Australia’s eating disorder peak body and leading experts say a social media ban for under-16s is not enough to curb the scale of harm being done to young people on platforms, with one describing it as a “knee-jerk” policy response.
They are instead calling on the federal government to make changes to legislation governing platforms so providers could be forced to be more transparent about algorithms – including allowing people to reset them – and remove harmful content.
The New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, has come out in favour of a social media ban for under-16s, saying at the weekend that he wanted to implement it “as soon as possible” to combat the platforms that he said were conducting a “global, unregulated experiment on young people”.
He will attend the state’s social media summit on Thursday, where the leading eating disorder researcher and director of the InsideOut Institute, Prof Sarah Maguire, will be speaking about the need for governments to do far more than implement a ban, including better age verification technology.
“How can we even talk about keeping young people safe if we have no way of determining what they’re accessing, at what rate, in what numbers,” she said.
“A ban alone is not going to do it. It’s not going to make the platform safe.”
Maguire said if a ban was enacted, it needed to be just the first step in making platforms safer, along with other measures such as forcing providers to supply information about their algorithms and allowing people to reset them.
“The evidence from the research is overwhelmingly that social media use, in particular appearance-focused type platforms like Instagram and Tiktok, are harmful on people’s perceptions of their bodies,” she said.
“It’s really important that whatever we implement, it’s not just up to the young person or just up to their parents. We’re talking about an industrial complex that is profiting greatly. There needs to be corporate responsibility for safety.”
According to Butterly Foundation data from earlier this year, about 1.1 million Australians have an eating disorder and more than a quarter of those are under the age of 20.
Foundation research released this year also found more than 60% of NSW children aged 12 to 18 reported that social media made them feel dissatisfied with their body and almost half reported a high level of concern about their body image.
The Butterfly Foundation’s Melissa Wilton said the organisation was not supportive of a blanket ban because it takes the onus off platforms to do better and could negatively impact people looking for help or who are socially or physically isolated.
“A blanket ban takes the responsibility away from the social media platforms and puts it back into the hands of the consumer and the users, and we know that kids will get around it anyway,” she said.
“It just seems to be a very knee-jerk reaction to a much bigger, more complex social problem. It’s not something that we’re supporting.”
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A University of Sydney research fellow, Jasmine Fardouly, believes a ban would not be effective in protecting young people from the harms because they would most likely be able to find ways around it and it would not make the platforms themselves safer.
“I don’t think it’s the most effective thing to focus on a ban,” she said.
She said while most sites banned users under the age of 13, research showed that about 70% of 11-year-olds were already using social media.
“It’s better to focus on making social media safe for everybody,” she said.
“I understand, especially parents’ concerns around social media and their desire to get their children off social media, but just banning it, I don’t believe that will be an effective approach.”
The NSW Labor MP Emily Suvaal, who has been public about her battle with anorexia, last month told the parliament that while raising the age could help in part, that “at 16, which is the peak age of onset for eating disorders and many other mental illnesses, we will have all our young people on social media anyway”.
She backed experts who called for changes to algorithms.
“We can do a lot more and there is a high level of consensus among our experts and the community on these issues and a lot of data available to support what we need to do,” Suvaal said.
