Last week, I had the privilege of interviewing Simone Gupta on stage at CommsCon, where we discussed her role as campaign strategist for lobby group 36 Months. The group played a critical role in driving legislation aimed at banning children under 16 from accessing social media, requiring platforms to verify users’ ages.

The campaign helped push the federal government toward an age restriction, with bipartisan backing and PM Anthony Albanese acknowledging the devastating mental health impact.

The bill passed into law at the end of last year and will come into effect in December. Critics see it as potentially unworkable, overly narrow in its scope, and question why it excludes Youtube.

But the debate it has sparked is essential—because we’ve reached a turning point in how children interact with technology. The writer of Adolescence — the hit 2025 British crime drama series with social media themes — referenced the Australian legislation saying “We need to do something similarly radical [in the UK].

One of the biggest revelations I have had in researching and experimenting with AI since 2022, is that most of human history is the story of unintended consequences.

(Midjourney)

I was an early proponent of the benefits of social media. In one of my most mortifyingly naive moments, I once claimed on stage, in public, that social media would be instrumental in resolving the AIDS crisis. I had drunk gallons of Kool-Aid at the time. But what we had no way of knowing in those early techno-optimist days was the potential for social media to lead to great, widespread harm.

When Mark Zuckerberg famously told his team to “move fast and break........

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