The Australian parliament has legislated what’s commonly described as as “social media ban” for people under 16. More precisely, it will require selected social media platforms to implement (unspecified) age verification technology for people wishing to create accounts. This measure was rushed through at the end of last year, at the expense of proposed legislation to limit advertising for online gambling.

I wrote a series of posts on my Substack blog looking at various aspects of the “ban” (TL;DR I don’t like it).

There’s too much for a CT post, so I’ll link to the posts instead
Part 1 dealt with the feasibility of a ban
Part 2 dealt with the evidence for and against
Part 3 pointed out the ban will do little or nothing to fix most of the harms attributed to social media
Part 4 suggested better responses to the problems young people are facing
Part 5 offered broader responses to the harm being done by platforms like X and Facebook

Feel free to comment here or there.