.

For example, anything in the space of facial recognition is trying to ensure that you simply have consistency of the person who's using a particular account, that that person appears to be the right age, whilst extracting the least amount of data from them as possible. And, yeah, hopefully those efforts are successful. We could see, you know, a big, um, uh, a big explosion in the quality of these trials, of these technologies, if, if we're lucky.

Nick Haslam: So some people are probably quite sceptical about bans like this because, uh, they believe that technologically savvy people, you know, like in the case of the Chinese gaming bans that you talked about, can often find ways to get around them. Is that a legitimate concern, do you think? Uh, and are there any reason to think it'll be different with this ban?

Scott Griffiths: Oh, of course, it's a concern. If you take something that young people want to do and you make it more difficult for them to be able to do it, they will try to find workarounds. And we're probably gonna see the most motivated work-arounders in the 14 to 15-year-old age group. But the legislation, in a way, is more concerned about younger ages than the 15 and 16s. So, in Australia, research commissioned by the, the eSafety Commissioner found that, you know, 90% of 8 to 12-year-olds have social media accounts.

Now, 8, 9, 10, 11 year olds who are suddenly unable to access social media, it is unlikely that they are going to have the means to be able to enact a workaround to get onto social media, and it's unlikely that they'll be able to get help from siblings or parents so that they could get onto social media. So over time, I suspect we'll see a reduction in the, the number of children trying to get workarounds and maybe also the motivation to do so once we're a couple of years out from the trial.

Nick Haslam: It's not possible that we'll just create a selective pressure for 10-year-olds to develop the rat-cunning of 14-year-olds?

Scott Griffiths: We could, but it would be challenging.

So if you wanted to get onto social media, right, and you're an 8 or a 9 year old, well, let's just make it a little harder to say, a 10 or an 11 year old, then looking at what other countries have done, you may need a willing sibling to help you out, and perhaps they'll give you some form of ID with a face on it. Now, in the past, the kind of age assurance technology looking at faces was being done with static images.

But now, if you're expected to do this in the form of a video and move your face around, that static ID is not particularly helpful to you anymore. Maybe if you were a gamer playing on your computer, you had the know-how to access a virtual private network, and you could say that you're coming from somewhere else.

I don't know of anyone who is particularly savvy enough to use virtual private networks on their smartphone, which is how people access social media. Certainly, uh, young kids, 8, 9, 10, it's a lot of friction. And that friction also is creating friction for their friends. And if gaming can be a solo pursuit, social media is fun in large part because your friends are on it.

So if you've got a whole bunch of friends who are also struggling to be on it or getting kicked off it a lot because of the technology in place, you have a lot of friction to stop you from accessing it.

Cassie Hayward: So looking into your crystal ball, Scott, what do you think will happen December 2025 when this ban kicks in? How do you think it will unfold?

Scott Griffiths: I think it is going to be partially successful with significant teething problems. There will be people who want to get on it and manage to get on it, and that could be interpreted as a failure. There will be people over the age of 16 who are identified as being under and who have struggles, and that could be interpreted as a failure.

I do think in all likelihood, we will see a reduction in social media use, and that will be a greater reduction for ages that are younger, further away from age 16. And that, to give it a full and fair test, we probably have to wait for 2 years to see, is it working as intended? Um, are there any unintended consequences, of which I think there's risk for a few, um, and how substantial are they?

Cassie Hayward: Scott, I wanna talk a little bit about what parents think of the ban, and I think some broad gender stereotypes are useful here, given the, the way the ban is playing out in that, and I think a lot of parents might be familiar with Jonathan Haidt's work, and he talks about this as well, that boys tend to gravitate towards gaming and porn, and girls tend to gravitate towards social media.

So this ban might have different impacts on you, as a parent, depending on whether you've got a 14-year-old boy at home or a 14-year-old girl. What's your research, say, or your, your, um, insight on this in terms of how parents are thinking about the ban as it comes up?

Scott Griffiths: It is true, boys are overrepresented as gamers, girls are overrepresented on social media. Those overrepresentations are not as large as you may think. I look at as an example, TikTok's global user base, 1.8 billion. The gender split there is something like 52, 48 as a ratio favouring women.

So it's not the case that it's a huge disproportionate representation. You can get larger differences per platform like Instagram has comparatively more uh girls on it than boys. In terms of what parents might be thinking,

If you look at data from Australian parents, nationally representative samples, then it's clear the vast majority of parents support the social media ban. I think having spoken to a lot of parents, uh, this year and last year, parents appreciate having this additional backup of legislation behind them.

So that the decision to enforce any kind of restriction from social media doesn't set them up for a very adversarial confrontation between them as a parent and their kids. And that confrontation gets supercharged because it becomes something that you ideally need other parents to also buy into, because if you've got a kid, and all of their friends are on social media, then you really are asking them to disadvantage themselves from the social connectedness that social media ostensibly brings.

But if everyone is in the same boat, then that connectedness can still be facilitated, it will just happen in an offline environment. And I think it sets up less of an adversarial confrontation between parents and their kids.

Cassie Hayward: Scott, just on parents' reaction, I think one potential unintended consequence here is that parents get a false sense of security of what this ban really means. And the reality is, even if this ban gets enforced as fully as it's outlined, there'll be some sort of messaging app that emerges that kids can get bullied on. There's still access to porn sites.

There's still misogyny chat on online gaming. There's still, you know, YouTube potentially isn't part of this ban, so they can go down all the different rabbit holes on, on YouTube. So, I wouldn't want parents, myself included, to have too much of a false sense of security about what this ban is going to solve, and we're still going to have to have those big conversations with our kids around consent and porn and respect.

And that this ban might solve a part of the problem, but those big issues are still going to exist.

Scott Griffiths: Bullying predates social media. It will still be an issue after the social media ban. Sure, you won't experience bullying now in the comments or in direct messages on TikTok or other algorithmically driven social media feeds, but that won't stop bullying, migrating through to simple chat or Messenger or WhatsApp, all of which are outside the purview of the social media ban.

And bullying will happen through those channels. So if you are coming to this ban with an expectation that issues like bullying will disappear, then you are set up for disappointment.

Nick Haslam: So there's been some hammering from academic critics about the ban, uh, and how it will adversely affect at least some kids. What are their arguments and what do the kids actually think about this?

Scott Griffiths: People who are against the ban, the arguments fall into a couple of camps. The first one is a scepticism around the technologies that will be put into place. And this one I understand to an extent, but it also seems to me like a lack of imagination and optimism. So right now, if you are an 8-year-old and you want to get onto TikTok, all you have to do is say that you are over the age of 13. It's a simple no yes button.

And you will be on there. We live in a world now where we have face ID and other age identity checkers, which are actually remarkably good, and we can also have biometric scans of fingerprints and things like this, and they are robust. What we want to do now is find something that has that kind of technological prowess, whilst taking the least amount of data from kids as possible.

And I don't see that as being a challenge that we couldn't overcome with the kinds of processes now in place where the government is getting tenders from technology companies who now are genuinely invested, formally not, but now have reason to make these technologies work. So, that to me is a bit of hand wringing and I'm looking forward to seeing what might happen.

A more substantive concern, I think, is the potential for the social media environment to fracture and for kids to migrate to platforms or spaces where regulation is harder to enforce. And an analogous situation here would be America when the teen vaping epidemic was on everyone's radar.

And all of the attention focused on one or two vaping companies, and in particular, I'm thinking of one called Juul e-cigarette. Now, Juul, based in America, had to listen to regulators and did, and eventually, a lot of regulation was passed, which did mean that Juul was no longer sold to teenagers.

But into that space to meet that demand came a whole bunch of operators operating in jurisdictions outside of the US and who were not listening to regulator input and were not concerned about fines and the like. Now, that was a harder sell because that's a physical product that had to get into the US. Social media is frictionless. It flows right across borders.

That's a genuine concern, I think. It's not one that can't be counteracted itself. Uh, the Australian government can, in theory, block the IP addresses of non-conforming social media platforms. That is pretty heavy-handed. There's other legislative things you'd have to consider, but I do think that's one of the more compelling concerns about the ban.

Nick Haslam: And any ideas about whether kids support the ban?

Scott Griffiths: I don't think kids support the ban. At the same time, 40% of kids under the age of 18 say that social media worsens their mental health. So this is the bind, right? We have almost a majority of kids who do believe that social media is a bad influence in general, but the prospect of having it taken away does not thrill them, and

I think that's OK. I think it's reasonable to expect that. I don't think the fact that they're anxious about having it taken away is a reason not to try out this disruption of social media in the lives of young people.

And yeah, that, that's where I, I fall on it. I've certainly heard academics who think that children's wishes in this particular matter should occupy a higher priority in terms of whether or not we decide to go with legislation. But again, having spoken with a lot of parents, I think I fall down on the side of, let's do something and see, rather than not.

Cassie Hayward: Some of the criticism around the ban is that kids who are marginalised or remote or have a special group that they belong to, that social media is their only way to find their community, their other people like them. Is there any merit in that criticism of the ban?

Scott Griffiths: I think it's fair to be worried about people who are already socially isolated, losing their means of social connection. Also, the intent of the ban isn't to sever social connection. And there is every reason to think that groups that are together for social connectedness can still do that using platforms and tools that are not social media, right?

If we think of this as getting rid of things like algorithmically-powered content feeds and infinite scrolling, social connectedness is not part and parcel of that. Yes, there are social media platforms that have a connectedness component, but there are also tools and, and software that doesn't. So I think groups will migrate there.

Nick Haslam: Do we trust social media companies to fully comply with the ban? Uh are some arguing they should be excluded from it and are some likely to innovate in ways that, uh, get around it?

Scott Griffiths: Yeah, so it isn't surprising that companies are advocating in their best interest and trying things like arguing that they shouldn't be within the remit of the ban. There's only one notable success in that regard. That was YouTube*.

[* Correct at time of recording, though this was later amended].

And they, interestingly enough, didn't go at the language in the ban saying, Well, we're trying to get rid of algorithm-driven feeds and infinite scrolls cause YouTube does have that. They went more at the, the definition of social media and by saying, well, we don't have any, like, for-fronted, these are your friends, this is your social network.

Therefore, we're not in the remit as a social media site. They were successful in that. Doesn't mean that it can't be amended later, but yes, the first wave, as you might expect, is a whole bunch of, it shouldn't apply to us. Why does it apply to us? The vast majority of social media platforms now understand they're in that, that remit, and so the onus is on them to develop this age assurance technology.

Now, if it was just Australia doing this, you might think that you wouldn't have a genuine effort from these companies to develop this technology. But other countries are looking to Australia to see how this trial goes and the technologies developed because there are lots of other jurisdictions also interested in having these kinds of age assurances in place.

And in general, this technology even beyond a ban, is going to become increasingly important as part of a whole, you're on the internet, how do we know that you are who you say you are?

So, I think we're at a point now where there is enough in the way of fines, incentive, and pressure coming from jurisdictions outside of Australia that we can expect some good faith, research and development in the space. 100% we need to keep on top of them, but I'm reason, I think we have reason to be optimistic.

Cassie Hayward: And what about for the parents, Scott, what practical advice would you give parents of 12, 13, 14-year-olds leading up to this ban?

Scott Griffiths: I would be prepared to have overtures from 15 and 14-year-olds about getting around the ban. If you have an older sibling in your house, that's 16 or 17 and one who is under 16, I think that that 16 or 17-year-old is going to be asked to help get around the ban. And I understand, I can put myself in the shoes of being a 15-year-old, 14-year-old, and wanting my older siblings to help me get around things like that.

You yourself may also be asked, and it would be useful for you to know beforehand where you stand on that. And ideally, follow through and be consistent against what might be, you know, some, some systematic prolonged conflict on the issue for a while. I think for young kids in particular, so 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, you may not need to explain much beyond these are the rules now.

And hopefully that is sufficient for that period of time. But being prepared for some conflict, some angst in those initial months, I think is useful and perhaps having older siblings on board as well, so that it's a whole of family effort and decision if that's useful.

Cassie Hayward: Scott, thank you. I think our parents who are listening

Cassie Hayward: might be a little less nervous about the ban coming up with that advice. Um, I still probably wouldn't want to be a parent of a 14-year-old, but I think your, um, practical advice will help them get through it.

Scott Griffiths: Good, and, uh, good luck to all the parents out there. We'll see how the ban goes.

Nick Haslam: And that's the end of this episode of PsychTalks. It's been wonderful having our guest for today, Associate Professor Scott Griffiths. This episode was produced by Carly Godden with support from Mairead Murray and Gemma Papprill. Sound engineering was by Jack Palmer. Thanks for tuning in and see you again soon.