Australia’s and other countries’ ill-advised crusades to ban teens under age 16 from social media jeopardize teens’ safety

Teens violently and emotionally abused by parents and adults use social media much more than non-abused teens. Social media bans are state-inflicted abuse.

The reality that teens in abusive families are more likely to be depressed and to use social media more (which seems to help them cope) has taken a long time to emerge. Now it has, in recent U.S. surveys and studies of 27,000 teens – loud and clear.

Source: CDC 2021, 2024. Never/rarely = never to less than 1 hour a day. Often = daily to hourly or more.

Unfortunately, by the time politicians start raging against a “teenage crisis” – as officials in Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, etc., indulge to ban teens under age 16 from social media – you can bet the “crisis” has been thoroughly debunked and their censorious campaign is now looking harmful.

Australia’s case for banning teens is a joke

Psychologist and social-mediaphobe Jonathan Haidt’s recent substack featuring Australia’s ban on under-16s from social media provides an inadvertently comical account of the “alarmingly high rates” of “online harms” young people suffer (yes, he presents these with a straight face):

Young Australians report online harms at alarmingly high rates. According to research by the office of the eSafety Commissioner, the average Australian child encounters online pornography for the first time at age 13. Young people described unintentional encounters with online pornography (which often includes sexual violence) as frequent, unavoidable and unwelcome. Another survey by the office of the eSafety Commissioner asked young people in 2020 about their experiences online in the previous six months. According to the report, forty-four percent of teens experienced at least one negative online incident, including being contacted by a stranger (30 percent), receiving inappropriate content (20 percent), being deliberately excluded from social groups (16 percent), or facing online threats or abuse (15 percent).

Seriously? In 6 months’ time online,

· 56% of Australian teens did not report ANY negative incidents,

· 70% did not report ANY encounters with strangers,

· 80% did not report receiving ANY inappropriate content,

· 84% did not report ANY exclusions from social groups, and

· 85% did not report ANY threats or abuse of any kind.

Online social media sounds like a safe, sane paradise for young Australians!

Is this the nothing-crap that drove Australian lawmakers’ mass-teen-ban? Why would anyone exile teens from such a welcome online refuge from the dangers and troubles of real life?

The occasional online annoyances horrifying Haidt can easily be banished using the keypad’s <delete> and <block sender> tabs – conveniences teens can’t use in the physical world to banish mom’s fists-happy boyfriend, a rapist sports therapist, the leering uncle they’re afraid to be alone with, etc.

In the real world young people actually live in, Australian child abuse agencies – in a small nation whose population barely exceeds Florida’s – investigate 1,200 cases of child abuse every day and have removed 45,000 abused children from parents. Soaring grownup drug/alcohol addiction, the chief driver of this “growing crisis,” has killed tens of thousands of grownups over the last 15 years – exactly when “the deterioration of youth mental health” Haidt laments grew. Drug abuse casualties have exploded among Australians ages 30-59 – the ages parenting teenagers.

“Urgent action needed to address a national crisis,” Australia’s leading addiction institute declares. Of course, no Australian leader in the ban-teens-from-social-media hegira mentioned these grownups epidemics afflicting young people. Teens face them in their homes, but politically, they’re too rough a reality for leaders to engage.

Social media is greatly beneficial for teenagers

Teenagers who are abused in violent, troubled homes turn to social media more, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s 2021 and 2023 Adolescent Behavior and Experiences surveys document. This is especially true of girls: 37% of girls use who never or rarely use social media are abused by violent parents and adults, compared to 47% of girls who use social media daily. Of abused girls in violent homes, 76% of those who never or rarely use social media report poor mental health, compared to 63% who use social media daily.

Since abused teens are more likely to suffer mental health problems, social-mediaphobes declare the mere correlation proves social media use must be causing their depression (the “correlation equals causation” fallacy). In fact, it’s the other way around.

Abused, depressed teens in troubled families who use social media more actually are less likely to suffer mental health problems than corresponding teens who never or rarely use social media. There appears a small fraction of teens and adults for whom social media use worsens problems elsewhere in their lives, and they merit individual treatment.

This is a big issue. Of the hundreds of “studies” (the large majority long outdated) and thousands of superficial commentaries on teens and social media, only FOUR I can find deal with the issue of parents’ and adults’ abusive and troubled behaviors affecting teenagers’ mental health and other risks: the CDC’s 2021 and 2023 Adolescent Behavior and Experiences surveys; the CDC’s 2024 analysis of its survey; and the Surgeon General’s 2024 parents’ mental health advisory.

Of the 4,000 American under-16 teens the surveyed in 2024, the CDC’s analysis shows an appalling three-fourths grow up in families where parents and other household adults are emotionally abusive, violent, and/or mentally troubled, addicted, or arrested; and one in five where parents suffer multiple such problems.

The CDC analysis associates these “adverse childhood experiences” led by parents’/adults’ emotional abuses, household violence, and mental health problems with two-thirds of teens’ mental health problems and nearly 90% of teens’ suicide attempts. In contrast, the CDC’s separate analysis associates social media use with less than 10% of teens’ problems – and even for that small fraction, severe caveats are necessary. (Guess which finding the CDC publicly hyped the most – the major finding, or the trivial one?)

At some point, official, profession, and academic America are going to have to face the hard truths teenagers face but authorities now enjoy the luxury to evade.

There is no teenage “mental health crisis” in healthy families. The crisis occurs in families with seriously troubled and abusive grownups.

Unfortunately, Australian politicos have learned popularity from American authorities and social-mediaphobes like Haidt and Jean Twenge, whose substacks and books on teenagers’ mental health problems don’t mention the epidemics of parental troubles and abuses victimizing children and teenagers that drive youthful depression. The trivialities of their alarms against social media, as in Haidt’s quote above, shows again that their ban-16 crusade is a manufactured distraction, proving yet again culture-war escapism is popular.

Australia as a nation is a bad parent stripping its kids of basic rights to evade facing rising domestic crises inflicted by grownups. But the United States as a parent may be the worst in the world.

American grownups lead the developed world and most of the second world in drug, alcohol, gun killing, violence, suicide, mental health, and related epidemics, which adults inflict on children and teens in crises afflicting rising millions of households. Then, American authorities voice outrage that more teens are depressed and stampede to blame kids themselves and social media.

An even more sinister response is emerging. Social-mediaphobes are beginning to mutter that grownup troubles and abuses either aren’t happening or are unimportant. “Parents aren't to blame for the rise in teen depression,” Twenge declares, now stunningly contradicted by the CDC finding that parent’s widespread abuses, poor mental health, and addiction most certainly are. She admits “that drug overdoses have soared among American adults,” insists that somehow this rising epidemic must be discussed entirely separately from teens’ mental health, and repeats the common misstatement that drug abuse has not risen in other countries.

Social-mediaphobia has already endangered children and youth by distracting authorities (who crave such escapist distraction) from politically difficult crises of domestic abuse, violence, and adult troubles afflicting teens. This crusade has now moved into direct endangerment by dismissing adult abuses as no big deal and denying abused under-16 teens the social media access they need to get help on their own.