Will it work perfectly? Does it matter?

A quick thought on the Aussie social media ban

There might be good reasons not to ban children from social media but “where do you draw the line?” isn’t one of them.

Should Snapchat be banned if it’s mainly used for messaging? Should WhatsApp be banned if it’s started incorporating social elements? It might be challenging to answer these questions but wherever the line is drawn it’s likely to be more effective than the alternative policy of no line at all.

We see these sorts of objections in all sorts of debates, because it’s a good way of making an idea seem ridiculous. Should we have a capital gains tax? No, because where do you draw the line - if we’re taxing valuable assets why not fine wine and oil paintings?

Should we legalise soft drugs like cannabis? No, because where do you draw the line? Why should a mostly harmless drug like MDMA be out and a very harmful drug like alcohol be in?

Should we ban rough pornography? No because where would you draw the line? Some women enjoy watching videos which are on the edge. Stop kink-shaming, it’s anti-feminist!

The problem with these arguments is that they often attack a very reasonable idea (we should protect children from emotional harm) with a practical objection (it might not work perfectly), often with an implied solution: we do nothing instead.

With the social media ban it’s hard to imagine any action creating worse outcomes than inaction. If you’re one of those people still clinging on to the no-causation theory of social media and mental harm good for you! We’ve probably reached the end of things we can agree on. But if you believe the evidence that teens, and girls in particular, are harming themselves in record numbers because of over protection in the real world and under protection in the digital world, I think you’d have to work really hard to believe any sort of restriction could make things worse.

So you ban TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram and you give it six months, treating the initial ban as a prototype policy. Some things work, some things don’t - the most dedicated teens find work arounds, a big chunk in the middle decide to obey the law, and you take a look at whether things are improving, staying the same or getting worse. Then you tinker with the settings. What exactly would that approach risk, and how could it be more risky than the status quo?

Technology progresses much faster than policy: if you wait around for the perfect plan it may already be out of date by the time it arrives. The alternative is that you start by starting, learn by doing and commit to improving it along the way.

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There’s a related argument: “a ban will drive social media use underground”. This is another goodie, and once again you’ll find it used in all sorts of policy debates.

You can’t ban cigarettes, you’ll just create a black market.

You can’t ban hard core porn, people will find it on the dark internet.

You can’t charge a capital gains tax, rich people will simply hide their assets.

Some of these things may be true, but we should be able to agree that if an idea is important enough, it’s worth attempting to solve the practical problems that come up along the way. We ban drunk driving even though people can still use the back streets; we ban sexual assault even though it still happens behind closed doors. We ban these things to send a message that they’re wrong, and because we want to empower authorities to stop as much of it as they can. If some of this behaviour continues to occur we treat it as a failure of the offenders, not a failure of the law.

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Like cigarettes, there’s arguably no safe way for a child to use social media - no safe way for her to sit down with a parent like the guidelines suggest and magically learn how to ignore tens of thousands of images and videos expertly targeted to her individual insecurities and vulnerabilities. What sort of social media black-market could be worse than Tik Tok, a site that takes a young girl interested in kittens and netball, and within 23 minutes is serving her suicide-related content and child abuse?