Echoing the concerns about this being a way to seek in more digital ID laws. Thinking of it like the patriot act after 9/11. "You want to be a Patriot, don't you? ?"
Parents need to take responsibility for raising and protecting their children, not defer to private corporations and the state
Hitler put a barbed wire fence around the Warsaw ghetto, telling the Jews it was for their protection from outside forces. And then, having restrained the Jews, he started rounding them up and sending them for extermination.
The Berlin wall was ostensibly created to protect east Berliners from outside forces.
Be very leery of any government action that they claim is there to protect you.
I'm all in favor of regulations that protect young children from internet predators. But is there an ulterior motive? My experience with governments is that what they tell you is not the real intention. At the very least, well intentioned regulations are often perverted by political interests to further their own objectives, not citizen's. Regarding the internet, we have seen copious censorship in the furtherance of political interests. Will these new laws be abused by governments to advance political agendas? Count on it.
Yes, children need to be protected from predators. And citizens need to be protected from government excess. What provisions have been made in these new laws to assure that governments won't pervert the law to their own ends, as they invariably do?
Yes; it is part of gradually chipping away the pieces until we have authoritarian governments world-wide. Although I'm more worried about the Oligarchs.
Good intention, bad precedence for the future. How are companies going to enforce these rules? By requiring everyone to create accounts or use some digital ID service that just adds to the data collection and tracking we already have too much of. When did the effort move away from parents being responsible for raising their children? There are already parental controls and you can still buy non-smart phones that have no internet connection. How is this not coddling?
The devil is in the detail of how the age verification is handled. I glanced thru the article and didn’t see that anywhere which tells me that this is NOT in fact a win for humanity. What I find interesting is that the calls for state regulation are pointed at limiting the age of access to social media rather than simply making it illegal for companies to harvest any data on anyone at all! That would do away with the biggest perverse incentive in the equation. 500 years from now if any human can still think clearly or obtain a real version of history they will look back and realize that human digital enslavement began when the people in our time failed to outlaw the harvesting of digital data on ALL living things and especially on all human beings.
I would love for the restrictions of harvesting of data we need more privacy laws, but the issues are much bigger than just that. We have algorithms that promote behavior or continued scrolling. We have bullying of young girls who are not capable of handling it. It is a complex web of multiple issues.
We wanted to give you a quick heads-up that in order to comply with the Online Safety Act Substack is introducing age verification steps for readers in Australia.”
Next step - book discussion groups to be banned in schools.
I view this similarly to driving a car. We don’t say, “Parents just need to be better parents and make sure their kids are old enough to drive.” We have regulations for cars and drivers because we know vehicles are good but powerful. We know the risks of operating a vehicle. A whole process for designing safer cars, learning to drive, and being old enough to do so has arisen in response to horrible incidents of the past.
Whereas cars are physically risky more often than mentally; the internet is more about the mental risks before the physical. We know driving is physically risky to adults, therefore we are even more restrictive on children. We know the internet is psychologically manipulating many adults, therefore we place age restrictions on children.
That being said, I do think it is worthwhile to discuss how we place those restrictions. Should it be decided on a more local level so people have a greater say in the process? I think that is fair. I cannot speak for other countries, but in the United States driving is governed primarily by each state. Handling restrictions within whatever entity balances the most effective but most local level possible makes sense to me.
Why not simply have better guardrails for all ages then? The Australian social media ban until 16 is equivalent to handing them whiskey and car keys and telling them "have fun, don't kill nobody", with the only requirement being having reached an arbitrary age limit (and any age limit is arbitrary), then it's open season.
The biggest problem with this law is that we currently have no method of verifying age of someone 16 or above. There is no universal ID proving the age of someone who has no government ID (i.e. Driver's License). In addition, we want this requirement to have privacy requirements. When you go into a liquor store to buy alcohol the clerk looks at your driver's license. They don't record the information and put in an online database. Think of having your age, address, and photo available to companies or hackers. Add the issue of having your sixteen-year-old having this detailed information recorded on multiple internet sites, some of which have poor data security (Just look at how many data breaches occur monthly). There needs to be a privacy forward method of age verification developed before this law will ever work.
No, they didn’t. Their catastrophic “compassion” and subjective, feelings based ideology just regulated the under 16’s out of any tehcnology that allow’s for communication - read the Act. Be better informed Jon, I expect more from you.
Indeed, while compassion/empathy is generally a virtue, it can easily become a vice when it is utterly divorced from reason. Case in point, this illiberal monstrosity of a law.
Thank you all for your reflections and breakdown of new Social Media Legislation in Australia. It is wonderful to hear from you all and know the world is watching what is happening here and the implications for our young people and their families worldwide.
This is sad. Started with what seemed like good causes -- stop coddling kids - stop smartphone use until mid-late adolescence - reduce tech in schools. All solid empirically based & sensible. And how does it end up - support for digital ID (watch it expand in AU) & censorship by a governing class that during Covid showed how it would turn purportedly prosocial initiatives into draconian authoritarianism. My question - was this the program all along or did it just get captured along the way?
I’m surprised at the negative reactions. A 13-year old child is not able to enter into an informed contractual relationship. A 16-year old maybe even less.
@Jon Haidt This is a real win. Shifting the default, breaking the trap parents feel caught in, putting enforcement responsibility on the companies. All of it matters.
What I'd add: the harm isn't just behavioral or psychological. It's developmental and somatic. The attention economy trains the nervous system into defensive states: constriction, hypervigilance, the collapse of sustained presence. For adults who formed before the smartphone, this is deterioration. For children born into it, there is no before. Their baseline is a nervous system that never learned what settling feels like.
This is why the mental health framing, while accurate, understates the problem. We're not just seeing anxiety and depression. We're seeing nervous systems shaped by an environment that rewards shallow, reactive attention and punishes depth. The capacity to stay with difficulty, to tolerate ambiguity, to sustain presence. These are developmental achievements that require conditions the attention economy systematically undermines.
Raising the age minimum is necessary. But even with perfect enforcement, we'll still need to help a generation develop capacities that never had room to grow. The harm isn't just exposure. It's what didn't form.
I wrote recently on this mechanism: “The Attention Wound: What the Attention Economy Extracts and What the Body Cannot Surrender.” Thx
I strongly disagree with the direction of social-media regulation and age-verification policy in Australia - **or anywhere in the world**. I previously raised related concerns in a comment on your earlier *After Babel* article here:
In that earlier comment, I argued that we have built an emotionally constrained society in which children are denied ordinary warmth, presence, and relational depth - and that when those needs go unmet in real life (IRL), children predictably turn toward social media or AI systems in search of connection. They rarely find what they are actually looking for, though they are carefully led to believe they have. Enormous resources and sustained R&D have been invested by these platforms to create the *illusion* of connection, belonging, and emotional fulfilment. Instead, children are drawn into environments shaped by attention extraction, commercial incentives, and bad actors - and we then pathologise the outcomes, pointing to platforms, predators, and screen time as if they were root causes, while leaving largely unexamined the social conditions that made those outcomes inevitable in the first place.
1. Moral Panic and the Erosion of Children’s Developmental Agency
The deeper problem is that, through decades of moral panic and risk-avoidance culture, we have systematically eroded children’s developmental agency, while simultaneously narrowing their worlds through constant supervision, restriction of movement, behavioural control, helicopter and snow-plough parenting styles, the shrinking of permissible relationships, and the replacement of guidance with surveillance.
Agency, in the context of children, begins with exploration - the freedom to move through the world, observe, approach, withdraw, test boundaries, form judgments, interpret social cues, and calibrate trust through lived experience. These are not optional skills. They are biological traits and behaviours forged over millions of years of human evolution in ancestral and hunter-gatherer societies - yet in just the last few decades, the environments that allow these capacities to develop have been systematically stripped away.
2. From Protection to Vulnerability - How Control Creates the Harm It Claims to Prevent
When these developmental capacities are suppressed and repressed, the instincts beneath them do not disappear. They are distorted - twisted into anxiety, compulsive seeking, heightened suggestibility, and vulnerability to coercion and manipulation. Children denied the opportunity to develop internal judgment and relational confidence become easier to direct, easier to pressure, and easier to exploit - and they carry those vulnerabilities forward into adulthood. What begins as “protection” in childhood becomes dependence later in life: adults who defer to authority, struggle to trust their own intuitions, and are more susceptible to fear-based narratives and external control. In trying to eliminate risk through ever-tightening controls, we have not removed danger; we have worsened the conditions that produce harm across human lifespans.
And this is where a vicious cycle sets in.
We identify the symptoms - platforms, predators, screen exposure - and respond by intensifying surveillance, tightening controls, and further shrinking children’s worlds. This further erodes agency and real-world relational competence, producing greater dependency, greater fear, and greater vulnerability. That vulnerability is then cited as justification for even more control. Social-media systems, operating inside this environment, are able to refine, intensify, and normalise exploitation more effectively. The loop does not close; it accelerates.
3. Capitalism, Extraction, and Why Technical Fixes Fail
Be hyper vigilant for authorities leveraging the issue of "child safety" into requirements for digital ID.
https://reclaimthenet.org/australia-imposes-mandatory-online-verification-to-access-social-media
I know, right? This is a Trojan horse that will create a privacy and cybersecurity nightmare for everyone! Don't say we weren't warned!
Echoing the concerns about this being a way to seek in more digital ID laws. Thinking of it like the patriot act after 9/11. "You want to be a Patriot, don't you? ?"
Parents need to take responsibility for raising and protecting their children, not defer to private corporations and the state
https://reclaimthenet.org/australia-imposes-mandatory-online-verification-to-access-social-media
Indeed. The Orwellian PATRIOT Act is an excellent analogy!
Read the article.
Read this one: https://reclaimthenet.org/australia-imposes-mandatory-online-verification-to-access-social-media
Hitler put a barbed wire fence around the Warsaw ghetto, telling the Jews it was for their protection from outside forces. And then, having restrained the Jews, he started rounding them up and sending them for extermination.
The Berlin wall was ostensibly created to protect east Berliners from outside forces.
Be very leery of any government action that they claim is there to protect you.
I'm all in favor of regulations that protect young children from internet predators. But is there an ulterior motive? My experience with governments is that what they tell you is not the real intention. At the very least, well intentioned regulations are often perverted by political interests to further their own objectives, not citizen's. Regarding the internet, we have seen copious censorship in the furtherance of political interests. Will these new laws be abused by governments to advance political agendas? Count on it.
Yes, children need to be protected from predators. And citizens need to be protected from government excess. What provisions have been made in these new laws to assure that governments won't pervert the law to their own ends, as they invariably do?
Amen
Yes; it is part of gradually chipping away the pieces until we have authoritarian governments world-wide. Although I'm more worried about the Oligarchs.
That's a distinction in search of a difference.
Good intention, bad precedence for the future. How are companies going to enforce these rules? By requiring everyone to create accounts or use some digital ID service that just adds to the data collection and tracking we already have too much of. When did the effort move away from parents being responsible for raising their children? There are already parental controls and you can still buy non-smart phones that have no internet connection. How is this not coddling?
The devil is in the detail of how the age verification is handled. I glanced thru the article and didn’t see that anywhere which tells me that this is NOT in fact a win for humanity. What I find interesting is that the calls for state regulation are pointed at limiting the age of access to social media rather than simply making it illegal for companies to harvest any data on anyone at all! That would do away with the biggest perverse incentive in the equation. 500 years from now if any human can still think clearly or obtain a real version of history they will look back and realize that human digital enslavement began when the people in our time failed to outlaw the harvesting of digital data on ALL living things and especially on all human beings.
I would love for the restrictions of harvesting of data we need more privacy laws, but the issues are much bigger than just that. We have algorithms that promote behavior or continued scrolling. We have bullying of young girls who are not capable of handling it. It is a complex web of multiple issues.
All the more reason to do a safety recall and QUARANTINE these platforms until they can be made safer.
Then don’t use these services. Facebook is hardly a human necessity.
Its much more than Facebook. Youtube, Apple, Twitter, etc. are listed. I'm surprised they didn't include Substack or Bluesky.
Well said
Govern me harder daddy 🫦
“Hi there,
We wanted to give you a quick heads-up that in order to comply with the Online Safety Act Substack is introducing age verification steps for readers in Australia.”
Next step - book discussion groups to be banned in schools.
Indeed, slopes are slipperier than they appear!
I view this similarly to driving a car. We don’t say, “Parents just need to be better parents and make sure their kids are old enough to drive.” We have regulations for cars and drivers because we know vehicles are good but powerful. We know the risks of operating a vehicle. A whole process for designing safer cars, learning to drive, and being old enough to do so has arisen in response to horrible incidents of the past.
Whereas cars are physically risky more often than mentally; the internet is more about the mental risks before the physical. We know driving is physically risky to adults, therefore we are even more restrictive on children. We know the internet is psychologically manipulating many adults, therefore we place age restrictions on children.
That being said, I do think it is worthwhile to discuss how we place those restrictions. Should it be decided on a more local level so people have a greater say in the process? I think that is fair. I cannot speak for other countries, but in the United States driving is governed primarily by each state. Handling restrictions within whatever entity balances the most effective but most local level possible makes sense to me.
Why not simply have better guardrails for all ages then? The Australian social media ban until 16 is equivalent to handing them whiskey and car keys and telling them "have fun, don't kill nobody", with the only requirement being having reached an arbitrary age limit (and any age limit is arbitrary), then it's open season.
Nope.
This is full scale Big Brother.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Here's the right take on all this:
https://reclaimthenet.org/australia-imposes-mandatory-online-verification-to-access-social-media
💯
The biggest problem with this law is that we currently have no method of verifying age of someone 16 or above. There is no universal ID proving the age of someone who has no government ID (i.e. Driver's License). In addition, we want this requirement to have privacy requirements. When you go into a liquor store to buy alcohol the clerk looks at your driver's license. They don't record the information and put in an online database. Think of having your age, address, and photo available to companies or hackers. Add the issue of having your sixteen-year-old having this detailed information recorded on multiple internet sites, some of which have poor data security (Just look at how many data breaches occur monthly). There needs to be a privacy forward method of age verification developed before this law will ever work.
Indeed, this is a privacy and cybersecurity Trojan Horse.
No, they didn’t. Their catastrophic “compassion” and subjective, feelings based ideology just regulated the under 16’s out of any tehcnology that allow’s for communication - read the Act. Be better informed Jon, I expect more from you.
https://thepaulbuchanan.substack.com/p/catastrophic-compassion?r=4qeeg8
Indeed, while compassion/empathy is generally a virtue, it can easily become a vice when it is utterly divorced from reason. Case in point, this illiberal monstrosity of a law.
Indeed
Thank you all for your reflections and breakdown of new Social Media Legislation in Australia. It is wonderful to hear from you all and know the world is watching what is happening here and the implications for our young people and their families worldwide.
This is sad. Started with what seemed like good causes -- stop coddling kids - stop smartphone use until mid-late adolescence - reduce tech in schools. All solid empirically based & sensible. And how does it end up - support for digital ID (watch it expand in AU) & censorship by a governing class that during Covid showed how it would turn purportedly prosocial initiatives into draconian authoritarianism. My question - was this the program all along or did it just get captured along the way?
I’m surprised at the negative reactions. A 13-year old child is not able to enter into an informed contractual relationship. A 16-year old maybe even less.
“USELESS GUN LAW PATTERNS APPLIED TO INTERNET”
@Jon Haidt This is a real win. Shifting the default, breaking the trap parents feel caught in, putting enforcement responsibility on the companies. All of it matters.
What I'd add: the harm isn't just behavioral or psychological. It's developmental and somatic. The attention economy trains the nervous system into defensive states: constriction, hypervigilance, the collapse of sustained presence. For adults who formed before the smartphone, this is deterioration. For children born into it, there is no before. Their baseline is a nervous system that never learned what settling feels like.
This is why the mental health framing, while accurate, understates the problem. We're not just seeing anxiety and depression. We're seeing nervous systems shaped by an environment that rewards shallow, reactive attention and punishes depth. The capacity to stay with difficulty, to tolerate ambiguity, to sustain presence. These are developmental achievements that require conditions the attention economy systematically undermines.
Raising the age minimum is necessary. But even with perfect enforcement, we'll still need to help a generation develop capacities that never had room to grow. The harm isn't just exposure. It's what didn't form.
I wrote recently on this mechanism: “The Attention Wound: What the Attention Economy Extracts and What the Body Cannot Surrender.” Thx
https://yauguru.substack.com/p/the-attention-wound?r=217mr3
Dear Jon,
I strongly disagree with the direction of social-media regulation and age-verification policy in Australia - **or anywhere in the world**. I previously raised related concerns in a comment on your earlier *After Babel* article here:
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/dont-give-your-child-an-ai-companion/comment/180827274
In that earlier comment, I argued that we have built an emotionally constrained society in which children are denied ordinary warmth, presence, and relational depth - and that when those needs go unmet in real life (IRL), children predictably turn toward social media or AI systems in search of connection. They rarely find what they are actually looking for, though they are carefully led to believe they have. Enormous resources and sustained R&D have been invested by these platforms to create the *illusion* of connection, belonging, and emotional fulfilment. Instead, children are drawn into environments shaped by attention extraction, commercial incentives, and bad actors - and we then pathologise the outcomes, pointing to platforms, predators, and screen time as if they were root causes, while leaving largely unexamined the social conditions that made those outcomes inevitable in the first place.
Social media is not the root problem.
I wrote this comment in a post at https://thesystemisbroken.substack.com/p/australia-bans-social-media, should I run out of comment space or anyone wishes to read this with formatting.
1. Moral Panic and the Erosion of Children’s Developmental Agency
The deeper problem is that, through decades of moral panic and risk-avoidance culture, we have systematically eroded children’s developmental agency, while simultaneously narrowing their worlds through constant supervision, restriction of movement, behavioural control, helicopter and snow-plough parenting styles, the shrinking of permissible relationships, and the replacement of guidance with surveillance.
Agency, in the context of children, begins with exploration - the freedom to move through the world, observe, approach, withdraw, test boundaries, form judgments, interpret social cues, and calibrate trust through lived experience. These are not optional skills. They are biological traits and behaviours forged over millions of years of human evolution in ancestral and hunter-gatherer societies - yet in just the last few decades, the environments that allow these capacities to develop have been systematically stripped away.
2. From Protection to Vulnerability - How Control Creates the Harm It Claims to Prevent
When these developmental capacities are suppressed and repressed, the instincts beneath them do not disappear. They are distorted - twisted into anxiety, compulsive seeking, heightened suggestibility, and vulnerability to coercion and manipulation. Children denied the opportunity to develop internal judgment and relational confidence become easier to direct, easier to pressure, and easier to exploit - and they carry those vulnerabilities forward into adulthood. What begins as “protection” in childhood becomes dependence later in life: adults who defer to authority, struggle to trust their own intuitions, and are more susceptible to fear-based narratives and external control. In trying to eliminate risk through ever-tightening controls, we have not removed danger; we have worsened the conditions that produce harm across human lifespans.
And this is where a vicious cycle sets in.
We identify the symptoms - platforms, predators, screen exposure - and respond by intensifying surveillance, tightening controls, and further shrinking children’s worlds. This further erodes agency and real-world relational competence, producing greater dependency, greater fear, and greater vulnerability. That vulnerability is then cited as justification for even more control. Social-media systems, operating inside this environment, are able to refine, intensify, and normalise exploitation more effectively. The loop does not close; it accelerates.
3. Capitalism, Extraction, and Why Technical Fixes Fail
...
Comment length hit. See https://thesystemisbroken.substack.com/p/australia-bans-social-media.