If you’ve been living under a rock, or you’ve been distracted by the horrific things happening across other countries and continents, one piece of news has really affected young people down under.

That’s the ban on social media for those under the age of sixteen, which came into effect in December 2025, in a bid to protect the mental health and welfare of the younger generations.

Why? Because the online world is scary and can be dangerous – and for young people, those risks are huge.

Sure, many children could go through their youth on social media with no negative consequences, the truth is that for others that’s not the case – and social media is not more important than the prevention of lifelong trauma.

While it’s not a popular decision, movements from other countries – including France, Denmark, Norway and Malaysia – are exploring following suit, while other countries including the UK are seeing the widespread banning of phones in schools.

Why? Well, for Frazer, a young person in the UK, being unwittingly shown a harmful video on a classmate’s phone while at school has had lifelong consequences, as he explained to Sky News. Now 18, Frazer is living with PTSD as a result of the horror he saw.

Sadly, this is not a rare occurrence. Every day, our children and young people are exposed to inappropriate and harmful content while they’re online.

Whether that’s disturbing content like that Frazer saw, cyberbullying, or the promotion of an unhealthy body image, social media is a veritable treasure trove of content that not only has a negative effect on mental health, it can also be detrimental to attention span too.

And that’s never a good thing.

Article 17 of the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child says that while kids should have access to the media, they should also be protected from harmful information. In banning access to unregulated spaces like social media, the Australian government is doing just that:

“Article 17: (access to information from the media) Every child has the right to reliable information from a variety of sources, and governments should encourage the media to provide information that children can understand. Governments must help protect children from materials that could harm them.”

So how does Australia’s social media ban work? Well, millennials will remember that, in the early days, all you had to do was tick to confirm that you were over a certain age to be able to use sites like MySpace and Bebo – regardless of whether that was actually the case.

However, the Australian government required social media companies to deactivate all accounts belonging to users under the age of sixteen, with many offering those users the chance to download their content in advance, and freeze their accounts until their sixteenth birthday.

While each platform was able to implement the ban and age verification in their own way, this is understandably a complicated process – with the risk of those over sixteen being accidentally banned, but clear protocols as to how to fix that, with the government explaining to The Guardian that this was a complex process:

“We do not anticipate that all the under 16 accounts will automatically or magically disappear on December 10th overnight. Some platforms will do this more quickly and effectively than others. Some may take some time to replicate through their massive systems. We’ll be watching closely, but I also want to set expectations that we will take a graduated risk and outcomes-based approach to compliance and enforcement, focusing on platforms with the highest proportion of underage users.”

It may not be simple – or popular – but if it keeps young people safe and mentally well, it’s for the best.

Because we only get one childhood. It’s the responsibility of the adults, governments and institutions – including social media companies – to safeguard that.

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