CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Adding to Failure: Amending Australia’s Under-16 Social Media Ban

Still from Poltergeist.

When something is not working, abandon it.  The policymaker and politician, the latter often inclined to populist temptation and the endless tapping for votes, will decide to make a state of wrongheadedness even worse. The evidence is starting to grow that Australia’s daft delving into the world of regulating a child’s access to social media (the arbitrary limit when social media virginity is shed is 16 years) is falling flat.  Here, we have the continued, easy target that keeps nourishing the blundering, self-pleasuring prefects in Canberra: irresponsible companies with their social media platforms luring children into a cyberworld of harmful content and damaging consequences.  We also have the object of holy salvation: children untouched by the world.  Punish the social media platform (though in small spanks rather than vigorous lashings) or at the very least, convince them to place age-set limits to accounts; spare the unfortunate, ignorant child supposedly incapable of navigating technology they can master in a fraction of the time their parents can.

The process leading to the passing of the legislation was, it should be remembered, also suspect.  With parental certitude and forced caring, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spoke of saving childhood before the ravaging predations of Silicon Valley.  Miraculously, children would cease being screen gorgers and become fit-as-fiddle athletes, climb trees or play the tuba.  The underlying, somewhat sinister message was that of a moral panic taking hold.  And where such panic exercises itself, the urges to control, monitor and police tend to follow with molesting predictability.   The children become a pretext and, if anything, ought to be ignored.  Hence the conspicuous absence of extensive........

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