Protecting Children Without Seeing Them: A Ban That Blinds Its Own Purpose

It has effectively become the duty of every child under the age of 16 to stress-test the integrity of social media platforms. If that requires falsifying personal details to create an account, so be it. In practice, the government has granted them permission to do so without consequence.

It is difficult not to find it insulting that the government could find no better way to address this issue than by outsourcing its responsibility to protect children, without a clear understanding of what it was actually trying to achieve or the full repercussions of its actions.

The underlying assumption appears to be that what affects children does not also affect adults. In reality, the issue runs deeper than that. The government must surely understand that influence, whether social or otherwise, occurs primarily through consumption, not creation. Yet this distinction has been almost entirely ignored.

Throughout the promotion of this ban, there has been little acknowledgement that it does not prevent children from viewing social media, only from responding to it. Worse still, by forcing children out of identifiable accounts, the government has removed any realistic way of measuring or understanding how much influence social media continues to have on them.

As part of its messaging, the government has urged parents not to dismiss their children’s concerns and to make space for how they feel. But what are parents meant to say? How do they explain the actions of a government that has placed families in this position while deflecting accountability elsewhere?

This bill was rushed and tacked onto existing legislation. The concept of outright restriction is not new, and history has shown that such measures rarely work. Despite this, little evidence has been presented to suggest that the lessons of the past were meaningfully considered.

Parents are told not to dismiss the concerns of their children, yet the government has failed to afford parents and young people that same respect.

If this is only a first step, it should be named as such. Parents and children deserve clarity, not the comfort of being told a problem has been solved when it has merely been deferred.

If you’re going to act, act honestly. If you’re going to start, don’t pretend you’ve finished.