Last year the Australian government introduced new laws that set the minimum age for using social media at. 16. The idea is basically to protect young people from the risks and the harms that can come from being online too early. 

So platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook will soon be required to have proper age checks in place and to keep any of that information safe.

If those platforms don't do that, they will face serious penalties, and these changes will come into effect by the end of the year. 

They have shaped the legislation from input from young people, parents, and experts, right across the country. 

The first poll that we will want you to participate in is, do you think that a social media age should be raised to 16, as in until you're 16, you can't use social media?

We will be asking a poll at the end of the conversation as well. 

So there's your first question. Should the age of social media usage be raised to 16? We'd be really interested to know what you think about that. We will be communicating those results throughout the evening.

I'm joined by Associate Professor Amelia John from UTS. Amelia's, the acting head of discipline in social, digital, and social media in the faculty of Design and society. Amelia looks at how young people tackle racism, misinformation, and digital safety across social platforms.

Also joined by associate professor Marian Andrei from the UTS. He's the head of behavioural data science lab. 

Professor Maria Andrei was the recipient of Academic of the Year at the 2023 Defence Industry Awards, and he looks at how we are pay attention online, like how we're distracted or how we're not distracted, and how influence and opinions spread across the digital world, which is of course such a huge issue.

Now from Project Rocket, we are joined by Rosie Thomas, who's there on the big screen for us there tonight. Hi, Rosie. It feels like you're in the room with us. Rosie's the co-founder of Project Rocket, and that's a youth-driven social enterprise, which is focused on combating cyber bullying, hate and prejudice.

She's also an Order of Australia medal recipient and we're also joined by Rana Rahimi. She's the national manager at Mayan, which is the Multicultural Youth Advocacy Network. Welcome. She's a fierce advocate for migrant and refugee youth and an expert in social inclusion and humanitarian ethics. All of you in the room.

Thank you. We also have a number of people joining us online, so thank you so much for being with us both in Australia and overseas. And like I said before, what we are really hoping tonight is to have a really practical and open discussion about what this all means, this is happening, and what the landscape looks like and what it means moving forwards for us, and particularly for parents and obviously for young children.

The legislation will be around who can open accounts on social media platforms. 

So, we're talking about TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat, YouTube is different because you don't need an account to watch videos, but there will be restrictions around that, age restrictions and who can actually access material.

This is a world first decision. In your mind, what do you think led to this decision? 

Well look, what led to this decision was the concerns of parents. And certainly I think that the discourse and even the current discourse is led by concerned parents and the regulator, both of whom are concerned with protection of their children with online safety, but not necessarily taking a balanced view.

Whereby, there might be a consideration of how young people are using social media, have used social media as an important source of social connection, social support, identity formation, belonging and youth advocacy. Young people are having a voice on the issues that impact on them. So I think that, that side of the equation has not led to the implementation of this ban.

The implementation of the ban has been led, by discourses around risks to children on social media, children and young people. And I think in many cases, some of the risks that are being discussed are at the extreme end of the scale. 

I mean, even the eSafety Commissioner was speaking recently in relation to the online industry codes about risks around pornography, extreme and violent content, suicide ideation. 

No children and young people should have access to that content, but that is not the whole picture of what people are connecting with on social media and what young people are connecting with on social media. 

I do have some concerns around the discourses that led to the implementation, or that are going to lead to the implementation of this ban in December.

I don't think it has necessarily been a balanced debate. And importantly, young people's voices have not necessarily been included in some of those discussions either. 

The government does say they did talk to a lot of young people and there was actually, you know, quite a lot of support for I think 74% or something, support for some changes, some legislation.

Rosie, I might come to you, you talk to a lot of young people. 

Some of the stats are almost three in four children, age 10 to 17 have seen or heard content associated with harm. Over 50% have experienced cyber bullying, one in four non-consensual tracking, monitoring, or harassment.

Rosie, in terms of what you hear, if you had to do sort of straw polls on stats, do you feel like there is a lot of concern around for young people around their safety in this space?

Or do you feel like there's more positives than negatives in the space for them? 

We work with 2000 students each week all over the country. And we're also informed by our National Youth Collective at Project Rocket. So they essentially do co-research with us. 

They steer the direction of our organisation and wherever possible will be trying to elevate their views into tonight's conversation. As Amelia astutely said, we know the harms exist.

All of us are actually dedicating our professional lives to tackling these harms.

One in five young people report being excluded, threatened, or abused online, and that's not good enough and it's completely unacceptable. But unfortunately, I think what we've done is we've wrapped up, or simplified this debate as a sort of good versus evil.

And we've erased all of the intersectionality that exists. 

Unfortunately, the way that it is, all of the harms and the risks are wrapped up with so many benefits and opportunities. And to jump off the back of what Amelia said we've spoken about the mental health benefits of social media, and we are not here just to understand the nuance of the way that young people use social media and the internet.

We are not so much just talking about them accessing Headspace, a phenomenal youth mental health organisation on social media. 

Although I will let you know that 73% of young people reported that they do access social mental health support on social media. 

But what we're really talking about here is self-expression and identity, and especially for young people who are already facing marginalisation,

It really is a lifeline to that community connection and that pride in ways in which they don't have that access offline. I just want to elevate one voice at the moment. It's La Missa.

She's a 19-year-old, young Muslim woman from Western Sydney and she sits on our national youth elective and she talks about the power of social media as a lifeline. The positive cultural representation, identity, pride, and community connection that she was able to tap into only via social media.

We know this is true. A lot of the first Nations young people we work with, youth who literally don't have physical spaces where they can show up and access support. 

So we've got a lot of unanswered questions here about how we can create these safe places for young people offline. But it's clear that yes, the harms and the risks are massive online and we need to be addressing them, but not at the cost of young people's agency, their belonging and their connection. 

Thanks Rosie. 

Ron, I'll just stick to where we are now. You are deeply invested in the migrant and refugee experience of these spaces. What are your insights into how they're used by young people? 

So, very similar to Rosie, we have connection to young people all across the country, in all the corners.

And, our access through them ironically, is through social media. Especially those young people who new newly arrived to the country and they are in regional areas far away from accessing to physical spaces. 

One thing that we are hearing is a concern that how they're going to pass that settlement process and to settle in safely and how they can navigate the process in the country.

For newly arrived, consider that around 20,000 people are arriving through humanitarian aid and from there, historically, 12% of them are children in this age group. 

And interestingly, we already have lots of problems with helping them to navigate the system and getting in because their parents do not know English.

They become the parents. They support their parents to settle in and they need this connectivity. We have heard through consultation that it's this connection between them and the rest of the world.

For example, messenger in Facebook or Instagram because they don't have a phone number through the journey that they have to get to the country.

So, it's really tricky if we consider that how they are going to help their parents, how they're going to navigate the system. And also, we understand that it's a protection issue for them because we hear a lot of racism and cyber bullying online. Even us as an organization are getting trolled all the time on Facebook.

So, we don't use Facebook. We understand that we cannot consider that this is the best platform, but we need to understand the diversity and the diversity that exists is quite nuanced. 

And there are lots of considerations in putting a ban on social media that needs to be diverse and understand that the country is the most multicultural country in the world, the most diverse country in the world.

And it's literally the matter of equity that when it gets to implementation, how we want to make sure that it's equitable for everyone. 

Marian Andrei, there's a lot of questions coming through about the kind of tech side of things. I'll just run through a few of them, but I just wanted to kind of get a sense from you about how much of this digital world is able to be sort of trapped.

There's the age verification process, for example. And there's also this idea that these platforms amass huge amounts of data. 

There are concerns about how this will happen and technically how it's going to work for these platforms to be held accountable.

Well, those are multiple questions there. 

Let me start getting to some of those elements. First of all, let me start with the last one actually. Are we comfortable letting the platforms amass that much information about us? 

They already do.

They don't need our IDs to know who we are actually. 

Even from 2014, we started knowing that our online activity, our public online activity is very revealing about us. It was the beginning of where we realised that inferential privacy is a real issue. 

We can figure out things like gender, sexual orientation preference, political preference, psychological profiling in the big five dimensions. 

But even things like whether your parents have divorced before your 21st birthday. So the fact that a lot of our personal information is out there in the hands of the social media companies, we knew that since 2014.

And you know, who else knew that? 

Cambridge Analytica. That's how it was built on this type of inferential privacy. Now, we can probably put a pin into the amount of information that the companies have on us. It's a lot more than we think. 

I wanted to come back to some of what we discussed, and I really liked Rosie's comment about how the benefits and the downsides of those social media are actually blended together. 

And I wanted to come down to some of the things that we know that are harmful. 

And there's increasing amounts of data and studies that are coming up that show the downsides, particularly in terms of psychological outcomes.

We know that, for example, the US Surgeon General identified the children that use social media more than three hours daily. They have doubled the risk of poor mental health outcomes. So just two hours a day. 

And we do know that limiting social media usage to just 35 minutes already increases, almost doubles those outcomes.

But what I found particularly problematic is that there's a new study that comes out of the University of North Carolina, which shows that when children that check social media at least 15 times a day, they actually show, and I'm quoting, increased sensitivity and reward sensors to, and that leads to hypersensitivity to peer feedback.

Where I'm getting with this, the proof is starting to be not only correlational, meaning that we know social media usage and at the same time we see these poor life and mental outcomes. 

We start moving into the causal links. 

And the fact that we see changes in the brains of teenagers, seems to be one of the arguments behind maybe putting a delay until the brain reaches a particular maturity level.

In this case it was deemed to be 16 years old. 

There are so many questions around how it will actually work. 

How will the platforms actually implement this? 

In order to get the technology in place, in order for it to actually hold social media companies accountable, is that actually possible to see whether you can't make an account, but someone might be able to make an account for you, fake their age, for example. 

There's a lot of questions coming in which we will get to around workarounds.

It’s obvious that there will be people trying to work around it. And can companies actually be fined up to $50 million if those rules are broken?

Like what's the technology around that space? S

How are we going to be able to enforce the rules without giving the companies access to our IT documents? 

There's been a trial, but there's a couple of approaches to do this. 

The first thing to know is that in the law, it is explicitly forbidden for the companies to request government issued ID so Facebook won't be able to request my driving license to check my age.

So what are the options then? 

Well, there's a couple of options. 

The one that is probably currently, most favoured, is based on token-based identification.

So essentially the company, the social media platform does not request for identification, but rather engages a third party, another company or another entity which specialises in identity and age verification. 

And this is not new. Anyone that has had to take a bank loan, you know that the bank externalises the identity verification to a third party service that does it, and then only sends the bank the information that they require.

So in this case, a third party would be verifying the identity in the name of the platform, and then would only transmit to the platform, a thumb up, Yes. Above 16 or below 16, which then transfers the problem from the platform to the company. 

But then the companies are domestically based or could be domestically based, and that's a different story.

Then you have other approaches, which are inferential. 

So essentially predicting the age of the individuals based on a number of things. 

It can be the way they speak, the way they look, the way they move, even the way they move their mouse. 

All of these put together, can predict the age, but as with anything inferential, when you make predictions, you can be wrong.

So, any prediction will come with a confidence interval. So almost like in voting percentages, like voting intentions, they say 3% plus minus 1%, so it might be 15 years plus minus one year, which then comes with all, all kind of questions.

And then there's other more exotic approaches, even some of them based on blockchain solutions.

I think it'd be great to hear from a young person. We've got a video we would like to play you. 

The social media apps that I use are Snapchat and TikTok, and I normally watch content on both of them and talk to my friends.

All my friends that I have added on Snapchat are people from my school and one friend that lives in the UK as well as watching content. I used to make some, but that's only for like a few people to see. Like people from my school. The kind of videos I make are just like relatable things to me and my friends, like inside jokes and stuff.

My mom had a rule where I wouldn't like to get Snapchat and I did break that rule, but I felt very excluded from my friends how they all had the same app and I only was stuck with messages still. So there was a group on Snapchat that I was added to. There was a person who added some very inappropriate content onto that group chat and luckily I left before I could see too much through my friends.

I found out that someone told their parents about it and I was kind of relieved because I feel like they should have got in trouble about what they did and learn that they can't just send stuff to people like that. Yes, I think kids under 16 should be able to be on social media platforms as I don't think it's up to the government to make that choice.

It should be about the parents' choice. Because I feel like this isn't really going to stop cyber bullying at all. Like this is not the approach. I think they should make it so that parents like have more realisation about things happening online. 

Do I think this ban is good? No, I don't think it is. It is coming pretty soon at the like end of the year.

I think it's important for like people my age to be on social media because I think some people feel very connected to like talking to people. because they might not have like that real, help the outside role and might feel safer, like posting stuff online or communicating online. And my mode of losing access.

I do have like a lot of followers on some of my accounts and like a bunch of streaks on Snapchat and TikTok as well as a very high snap score. And I don't want to lose that because that took a very long time to accomplish. 

Rosie, when you hear that video, when you like, is this, is this something typical that you hear?

Yes, absolutely and so great to have some youth representation. 

The biggest thing we've heard from this debate if you like, is that don't talk about us without us from young people. 

I can say as a youth organisation in the mental health sector for 20 years, young people and our sector weren't adequately consulted.

And I think these voices just show the nuance and the dynamic of these issues. 

Ultimately, though, and I think this is what this little legend was telling us, that ultimately bans don't build skills. Bans don't build empathy or resilience. Bans don't address the root causes that are human issues around like division and hate.

I think the biggest injustice of all of this is that parents have been left over the last 15 years to carry this huge burden of online safety with zero support, and now have been lured into this false sense of security that the problem is fixed, but the problem Isn't fixed. 

We need to be addressing these real issues. And I'm glad to hear that the ban is being framed as a delay. 

We know that are musicians online because of their social media that have followers, that are creating their own social change movements like Project Rocket. 

Tackling global issues like climate change by galvanising literally millions of other young people using social media to call governments to account.

So the real opportunity, I think, for the delay is to do exactly what this legend has said, and that is really focus on education and design approaches that actually meet young people where they're at. 

Amelia, given that this is happening, so you know, it's, it's tempting to have a debate here tonight about what should happen, what shouldn't have happened, what discussions should have taken place, but let's assume that this is going ahead.

Do you feel like there will be other spaces that young people will find, let's say it is about activism or is about connection outside of the social media spaces that are now going to be restricted?

Well, I hope so, Kumi.

I guess the thing to think about here, when you're hearing about young people and how important social media is to them in terms of their social connections and communities that they're building online, is that young people are not without agency. They're not without capabilities and skills in being able to find the spaces where they can make those kind of very vital connections.

I guess my hope is that alternatives will be found, but I don't think the resources are really there at the moment because there has been such a focus on implementing this ban. 

You're going to have young people who are coming into year 12 or the first year of university and are accessing social media for the first time.

Whereas they may have been able to have conversations with their parents about things that were concerning online or with their friends and peers. Maybe they had digital literacy education at school. 

I think that there will be fewer guardrails, as they're coming into a time when they're becoming more autonomous and not relying on their parents or school. systems quite as much for these forms of education.

I think where are the resources going to be to create those third spaces? 

Look, I hope that young people will find a way to find those connections, but a ban is a really blunt tool and it means that even young people now who have social media accounts, if they are not of the correct age, they are going to have their accounts deactivated.

I'm pretty concerned about, young people's levels of anxiety when their accounts are deactivated. 

I'm concerned about parents having these conversations with say a 17 year-old child who's going to have their access to social media continue, and then maybe there's going to be a 15 and a half year old child who they're going to have a very different conversation with.

Yeah, all of your memories, your connections with your friends, community building, some of these really vital sources of connections are going to be lost. So, I think that there is a lot of support that's going to be needed to be provided to parents to have some of those conversations.

And young people, while I don't think they've been present enough in the debate so far, but we need to hear them now and there needs to be a lot of research that centres on their voices and experiences what their needs are and that gives them the resources to be able to create those third spaces.

Rana looking ahead. Have you and your colleagues been considering how to manage that shift and that change and what kind of support you feel like might need to be implemented? 

Particularly, I think for those young people who have built a community and a life online up until this point, maybe it's going to be different for kids, under eight or nine, but the ones at that older end of the spectrum, what discussions have you been having around that?

Yeah, absolutely. 

So, very similar to Rosie, we have that motto of nothing for us without us, and the conversation right now is are we breaching the child’s rights? 

And how much of the agency we want to give to the children.

For an organisation like us, we say that definitely we need children around the table to create the solution because they are innovative, they're creative. The Gen Z and Gen Alpha are the generation who were born in digital world and as parents, the Gen X and millennials are not that much familiar with the digital world that their children are already coding.

And I stopped by Instagram. I didn't even get to TikTok. So I guess it's really important to bring them around the table to make sure that they can help us and children and young people that we are working with. 

And they are eager to create something that can protect them. So they can be a part of solution and they need adults to understand that and bring them to the conversation. 

And on the other side, I think we have 30% intergenerational gap. We have to address it in a way. And I think one of those ways of addressing is to teach the parents and to educate adults on digital literacy as well. 

Children can train them. It needs something that will bring all of them together. It is not just the pure responsibility of a parent and it's not pure responsibility of a child or a government.

It needs to be a shared responsibility and a shared approach to address all of these in implementation. 

Marian Andrei, what research do you have around, or have you read around workarounds? Like when there's bans, do people tend to use VPNs? Like it's quite interesting, anecdotally, and I don’t know about parents in the room if you've had conversations with kids.

I know I've had conversations with young people saying, are you guys talking about how to work around stuff? And they go, yeah, of course we are. 

Do you have research around that space? Around what kind of workarounds people might tend to be thinking of, is that of concern for you?

Or where do you think people will be turning to try and potentially keep access to communities that they feel like they will lose access to? 

There will always be, there will always be workarounds. 

Any workaround that makes your access appear from outside of Australia will circumvent at least partially the problem. 

Workarounds exist and they will always exist, but that will not blunt the effectiveness of the measure because we have heard that the brunt of enforcement up to now was the parents. 

And any parent with a teenager at home will know the pain of trying to forbid their teenager to get on a particular platform, particularly when everybody else in the social group has access to that platform.

And even in our video here, the young lady was saying that she was not allowed to have Snapchat, but she still got it because everyone got it and she felt like she was missing out. 

So it is a form of peer pressure and the fact that everyone is on it is currently making the mission of the parents almost impossible.

But with the new law, there's two things that will happen. 

One, even if the law is only partially effective, we will start seeing those proportions of teenagers that will not be on social media anymore. 

Therefore, the pressure on the parents at home is going to be less, and therefore they will have more ammunition to fight.

I mean, up to now we could have said you can't because you don't sleep at night. 

But now you can say, well, no you can't because it's illegal. 

Then talking strictly about workarounds, the goal is not to necessarily have one effectiveness of 100%, but rather to introduce what is called friction.

So all the platforms do in their design. 

And I wanted to talk a bit about the design is they make actions easy. They make the action pathway easy towards a particular goal, and that's where the interface is working. 

When, there's a gap or a difficulty in moving from one point to another, we say that we introduce a friction.

So if between the moment when I want to go online and getting online, I need to activate a VPN and reroute my traffic through some third party country, which then limits the speed of the connection and then introduce all kind of undesirable properties, you'll lose a lot of users down that path because some don't know how to do it and others will just find that the new quality of the service is just not good enough.

And they will abandon it, therefore increasing the net effect. 

And some of these platforms, they are designed to be addictive. That's not by chance, it's by design.

There is the most addictive reward schedule. It's called intermittent reward schedule, which essentially means you take an action all the time and you get reward every now and then. 

And if that sounds familiar, that is exactly what poker machines do. You pull the lever all the time and then a reward comes every now and then and you can't predict it.

And how does TikTok work? You scroll up all the time infinitely, and every now and then you see something you like. It is the same design. It is a digital poker machine. 

So if you feel you can't get your eyes out of TikTok, it's because it's addictive.

Rosie, I want to put a question to you.

We are protecting our children and we know that there's been calls for that endless scrolling to be coded differently within a lot of these platforms. I don’t know if anyone's read Johan Hari's book, which is fantastic. 

There's actually an interesting question here. 

I live somewhere where kids as young as 10 were allowed to drive. When traffic and awareness around dangers increased the age limit was increased. IEA ban. 

If we are talking about trying to protect young kids, and a lot of this discussion leading up to this was around the dangers. Is it not a good thing to protect young people from harm, from dangers?

And perhaps say, until you are this age, this is kind of a good thing for your health. 

Like, we don't get you driving before you're 18. We ideally don't get you smoking or drinking before you're a certain age can make those decisions for yourselves.

Are there not some positives to this?

I'm a parent myself and I have a responsibility to protect my child as well, and I like that you used the example of driving because driving isn't inherently bad for you, just like smoking or gambling is, and that's similar to social media.

I don't think anyone is arguing that social media is a lovey-dovey safe place that is just wonderful for their kids. 

No, it's harmful and it's problematic. And social media companies do have these sticky, harmful ways of operating that are unhealthy and harmful and we need to address them.

But in terms of having the most impact to address the root causes, and this is what young people tell us, we want partnership, not protection. 

Type teenage mentality. VPNs to mask the competition around finding a way to get around the ban. But also recognising that we might think we're protecting young people, but we're actually sending them into all these parts of the dark internet that is so much more harmful and it's unmoderated.

So I think it's short sighted and poor use of our desire to protect our children that we're better off addressing, you know, digital literacy, as I said before, like building trust, digital citizenship and building the capabilities that way and putting a hell of a lot of pressure on social media platforms, helping governments regulate even further.

Rana, you mentioned some of the bullying and some of these situations that have occurred in your communities. What would be the ideal situation for you? 

Like, this is coming into place, we need to find alternative kind of spaces for these communities. How do you see this working?

We need to look at solutions. I don't want parents leaving here thinking, this is just going to get worse and worse and worse. 

I feel like parents already feel quite stressed about how much time potentially kids are spending online. There was an interesting comment here that we are focusing quite a lot on time spent online as opposed to content that we might be consuming.

My daughter spent a lot of time on her phone, playing games. She's totally fine. She's matured into quite a lovely young person. But I get the sense that, we're not arguing here whether the ban should be in place or not, because it's coming into place. 

How are we going to create a space and digital literacy for the communities you're talking about? 

We need to look at the evidence and then implementation and design.

It's interesting because, uh, when we do our market research to see how we can communicate with our community, which is young people from 12 to 25 and recently from eight to 25, we don't get traction on Facebook.

They don't look at Facebook, and we don't have a TikTok at all ourself.

They got the information from Instagram, and from our website. We sat together with young people and said, how can we get to you and what channel do you like us to have a communication with you? 

So we were able as an organisation to create a platform on our website to communicate with our young people. We have Mail Chimps for them. We have WhatsApp groups for them, which is closed groups, and they can have conversations with us. 

And interestingly on Instagram for example, we don't communicate with young people under 18. We never did. We always communicated with their parents and said, can you send a message that we want to meet or we want to have this project for them.

They don't trust the open social media either. 

And recently I had a conversation with an 18-year-old who is doing research with us for her school. And she told me that, she's Syrian and when they arrived, she got her phone, when she turned 16.

But her sister, who is younger, got her phone and access to, social media when she was 12. 

And she said, I don't care about Facebook or any of the things that is on Facebook. I use the messenger to message my friends.

Even we have heard online that the most important aspect of the whole social media is the connection. It's not the primary idea of Facebook. The primary idea of Facebook is that you find your friends across the globe. 

We can design something which is less harmful.

Maybe, we need a national Facebook, because we don't want the Kingdom of Mark Zuckerberg control us and have this power over us that is removing our newsletters. 

So it's not that people are against, especially children and young people are against the ban, but it's a factor that how we are going to implement this policy.

Okay. And that's the sensitive force. 

I want to ask one more question. 

I might ask you, Amelia, and then I want to move on to quite a few questions that are coming in.

There are other ways to connect and someone said, use Gmail, send emails, send letters to connect.

I know that you do a lot of research around young kids, how they're feeling about their digital literacy, but should we be looking at digital literacy as a much more fundamental part of not only children's education, but parents as well? 

Yeah, definitely. Because even if there are concerns around risks young people are encountering on social media, we know that the social media ban isn't a silver bullet.

We know that it isn't a ban, it's a delay. 

So young people will be accessing social media at some point in time. 

I'd like to know how well schools teach forms of digital literacy, but in research that I've done with young people from migrant backgrounds, it's often young people encountering risks online.

Like maybe, you know, ideologies around toxic masculinity or something like that, or encountering forms of misinformation and disinformation online and working out with their peers, you know, I can't trust news on this particular platform.

I'm going to go to the source and perhaps leave this or some of the platforms they're engaging with as a place for playfulness, for connection, et cetera. 

So young people are learning digital literacies and digital safety strategies through encountering forms of harm at the lower end of the scale online.

I think that needs to be facilitated, even somehow working around the ban to have some of that contents that young people are encountering online and developing their own safety strategies and literacies to work with that reality. '

Because that is the world online. There are risks in the world that is not on social media as well.

And risk is an important part of young people's development. It's how they learn agency, it's how they learn autonomy, how they learn to think critically. 

So digital literacy is very important and multiple stakeholders are really vital here. So schools need to be involved in this.

Youth organisations need to be involved in this, parents need to be involved. 

Young people themselves. I think co-design is really important in terms of coming up with digital resources as well because some in research I've conducted, young people felt that the digital literacy education they got in schools wasn't relevant to them.

Because it didn't deal with the sort of risks that they're negotiating on social media, for example. 

Often it's dealing with static websites and is this fake or is this real news? 

And they felt that that was really a bit beneath them. It was a bit basic in terms of some of the complexities around disinformation and misinformation on social media.

We can't just like pretend that that doesn't exist and go out in the backyard and have a game of cricket and you'll be fine.

Those risks are still going to be there when they're able to have an account and when they're going to be able to navigate social media. 

I think it's important to have those guardrails in place. 

Marian Andrei, is there an ability for platforms like Instagram, to have a variant of their app, which doesn't allow, for example, infinite scrolling?

Yes. They control it. They build it from scratch. They can do whatever they want. 

They could do versions for kids. They could tweak their recommender system. 

Not to recommend toxic content. 

But the question is, what would be the incentive for that? 

So, for example, it is known for a while that TikTok recommender engine would recommend to teenagers, harmful challenges, things like the, the blackout challenge and other really dangerous activities where young people consume the content and then film themselves performing these dangerous acts, sometimes leading to death, but they've not done anything about it because any intervention onto their platform design will reduce the engagement, which then will lead to less advertisement and less funding.

Yes, they can remove the infinite scroll. 

Of course. Infinite scroll is a new thing. 

We talked here about the history of social media platforms. We had initial forums where people talked topics, but then we moved into Facebook where we started searching our friends and it was all friend centred.

And then TikTok and Instagram changed the paradigm where we are no longer connecting with anyone. We are just consuming infinite amounts of content, which is dictated not by anyone, but by a recommender engine designed to keep us there for hours. 

So could they change it to make it safe? Sure, they can. They can also reduce their own income at the same time. 

Okay. I want to, because I know there's so many parents in the room, I'd like to just shift the discussion briefly to some parent questions that have come up.

 And then I'd love to look at the poll, where we're at with the initial poll, because we're also going to do an another poll.

Rosie, there's a lot of questions around how parents sort of communicate with their kids.

What they can access and what they can't. Do you have parents talking to you around concerns around their children or positives? 

I'm glad that there's something here because we've been trying to fight this at home on our own and we actually feel like there's some recognition that some of the stuff that our kids might be looking at is harmful.

Like, are you hearing both sides of that from parents and then therefore how they can communicate to their kids about what's going on? 

Yes, absolutely. And there is so much pressure on parents, which is why this delay just seems so irresistible because it feels like it's going to fix those problems.

We need to start having these conversations now as early as possible because there is potentially a fallout or transition for when young people are being removed.

A lot of the time, younger teenagers might not be thinking in the long term about what is going to happen on December 10 when this law comes to effect.

They might start thinking about it a week earlier, for example. 

So I think starting these conversations between parents and kids now is really important. 

And I hope you have these conversations with the parent friends that aren't here. I guess some advice around talking about this stuff because. I feel the panic and fear too, despite working on these issues for the last 20 years. 

I think it could be really hard to suspend our fear and panic and also our opinions when it comes to talking about this stuff.

But my biggest tip, that works really well with parents and their young people is to just try and approach the conversation with curiosity and judgment. 

So rather than leaping to conclusions or even rather than having a conversation a little bit like the one we are having about whether we are pro ban or ban, let's just talk about the issues.

Don't be afraid to talk about the things that you've seen online that you didn't like. And especially don't be afraid to say that you didn't know what to do about it. Because I actually find that as in those experiences where we show our imperfections as parents that really open up the conversation and build that trust.

So together in that scenario, you can problem solve what you could both do in the future when you see hate happen online, or you can problem solve some tactics or strategies for when you might want to use social media and no longer be allowed to. 

You'd be so surprised about how this approach of talking about your own experiences really opens it up for young people to do the same.

And I think ultimately that is our goal here as parents, is to be a safe, soft place to land for our kids. One thing I wanted to add here, because parents, you're not alone, you know, project Rocket and so many other organisations that will be here to support you, and there are phenomenal researchers that are doing research right now to support you.

One of those organisations is young and resilient research centre from Western Sydney University. And they just released fascinating research around the impact of social media on families and their attitudes and perspectives. And actually the good news is they found way more in common between parents and young people.

Both parents and young people recognise the benefits and the risks, but they prioritise them differently. So if this helps, going into your conversations with your young people, the research showed that for the parents, the focus tends to be very much on the harmful content, the impact on mental health, and boundaries like screen time, which is probably no surprise to anyone.

And for young people, the focus for them is connection, identity, creative and learning and for them what they say is they really want guidance in those areas. 

The study also showed that too much monitoring can actually backfire with kids feeling really spied on. And of course, you know, they find ways around it.

But I think, um, you know, at the heart of it is that young people, even though it's really hard to start these conversations, are looking for guidance and partnership and support and skills. 

They don't want to live in an unsafe world. They don't want to see hate and division. They recognise that they're not the experts of this, but it's so hard to sometimes start the conversations between parents and young people.

Thank you. 

But to parents on the panel, what tips and tricks can you share about how to minimise harmful aspects and to build kids positive online skills? 

Rana, what do you think about that? How can they help build those positive online skills?

Yes, exactly. That's the thing we hear a lot of parents who are worried because they're not familiar with the space at all and there are a lot of unknowns around what's going to happen.

One of the tricky questions I got a lot is that, are we going to buy many devices for them? And when they get to buy one device when they turn in, get another device, which is a lot of costs for many families and they were worried about the cost of this process for the family as well.

One of the responsibilities that government can pick up is that investing in digital literacy for parents and investing to clarifying how it'll look specifically for parents. And one of the things that we can do, is bridge the gap between parents and children, and navigate it together through co-design.

So we bring them together and we ask questions or we ask parents to ask their questions from the younger adults and from children. 

And then we in interpret it for both generation to understand. So, we can play the mediatory role, but I think a big part of it is also for the government and the eSafety Commissioner to provide this information as much as possible and clarify many things for the parents.

Have town hall meetings, and bring parents together and answer their questions because, as much as we get information, we can solve many things.

So I wonder how much it takes time for a parent to just get to the speed of digital age and learn all of these things, but they can, at least, as Rosie said, talk about the pros and cons and what happens when you get accepting digital things.

And, everybody needs to address that together. It's not something that only parents work on or only children, or only the implementers. 

I feel like there's a kind of divide in a way happening here where we've got a generation or generations of young people who social media is what they've grown up with. 

And parents who have been trying to properly monitor that and manage that. And this is how we grew up.

And there's no judgment on either end, but how do we bridge generational differences or differences of how we should be raising our kids. There is a lot of criticism. Often just anecdotally, you see a kid in a cafe and they're on a phone or on an iPad, and it's kind of like they should just sit there and draw.

What research do you find around that? Do, do young people feel like they're understood by parents? Do parents feel exacerbated by the fact that they can't get their kids off the devices? 

In a recent research report, I was interested in looking at the differences between adult stakeholders, so teachers, educators, people from youth services, policy makers, the views that they had on digital and social media as a technology, and then the views that that young people had in terms of what meaning it had, what, what, what importance it had for them in their everyday lives like it.

And again, you really saw these differences coming through where adult stakeholders tended to be a bit of a fear around technology, full stop, you know, social media being something that they thought was harmful. But the next debate is obviously going to be around AI and AI companions.

You know, it will be the same debate. And I think that the reason for that is that young people think, I grew up, I had these fantastic experiences and my kids are missing out. 

I don't think there's always a lot of attention that might be given to the forms of creativity and play and the discoveries, the excitement of young people engaging in these different worlds that are being created, that they're co-creating, in some ways through digital media, and through social media.

It's almost a sense like they're not doing what I used to do to get enjoyment and I don't really understand it. 

But I would encourage us all to get past that generational divide. I would encourage, certainly parents to speak to young people, not only about risks that they might be exposed to through social media or through digital media, or through games or in interaction with Gen AI, but to ask them why, why are you talking to an AI chat bot for this many hours a day? 

Or why is it that you are connected to social media? What it is, is it that you're doing, what are you getting out of it? 

Because I'm pretty sure that all parents in the room had similar conversations with their parents, where their parents may have been disapproving of a certain kind of music that they were listening to.

Maybe it was television, as screen time that their parents didn't necessarily agree with. 

We've heard a lot of these kind of debates around every new technology that comes in.

You know, it's bad because young people are glued to it and they're not doing what I used to do. But I really do genuinely believe, and I think that that many of us here believe that young people are forging important connections online and their creativity is being encouraged.

They're engaging in forms of play that might not necessarily be the same as what their parents experienced, but still very important to them, very important to their peers, important to their social development. 

So I think in some ways it's about a bit of give and take, maybe these kind of really hard positions that are taken, there needs to be a softening of that.

I think Rosie mentioned a soft kind of understanding of what, why is it that you are engaged in social media for this many hours a day? What are you doing? Why is it important to you? 

Rosie. Questions that come up often and ones actually come up here tonight is, a parent worrying about their son, finding a sort of sense of masculinity through extremism and sort of hatred spouting of views online that don't represent the majority. 

Is there a positive to there being limits to what that young person can see online and their views being formed in a more regulated kind of majority space, not through social media platforms?

Yeah, I think one of the most harmful outcomes that rightly we are spending time talking about at the moment is the manosphere. The idea that online spaces can be luring young men, and teenagers in through benign messages around going to the gym and getting fit and being your best self, but ultimately leading to much more violent ideologies like misogyny, for example.

And then of course, with those addictive features that we've been speaking about tonight is this idea that young men in particular can get trapped in this space. 

And we also know that there are additional challenges with young men when it comes to mental health and accessing support that are unique to young men that are quite different to girls and the way that they relate to one another in their social setting.

So without a doubt, this is a massive concern. And there are some amazing organisations like the Manca and Vember who are addressing this work. If you're actually a parent in the room and you are concerned, I really recommend you checking out those organisations. 

But I guess with what we've said tonight, and maybe one additional piece of research I want to add, is that, we actually recently did a study with 500 young people aged 13 to 15 about the impact of social media for them.

And we found that 44% of teens reported both positive and negative experiences online. 

41% report only positive experiences and just 3% report only negative experiences. And I'm absolutely not dismissing that small group and the problems they face, and especially when we're talking about really extreme issues like the Manosphere.

Thanks Rosie. 

We're just going to pull up the poll and see where we are at. 

There were nearly a hundred votes for that initial poll, and I'd just like to discuss those findings. So, has our opinion shifted? Can we just look at the original one as well? 

Basically, majority was for that age restriction. 

So I think it's really important to talk about that because on the panel here, we are sort of looking at, this is not going to be great.

But when you say, look at the poll, it's kind of like, bring it on. 

So how do we address that? You know, there's a sense of let's limit the access at least until a bit older in life. 

If you go back to that car driving analogy, it takes a while to get a license and you drive when you're older.

There was an interesting comment here about saying when young people will go to access social media, especially young girls, should they do some kind of test to know that they understand how to use it properly and what the harms might be. 

We do a driving test when we get in a car, should there be something like we do a, a test before we access social media?

I'm just trying to reflect the poll there. And people's views haven't changed that much. 

So what does that tell you? That there's still support for these restrictions? 

Yeah, definitely. I'd be interested to ask every single person in this room why the social media ban is so important to them and why they think it is going to address these online risks and help their children or young people in their lives? 

There's a lot of comments around data privacy, leaking of information. There seems to be a valid sense that our information's not safe.

What would you say to that? 

Well, I feel so motivated because I really want to bridge this divide. And I'm really privileged to come from a space where I get to work with young people day in, day out, and we deliver digital literacy programs in schools.

We deliver anti-bullying programs. We've externally evaluated them. We know they're effective. 

I think when we know that there's this solution here, but it isn't being rolled out at scale, it isn't being funded. Digital literacy is being left up to young people and peers to sort of fumble their way through with scars and battle wounds at the end.

For parents who understandably have been given no education, no training, no support, but expected to hold the burden. I'm not surprised that this divide exists, but I feel really motivated to close the divide. 

And most importantly, I feel so motivated to be part of a conversation that brings together young people's views and their experiences, their strengths and their struggles and the potential that they have, to a room where parents can get to see that.

Because maybe we just get to see parts of young people, and especially on social media that perhaps parents just aren't getting to see. 

We've sensed that particularly in this room, there's a real sense that this is something that maybe parents feel like might be supportive for them in this sort of social space.

Rana, if there was one thing you could say around December when this ban comes into place what would you say? 

Well. I totally understand when we always kept it 50 50 until it got to the implementation. 

But I definitely think definitely co-design is the way going through. And I don't want it to sit on the lap of the parents to have another responsibility adding to all of their responsibilities. 

I think it's a shared responsibility as long as we do it in a shared way, I think that's the best solution.

Amelia, in terms of all the research you've done around young people and how they feel when they navigate the digital world. What would, what do you think young people need to be navigating that digital world, this new digital world in a way and make them still feel connected to their peers and to their communities?

My motivation is always to do research with young people to see how they're navigating this new landscape. It's a completely new landscape for them. 

So if you look six months down the line after the ban. What questions will you be asking young people?

I would love to do that research and I would like to hear what their experiences are of digital exclusion. Because we talk a lot about the inclusion of young people, of their voices, how important it is for them to participate in the issues that matter to them and to have a say in them.

I would be asking how they're dealing with the ban 12 months on, has it been positive for them? 

Have certain risks diminished, do they feel safer? These are the things that I would ask them, but I would also be really asking them, is there a sense of something that they have lost?

Are they trying to find new ways to forge those connections again, that may be lost once their account is deactivated. How are they doing that in, in which setting? 

Are they doing it in local neighbourhood setting through school or some of those opportunities for having a say on things that matter to them being provided more in the school environment?

Is that space going to be opened up within the school environment? Because at the moment, schools also are very focused on risks. If restricting young people from engaging with things that may cause harm or that that may cause the school reputational damage even.

I mean, is there going to be a little bit of risk taking from schools to provide that space for young people that that may be lost in terms of the, the online environment? 

Rosie, do you think there could be some positives that maybe, I'm not saying you haven't considered, but if you did a poll of young people in six months time after the ban, do you imagine that some might say, oh look, I'm actually feeling less anxious?

Not all young people are against a ban either because young people aren't a homogenous group, of course. They have a rich intersectionality of different experiences and identities, and some are for the ban for those very reasons.

So, for me, it comes back to those practicalities. I'm hoping that there will be positives. 

As I said before, what I want to see is mandatory digital literacy education in school. 

My hope is that this does crack open conversations, that it does hold social media platforms more to account. I mean, I don't want to stifle the good things that they are doing, like, for example, Instagram teen accounts, which they literally used before there was even talk about a ban that did bring in into effect some of the features that the ban is hoping to bring into effect.

Anyway. I'm really hoping that we can start to work together because we need to move away from this division and debates and polls for and against, and instead actually prioritise young people. 

Because when we treat them as empowered citizens that are capable of being agents of change in their own lives, and when we give them the tools and the skills and we create school environments that allow them to be who they are and meet them where they're at, then young people can tackle online hate.

But they can navigate the harms and they can experience the benefits and become leaders and have positive relationships and positive mental health and loads of resilience because they've navigated  the risk that they've been exposed to. So I think in six months time we'll be reassessing this again because I just don't think it's going to work.

But I'm hoping that what comes next is something that is a bit more applicable, practical, and actually values young people as citizens. Finally, I think I just want to make sure I've asked everyone, everything. 

Mario, Andre, if you look six months down the line, you talked a lot earlier in the panel about those known harms, the addictive nature of social media and such.

If you look six months down the line, do you imagine, data research that comes in where perhaps there is a different level of freedom that younger people might be feeling around that space? Because they're not as glued? Do you feel like there's going to be some disconnection? Where do you think that data will point?

We already have indications, via studies, where they've looked into people reducing their connectivity to digital environment in general, but to social media also. And always unanimously these studies show that once we reduce the connection, the connectivity, once we review the inflow of information, then I actually have it here.

90% of the participants showed improvement in at least one psychological outcome. 

So they showed improvement in at least one psychological outcome. So they showed reduced connectivity leads to improved psychological outcomes. And I can actually attest to that myself.

I have my own proof. A couple of years ago I was on holiday with my family when I managed to drown my phone. The result was half a holiday without a phone. The home was also home. And I have to tell you, that was the best half holiday that I've had in such a long time.

The only thing that I missed was the ability to call my family when I got lost in the supermarket. And that's why now I have this, does anyone know what this is? And this is my right to disconnect. 

Thank you so much, Rana, Marie, Andre, and also to you, Amelia, for joining us and to you all for your questions and for your input. Thank you so much