While Finland invests twenty years teaching its children to think critically about media, Australia reaches for symbolic gestures and declares them progress. Within days, a new law regulating social media will take effect; one already destined to fail in its stated aim of protecting young people. Not that you’d know it from the rhetoric. Nothing serves a risk‑averse government better than a crisis narrative: it creates the illusion of decisiveness while leaving the substance untouched.
Minister for Communications Anika Wells sounds resolute:
“We will not be intimidated by legal challenges. We will not be intimidated by Big Tech. On behalf of Australian parents, we stand firm.”
As to what “standing firm” means in practice, Wells is less direct. The ban targets the “big ten” platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube, Reddit, Snapchat, Twitch, and Kick. They’re required to “take reasonable steps” to block users under 16, backed by fines up to $49.5 million. But enforcement will struggle: 80 per cent of teens are already bypassing age gates via VPNs or fake IDs, while alternatives like Noplace and Airchat surge with youthful users hunting their next dopamine fix. It’s like issuing a building permit for a sandcastle and calling it flood control.
Stanley Cohen observed that moral panics arise when a condition or group becomes defined as a threat to societal values. But we need less symbolic posturing and more practical solutions. Labor’s teen social media ban, taking effect 10 December 2025, is the policy equivalent of installing a screen door on a submarine: technically present, ultimately futile, and engineered mainly to be seen from the surface.
Social media executives blend frustration with strategic positioning. Platforms express cautious support for protecting young users while warning that patchwork age bans risk pushing young people to less regulated spaces where harms are amplified. Silicon Valley’s behavioural architects remain busy offstage, designing the next addictive loop.
Meanwhile, Google threatened legal action before YouTube was dragged into the ban, and now the Digital Freedom Project, fronted by two articulate 15-year-olds, is challenging the law in the High Court on constitutional grounds.
Noah Jones cuts through the cant: “We’re disappointed in a lazy government that blanket bans under-16s rather than investing in programs to help kids be safe on social media.” His co-plaintiff Macy Neyland adds: “If you personally think kids shouldn’t be on social media, stay off it yourself, but don’t impose it on me and my peers.”
Out of the mouths of babes … this isn’t protection, it’s abdication dressed up as safeguarding.
The Real Crisis: Dopamine Economics and Developing Brains
The actual crisis isn’t about access or explicit content; it’s the dopamine economy rewiring adolescent brains in real time. Frequent use alters dopamine pathways, fostering dependency akin to substance addiction, while changes in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala heighten emotional sensitivity but impair decision-making. Every notification, “like” and comment triggers dopamine, making it harder to stop; a process scientists call “delay discounting,” where immediate rewards trump long-term priorities.
Infinite scroll and autoplay aren’t bugs; they’re deliberate features exploiting psychological needs through suggestions, pull-to-refresh, and social investment mechanisms. An NTU Singapore study of Australian and Singaporean youth found 68 per cent reported difficulty focusing, with many struggling to complete schoolwork or engage with content lasting over a minute.
Neuroscientist Gemma Calvert explains: “The brain is being trained to seek constant novelty and instant rewards through dopamine-driven feedback loops. Over time, this reduces our ability to focus or engage in deep thinking.” One teen captured it perfectly: “TikTok has made my attention span so low that I can’t even watch a one-minute video.”
Australian data underlines the cognitive toll. Teenagers’ mental health has deteriorated sharply: 27% of female adolescents aged 15-17 reported serious mental illness in 2021, up from 16% in 2017, while 98% of young Australians report feelings of anxiety or depression at least once in the past year. Heavy screen time users spending more than four hours on school nights are 15 per cent less likely to attain higher reading scores and 17 per cent less likely to obtain high numeracy scores.
NAPLAN results for 2025 confirm the pattern: one in three students nationally fail to meet basic literacy and numeracy standards, while reading and writing in years three and five continues to decline.
Reversing this neurodevelopmental shift is well beyond any government’s legislative reach. The adolescent brain remains plastic until the mid-20s, but cultural dopamine saturation demands deep repair processes. Child psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg insists regulating addictive design is crucial: ending autoplay, mandating breaks, not simply erecting futile age walls. What’s needed is whole-of-society transformation: digital literacy across curricula, algorithm transparency, family supports, sustained mental health investment. This requires more than a politician’s performative scolding.
What the Rest of the World Is Actually Doing
While Canberra congratulates itself on “world-first” law, the actual world is building something useful.
Finland leads where Australia flails. Since the 1990s, Finland has embedded media literacy across its entire education system, woven through every subject from early childhood through tertiary education. Students learn to analyse media from different viewpoints, with media literacy integrated into mother tongue, visual arts, geography, civics, religion, and ethics, focusing on critical literacy, copyright norms, freedom of speech, and responsibility in producing and sharing content.
The results? Finland scores at the top of the European Media Literacy Index among 47 countries, with students scoring remarkably high on measures of media education, usage, and digital skills. Finnish students dramatically outperform their US counterparts on digital literacy tasks: showing mastery where US students fumble at entry levels. This is the authentic alternative to Labor’s ban; a whole-of-society approach that actually equips young people with tools for digital autonomy rather than infantilising them.
Norway is building technical infrastructure, not political theatre. The Norwegian government is taking decisive steps with a public consultation proposal for a new law prohibiting social media platforms from offering services to children under 15, with 75% of the population supporting electronic age verification. Unlike Australia’s vague “reasonable steps,” Norway plans robust age verification using its BankID digital identity system: privacy-preserving technology that actually works.
France is setting technical standards rather than hoping for the best. Paris published a detailed mandatory technical standard applicable to age verification systems in October 2024, becoming applicable in January 2025, with failure to comply resulting in fines up to 150,000 euros or 2% of worldwide annual turnover. France is also exploring under-15 social media restrictions with proper parental consent frameworks, not blanket bans that treat 15-year-olds like toddlers.
The EU and UK are developing actual solutions. The UK Online Safety Act requires “highly effective” age verification including open banking, photo ID matching, facial age estimation, and digital identity wallets. The European Commission is developing the EU Digital Identity Wallet for age verification while respecting privacy; binding guidelines on protecting minors are due mid-2025.
These aren’t performative gestures; they’re serious regulatory frameworks built on technical competence and privacy protection.
Brazil passed comprehensive legislation in September 2025 requiring age verification, linking under-16 accounts with parental oversight, and banning predatory gaming mechanics like loot boxes; implementation begins March 2026.
The pattern is clear: serious jurisdictions are building privacy-preserving infrastructure, investing in digital literacy, and regulating platform design. Australia’s rushed ban is world-first in the sense that a paper tiger is a rare and largely useless beast.
The Opportunity Cost: What We’re Not Doing
Here’s the arithmetic Labor hopes you won’t do. That $49.5 million per platform the government threatens in fines? That’s money that could fund comprehensive digital literacy programs modelled on Finland’s approach in every Australian school, expansion of evidence-based youth mental health services filling the “missing middle” tier of care, training for teachers in media literacy pedagogy, research into effective interventions for problematic social media use, parent education programs teaching digital parenting skills, and desperately needed therapy and support services for at-risk youth.
The bitter irony stings: our government spends millions on an unenforceable ban while young Australians can’t access timely mental health care. Young people wait months for mental health services, with emergency department presentations for self-harm and suicidal ideation continuing to rise. Nearly 40% of young Australians aged 16-24 experienced a mental health disorder in 2022, yet the vital “missing middle” tier of secondary care between primary services and hospital admission remains largely absent, leaving young people with severe, complex conditions stranded.
Australia has been ahead of the curve with headspace centres operating in 150+ communities, but the Youth Enhanced Services (YES) initiative funded from 2016 is a weak and piecemeal response commissioned by Primary Health Networks with little regard to evidence or integration. We need expanded professional workforces tied to team-based multidisciplinary care, not fragmented fee-for-service solo practice models. The federal government already possesses solid blueprints for such secondary care models but chooses theatrical bans over actual mental health investment.
Meanwhile, platforms continue designing addictive loops without consequence. Where’s the regulation mandating scroll breaks, time-use cues, or algorithm transparency? Labor won’t touch platform design because that requires confronting corporate power, not just announcing headline policies that shift responsibility onto platforms while achieving nothing.
What Will Actually Happen
Short term is predictable: platforms implement minimal compliance through age self-declaration and basic checks. Meta is already removing under-16 accounts proactively. Sophisticated teens bypass restrictions via VPNs, fake IDs, alternative platforms. The High Court challenge proceeds but won’t quickly succeed. Privacy concerns intensify around data collection for age verification.
Medium term looks worse: teens migrate to unregulated platforms, gaming sites (Roblox, Discord remain exempted and unregulated), encrypted messaging. Minimal measurable impact on teen mental health outcomes emerges. The ban reveals itself as exactly what critics warned: political theatre masquerading as public health intervention.
Long term? The ban joins Stage 3 tax cuts and housing “fixes” in the gallery of announce-ables that announce nothing but involution. International observers note Australia’s failure and adopt more sophisticated approaches combining technical infrastructure, digital literacy investment, and design regulation. Pressure mounts for actual solutions, but by then another election cycle has passed and another cohort of young Australians has been sacrificed to Labor’s small-target strategy.
At 16, the same dopamine traps await. The ban doesn’t address infinite scroll, autoplay, or variable reward schedules. These addictive design features aren’t bugs; they’re the business model. A 16-year-old encountering TikTok’s algorithmic manipulation for the first time faces identical neurological risks as a 14-year-old; except they’ve had two fewer years to develop critical thinking skills and digital resilience.
The Duty of Care We Actually Owe
We owe young Australians a higher quality duty of care than this legislative farce delivers. Genuine duty of care means teaching resilience, not hiding danger. As educator Bell Hooks wrote: “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely conscious is the greatest threat to the status quo.” Bans don’t prepare young people for the digital world they’ll inhabit as adults at 16. Finland’s approach works because it treats children as developing critical thinkers, not passive victims requiring protection from their own agency.
It means evidence-based interventions targeting root causes: regulating addictive design features, infinite scroll, autoplay, variable reward schedules, algorithmic manipulation; rather than age-gating access. It means forcing platforms to disclose how their algorithms work, ending dark patterns that exploit psychological vulnerabilities, mandating “friction” that allows users to make conscious choices rather than defaulting to endless consumption.
It means addressing the attention economy’s business model. The problem isn’t kids on platforms; it’s platforms designed to monetise attention through addiction mechanics. As researcher James Breeze notes: “We need default-on safeguards embedded in social platforms, such as scroll breaks, time-use cues, social comparison prompts, and attention-aware interface design. The science exists, but what’s missing is the will to act.”
It means respecting young people’s agency and voices. The plaintiffs challenging this ban in the High Court articulate what policy-makers won’t: young people deserve better than a lazy government outsourcing parental responsibility to unenforceable legislation. They need tools, skills, and support; not condescension masquerading as care.
Instead, Labor delivers a paper tiger: scaring no one, fooling parents through expensive government advertising campaigns, letting the real harm fester. In Canberra’s world, being seen to act is enough; even if young brains pay the price, even if international evidence shows better approaches, even if the kids themselves are telling us this won’t work.
Call to Account
This is where we need to stop accepting performative gestures as policy. The Albanese government talks tough but shows it is content to skip the hard graft of creating policy that will actually work. It’s our responsibility: as parents, educators, employers, citizens; to demand better.
Hold your representatives to account. Insist they explain why they chose theatre over substance. Ask them why Finland’s proven digital literacy model isn’t being implemented in Australian schools. Demand they fund the missing middle tier of youth mental health care instead of wasting money on unenforceable age-gating.
Young Australians are telling us what they need: tools, resilience, support, and adults who listen. The Digital Freedom Project’s plaintiffs have articulated this more clearly than any government minister. They deserve a government that takes their voices seriously.
We owe our young people a duty of care that goes beyond headline-grabbing bans. We owe them a government willing to confront corporate power, to invest in proven solutions, to make hard choices about where money actually goes. Not the easy theatre of announce-ables. Not the hollow performance of a government pretending to act while young brains rewire themselves in real time.
The dopamine machine will keep running. Young people will find ways around the ban. But if we demand accountability, if we insist government do the hard work of evidence-based policy; digital literacy, mental health investment, platform regulation’ then at least we’ll be building something real.
The choice is ours. As philosopher Karl Popper wrote: “We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than that freedom and security are inseparable.”
Demand better. The young people of Australia deserve nothing less.
Urban Wronski Writes 
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