I’m not much of an expert on social media. I’ve got a Facebook account, but I only use it to participate in occasional ad hoc choir events. Nonetheless, I’m well aware of how easy it has become to reinforce users’ predilections, fears and obsessions by algorithmic manipulation.

In December, 2025, Australia’s Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 came into force, making it illegal for under-16s to ‘make or keep’ accounts on a wide range of social media platforms. The stated objective is to protect young people from the psychological harm that some have suffered through unsupervised use of these media.

My prompt reaction, when I learned of this legislation was ‘Oh God, here we go again, another attempt by lawmakers to put the toothpaste back in the tube by means that look superficially sensible, but are in fact unlikely to work, and may even exacerbate the problem they are supposed to be solving.’

Let me explain.

A stranger though I may be to social media, I’m somewhat more of an expert on being a teenager, since I was one, for seven years, even if those years were long ago. And as I recall, chief among the preoccupations of, let’s say, a 15 year-old is being able to do things he (or, for that matter, she) is forbidden to do until he’s 16. Once I became 16, I hankered just as ardently to do those things I wasn’t allowed to do until the age of 17. And so on.

Smoking, drinking, driving, going to adult-rated movies, a whole range of potentially harmful activities were appealing, not just for the pleasure to be had from indulging in them, but for the sheer joy of transgressing. Another thing about being 15 that I remember clearly is that if another 15 year-old had found a way to indulge in things that were forbidden until you were 16, there was the strongest possible incentive, on pain of being seen as lame, or what is known in Yiddish as a nebbish, for you to do likewise. I certainly remember forming habits at that age – smoking prominent among them – that I would probably never have acquired had they not held the allure of adult sophistication, and promised the esteem of my peer group.

I doubt whether 15 year-old psychology has altered so greatly that these motives have disappeared. If that is so, we ought to be reducing, not increasing, the things we forbid them to do. We should certainly not forbid them to do things, however great their potential to do harm, unless we are quite sure we can prohibit them effectively. It seemed to me that the Online Safety Act was a classic example of failure to observe this rule. Not only do its sponsors seem to fail to understand the technology they are up against, but, less forgivably, they seem to misunderstand the psychology of the people they are supposedly trying to protect.

Around the time the law came into force, amid much self-congratulation from the Albanese government, I found myself seated at a choir rehearsal next to a retired school principal. I took the opportunity to run my concerns past him. Far from erecting an effective barrier to Australian children using social media, were they not erecting an enticing target? Far from protecting young people from possible harm, were they not propelling them into darker places on the internet, where real harm is more likely? My colleague wholeheartedly agreed, adding that in his opinion protecting children from online harm is not a task that the government can or should undertake, but that ‘it’s a job for the parents’.

Half a year on, it’s worth asking how well that law is working out. A University of Newcastle observational study of 408 youths found that despite the law taking effect, about 80% of under-16s reported still using social media. In addition, there is extensive anecdotal evidence that under-age users are circumventing the law by turning to smaller platforms that lie beyond the regulatory reach of Australian authorities. For instance, Rednote, a China-domiciled messaging platform, experienced a surge in downloads concurrent with the introduction of the law. Gaming platforms, which have long offered a chat capability ancillary to their primary function, are now being used by young kids denied access to branded social media.

Why do governments keep doing this? It’s difficult to resist the conclusion that, faced with a problem that has attracted a lot of attention, the temptation to legislate simply for the sake of being seen to do something, regardless of any unintended consequences their law-making may have.

The present government, in particular, has form in this. After the Bondi Beach shooting, it was quick to – well, to do a lot of hand-wringing, anxious, no doubt, to divert attention from its own contribution to the normalisation of Judeophobia in Australia. Its most ostentatious bit of hand-wringing was to amend the firearms law, to make it harder for Australians legally to possess guns. This might have the superficial appearance of reducing the chance of a pair of radical Islamists turning up at Bondi Beach and murdering people. But the word ‘superficial’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Does anybody seriously think that the Sajid Akram, had the gun laws been tighter, would have said to himself ‘Rats! I was going to take my son down to Bondi Beach and murder as many Jews as we could, but I really need five guns to do that, and the most I’m legally allowed to have is four. Oh well, I wouldn’t want to break the law, so I guess I’ll just have to think of something else to while away my Sunday afternoon’?

And even if the other provisions of the legislation had succeeded in preventing him legally getting his hands on any guns at all, isn’t it likely that a person who had determined to commit murder would be utterly unconcerned by the comparatively minor lawbreaking necessary to acquire an illicit firearm? Indeed, if he really had been thwarted in his afforts to get a gun, why would he not have simply followed the example of his coreligionist Khalid Masood, and hired a vehicle to drive into the objects of his hatred?

The effect of all this performative law-making is not to diminish harm to society, but to encumber it with a forest of regulation that just makes law-abiding life more difficult.