Editorial: Looking backwards won’t fix online risks

Anthony Albanese is 61 years old.

By the time Space Invaders came out in 1978, he was already 15, meaning the greatest technological challenge he faced during his teen years was shooting down endless waves of pixelated alien space ships in an arcade video game.

So it’s perhaps understandable that the Prime Minister is finding it difficult to grasp the complexities of social media and the risks and opportunities it offers to Australian children.

Social media has its dangers. There are online predators, cyberbullies, body image pressures, pornography and extremists looking for impressionable young minds to distort with racism and misogyny.

Social media also has enormous benefits. It offers kids who may feel out of place with their peers in the real world an opportunity to connect with their people. It gives them an outlet for their interests and a way to express themselves and to form their identities.

We need to find a way to minimise its risks while ensuring kids still have access to the many positive aspects of social media.

That’s all a little too complicated for Mr Albanese and his Labor Government.

Instead of making these online spaces safer for everyone, they want to shut it all down by imposing a blanket social media ban for all kids under the age of 16.

Get the kids off TikTok, tell them to fire up Space Invaders and pretend it’s the 1970s again.

“I want young Australians to grow up playing outside with their friends, on the footy field, in the swimming pool, trying every sport that grabs their interest, discovering music and art, being confident and happy in the classroom and at home. Gaining and growing from real experiences, with real people,” Mr Albanese wrote about the ban in a recent opinion piece published in The Herald Sun.

That sounds idyllic. But Mr Albanese is evoking a nostalgia for a world that no longer exists.

The natural habitat of the generation alpha child is online. There are pre-teens making serious money from running YouTube channels, kids writing sophisticated code and creating digital start-ups in their spare time. The internet is their primary form of communication with one another.

Suddenly yanking social media away from them and then expecting them to have the digital literacy to navigate it upon turning 16 is a fool’s errand which could potentially open kids up to even greater risks. And that’s the teens who don’t bother figuring out a workaround, which many will inevitably do.

At best, thinking that we can solve the problems presented by social media by blasting kids back into the past is extraordinarily naive.

At worst, it’s a cynical political ploy designed to generate headlines and win the votes of a few frazzled parents while doing nothing to address social media’s significant risks.

Imposing an old man’s solution to this very modern problem is doomed to fail.