Australia's social media ban for those younger than 16 came into force this month. The law focuses on ten major platforms including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok. It is the most aggressive age restriction on social media access anywhere in the democratic world.
This article was originally published on 3 December 2025 on The Brief at sebsauerborn.com.
Every government in Europe is watching closely. Some are already drafting their equivalents.
I have a complicated reaction to this.
The Case For
I am going to do something unusual and start with the argument I find most compelling, even though it cuts against my general instinct toward freedom from state interference.
The evidence on social media and adolescent mental health is genuinely damning. The internal research from Facebook and Instagram, leaked by Frances Haugen in 2021, showed that the companies knew their platforms were causing harm to teenage girls — increasing rates of depression, anxiety, and body dysmorphia — and they continued anyway, because engagement metrics trumped welfare.
The algorithmic architecture of these platforms is designed to maximise time on screen. Not to inform. Not to connect. To retain. And the retention mechanisms exploit the same psychological vulnerabilities that make adolescents particularly susceptible to social comparison, validation-seeking, and anxiety spirals.
I have ten children. I have watched what unrestricted smartphone and social media access does to young people's attention, their relationships, and their sense of self. It is not good. It is, in many cases, genuinely harmful.
A parent who understood the mechanism would not hand their thirteen-year-old an anxiety machine. The platforms have made it very difficult for parents to do otherwise.
The Case Against
And yet. I am instinctively suspicious of the state deciding what information citizens can access, even young ones. That instinct does not disappear because the stated motivation is child welfare.
The history of content restriction in democracies is not reassuring. Every restriction begins with a compelling case. The compelling case normalises the infrastructure. The infrastructure gets applied more broadly. The original justification becomes less relevant than the tool that was built to serve it.
Australia's age verification system for this ban will, by necessity, require platforms to collect and verify personal data about their users at a scale they have not previously managed. Who holds that data? How is it secured? How is it used? Who has access to it?
These are not hypothetical concerns. They are the predictable second-order consequences of a system that sounds reasonable in the abstract.
And there is a simpler objection: a determined sixteen-year-old will find a way around this ban. The same way determined minors find their way around alcohol purchase restrictions, gambling age limits, and film rating systems. The compliance burden falls on compliant families. The non-compliant ones route around it.
Where I Land
I will be direct. I think the Australian ban is probably a reasonable experiment in a genuinely difficult situation.
The mental health case is serious. The existing regulatory framework has failed to constrain platforms that knowingly harm children. The ban is limited in scope, it applies to specific platforms rather than internet access generally, and it is subject to democratic oversight in a functioning democracy.
That is different from the EU building a comprehensive digital identity infrastructure that will eventually regulate access to everything.
The principle of subsidiarity that I believe in — decisions made at the lowest appropriate level — supports parents making decisions for their children, and communities making decisions for their children when parents fail. It does not automatically extend to the state controlling what adults can see.
The Australian ban sits, just barely, on the right side of that line. Most of what Brussels is building does not.
Work with Sebastian
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