Short read: Australia Banned Social Media For Under 16s. Did it Work or Fail?

“When Australia banned under 16-year-olds from using social media in December 2025, it became a test case for a policy now being pursued by governments around the world.” This piece examines the impact of the social media on Australian youngsters with inputs from “Susan Sawyer, a professor of adolescent mental health at the University of Melbourne, who is running a number of ongoing studies examining the way young people and their parents are reacting to Australia’s ban.”

Sawyer says that when the ban was first introduced, she was initially cynical about the government’s ability to get young people off social media.

Sawyer now says that ““We’re seeing that conversations are shifting from whether social media negatively affects young people or to what extent or in what ways, to rather thinking about what age might be a more appropriate age for young people to first gain access to social media,” says Sawyer.

And that is borne out by some of Sawyer’s research. In a recent poll of more than 2,000 parents of 0- to 17-year-olds, just under 40% said the law had changed their view on when children should first have their social media accounts and “overwhelmingly, that’s now a higher age”, she says.”

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