The“Social Media Minimum Age” ban and what it tells us.
By Gary Scarrabelotti
You’re worried. The kids are addicted to their “devices”. They can’t keep their eyes off their screens and menace lurks behind the magic scenes.
That’s a problem, you reckon. Then what about us adults?
Mobiles are us
Drive by a bus stop as the grown-ups are heading off to work. Each one is an ‘isolate’ absorbed into their treasured little machines.
Take a walk around a shopping centre. Quite often you’ll spot a youngish woman engrossed in her mobile as a disconsolate child trapes along behind.
It did not hit me until late in 2012 that there really was a problem with social media addiction. I remember the circumstances vividly.
It was a Thai restaurant in Canberra. I was dining with family. At a nearby table four young people were seated, possibly students at the university campus a short drive away. Each had a phone in their hands; each was riveted to it; and so they remained, all through their meal, until the plates and dishes were cleared away, when they paid their bill and left.
I was completely distracted by the weirdness of it all. Occasionally, they did speak a few words. I speculated to myself that they might have been about messages they were sharing among themselves. Otherwise, there was no conversation. Each seemed ruled by their “precious”. I’ll never forget it.
Go to a café or restaurant at any hour today and you see much the same. Husbands and wives, “partners”, the steady couple, seated opposite each other, staring into their mobiles, alternatively flicking through messages then tapping away: conversation — one uses the term advisedly — breaks down into word-packages “tweeted”, so to speak, across the table.
Of the busily exhibitionist business types and of the political movers and shakers, each with mobile protocols specific to their kind, I say nothing for now.
SOS
Not long ago, over drinks, I had a conversation with a father of teenage children. He related ruefully how their bedrooms were out-of-bounds to him when they were on-line networking with friends. A knock on their doors would be greeted with shouted orders to go away before which he felt obliged to yield. He timidly expressed the hope that “the government” might ban social media access to the young and immature.
So, sure, we’ve got a problem. But it’s not simply an ‘under 16s’ phenomenon, as the recently enacted Social Media Minimum Age Bill might lead us to imagine. It’s society wide. If the children are glued to the Internet, it’s because their elders have led the way or because they have given up parenting – or, very likely, both. In any case, their authority is shot.
No wonder, then, that we hear them cry out, ‘Help, government, help! Save our kids. Save us, too!’
Life raft
How glad, then, are our politicians to ride heedless to the rescue.
“[W]e have your back”, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese mawkishly assured the nation’s troubled parents.
The Minimum Age Bill’s “a cracker”, pronounced Opposition Leader Peter Dutton.
Dutton was right there beside Ultimate Daddy “Albo” assuring mothers and fathers across the country that Parliament had stepped in where they, the parents, had feared to tread. Our hero leaders had the solution: a law to stop “under 16s” from opening accounts with social media platforms.
Jonathan Haidt, a serious American social psychologist who has taken the measure of smart phones and of the damage they can do, especially to the young, cheered the passage of our Minimum Age Bill through the Federal Parliament.
“We applaud Australia for stepping up and doing the right thing.”
Well, just hang on there, Professor. The “right thing”? Sure, you understand the problem. But do you understand the solution – and here I especially mean our Parliament’s solution?
How can Australia’s national parliament and government do the “right thing” about a serious many-faced problem — covering psychological, educational and social disorders — when politicians manœuvre, behind the façade of their fake “party lines”, to rush legislation through parliament, in the last days before its Christmas rising, by expressly ruling out the opportunity for considered review?
This is precisely what happened in this case.
Judgement rushed
On Thursday 21 November, the Senate referred the Minimum Age Bill to the relevant Senate Committee. Orders were given to it to report back by Tuesday 26 November.
The closing date for submissions was set for c.o.b. Friday 22nd!
Even so, remarkably, the committee was swamped with 15,000 submissions which it could not possibly have digested before composing its report.
A single day (Monday 25th) was given to a public hearing and the Committee duly reported the following day.
The bill was then debated and amended in the Senate on Thursday 28 November, whereupon the Bill was sent back to the House of Representatives where it accepted the amendments and passed the Bill just after 7.00am on Friday 29th. Parliament rose, as planned, later that day.
No, I am not joking! This is how non-serious people deal with serious problems.
When parents cry, “The government should do something,” we can justly ask ourselves, “Well, why didn’t we?”
All power to Senator Matt Canavan, then, for calling out the “abuse of process” which he correctly judged risked generating “perverse outcomes” without reducing the dangers to children that parliament claimed it was seeking to address.
In his dissent on the Committee’s report, Senator Canavan wrote,
“ … a change has been forced through the Parliament with a haste not befitting its radical and unprecedented nature.”
Exactly so: “radical and unprecedented” measures. And why has parliament taken them? Because both the Government and the Opposition want to lay claim to a social media ‘reform’ (however misconceived) in advance of the 2025 federal elections which could come as early as March.
Flaws
Here, in brief, is what is wrong Social Media Minimum Age Bill.
First, the Bill hijacks the rights and responsibilities of parents in relation to their children. Obviously, many parents are stressed by excessive resort to social media by their children and by the harms that can come of it. The proper response of the state, in this case, however, is not to take over the parenting role but to encourage parents to assume their proper place in the circle of the family as the primary socialisers and educators of their children.
Secondly, the Bill has every appearance of being a ‘try on’. Age verification is being brought forward, not so much to ‘save the children’ as to advance a longer-range agenda: the introduction of a universal digital ID for social media access (and perhaps more) without which, in any case, age verification will ultimately fail.
Thirdly, a universal digital ID for access to social media — the next logical step after the Minimum Age Bill — is a free speech issue. This is because people turn to social media, in part, to exercise free speech which they are unable to do via the legacy media from which the mass of ordinary people are excluded in practice. Citizens should not have to undergo a form of registration by the state before they can exercise their right to free speech in the media of their choice.
Finally, governments need to ban rather than green-light certain measures envisaged in the Explanatory Memoranda to the Minimum Age Bill: namely, as yet undisclosed, subliminal technologies designed to identify the characteristics of social media users. The use of such technologies will certainly not be restricted to age verification.
To conclude, a digital ID, whether for “under 16s” or for all, whether for age verification or for other broader purposes, is the “vaccine passport” gambit all over again. The Coalition parties, in particular, ought to break decisively with the failed social-control ambitions of the Covid era. Unhappily, however, the Coalition’s federal parliamentary leader has been crowing about how great is this legislation.
I say it with deep regret, but Peter Dutton, just doesn’t seem to get it. He lacks a philosophically integrated frame of political mind which is neither traditionally liberal nor traditionally conservative. One week he supports killing off the Misinformation and Disinformation Bill, the next he supports the Minimum Age Bill where both pieces of legislation attack free speech, the former directly, the latter en passant.
Yes, we have a social problem. And, yes, our national parliament and our federal government could (possibly) contribute to our tackling it.
Problems are us
Fundamentally, however, this is a problem that cannot be solved from the top down but from the bottom — or perhaps, rather, from the foundations — upward. And those foundations are the parents of our children.
What we are dealing with here is not, in the final analysis, a potentially dangerous technology – though the nature of that technology, the role it has assumed in our society, and its attendant risks cannot be excluded from consideration of the problem at hand.
The “problem at hand”, however, is not, simply speaking, a pathology. It is a symptom. And of what is it a symptom? I suggest the erosion, if not the collapse, of parenting skills and of parental authority in Australian families.
When we cry, “The government should do something,” we can justly ask ourselves, “Well, why didn’t we?”
Technology has been on the market, for some years now, whereby competent parents have been able to control remotely, from their hand-held devices, what their children view on-line and how long they are on-line. It’s not some massive issue that only government can address. The problem is a culture-wide inability among parents to say, with quiet dignity, “Yes for Yes and No for No.”
Australia would be a less troubled society and much freer politically, if each one of us could recover and practice that virtue. But now, because of our lassitude of spirit and want of courage — and because we’ve failed to set and uphold for ourselves requisite standards of behaviour — we are headed in the direction of a universal system of digital identity without which access to the advantages of a social media could prove ultimately impossible.
Good one, Australia!