Too young to scroll? Policy, practice and the bigger picture key takeaways

Global Game Changers 2025 – Transcript
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Well, I think that's our cue to start.

The music's down. Hi, welcome everyone.

My name is Kumi.

It's so lovely to see you in the room.

I know how tough it is to come to events after work, you've had a long day.

You're juggling things.

So, we really appreciate you being here tonight and engaging in the conversation.

One of the things we're really keen to do tonight is to have you involved in the conversation as much as possible.

I think there's a lot of questions, a lot of curiosity around what's happening.

So, there'll be so many opportunities for you to put questions into us, to the panel, and also be involved in a couple of polls, which would really appreciate you participating in if you've got your phones available.

I'll explain how all that happens.

So, you're here because, well, last year the Australian government introduced new laws that set the minimum age for using social media at 16.

The idea is basically to protect young people from the risks and the harms that can come from being online too early.

So platforms like Tik Tok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook will soon be required to have proper age checks in place and to keep any of that information safe.

If those platforms don't do that, they will face serious penalties and these changes will come into effect by the end of the year.

They have been shaped the legislation from input from young people, parents and experts right across the country.

Before we get into that, I'd like to acknowledge of course that we are on Gaduland and I'd like to acknowledge the elders past, present and emerging.

So thank you so much for being here.

Now I just wanted to mention that we will have a number of those polls going on tonight.

So does anyone use Slido before the polling? Great.

So, we'd want you to pull up, we're going to pull up some information on the screen, but we want you to be involved in that.

We'll pull the Slido details up there and there's a login and the event.

So, hopefully that will come up soon.

But that's where you can participate and participate with us and participate in that poll.

So, one quick thing.

How many parents are in the room tonight? Great.

Mostly parents.

That's exactly what we hoped for and wanted to see.

So, the first poll that we will want you to participate in is do you think that the social media age should be raised to 16? As in until you're 16, you can't use social media. , has that poll come up? Yeah, that's what you do.

So, if you can scan your QR code there, that'll take you to Slido and there's the number.

You just put yes or no.

I can monitor those polls throughout the evening.

We will be asking a poll at the end of the conversation as well.

So there's your first question.

It basically is should the age of social media usage be raised to 16? We'd be really interested to know what you think about that.

We will be communicating those results throughout the evening.

We can even pop it up on screen.

There's some coming in already.

That's fantastic.

The other thing is that we really want your questions.

So there will be a number of questions put to the panel.

There'll be a lovely discussion taking place.

If you've got any questions that arise during the conversation, please pop them through to us.

I think you can use the same screen.

So you can pop any questions in there.

If questions arise while we're chatting, please feed them through to us live.

I can moderate those, and I can feed them to the panel, and we can have a really nice circular conversation.

So, thank you so much for being here and for participating.

That's time now to introduce our wonderful panel.

I'm joined by associate professor Amelia Johns from UTS.

Thank you, Amelia.

Amelia is the acting head of discipline in social, digital, and social media in the faculty of design and society.

Amelia looks at how young people tackle racism, misinformation, and digital safety across social platforms.

Also joined by associate professor Marian Andre Brazil from the UTS.

He's the head of behavioral data science lab.

Basically someone who does stuff that pretty much none of us understand, but he will explain it all to us in layman's terms. , Professor Maria Andre was the recipient of academic of the year at the 2023 Defense Industry Awards and he looks at how we are pay attention online like how we're distracted or how we're not distracted and how influence and opinion spread across the digital world which is of course such a huge issue.

Now from Project Rocket, we're joined by Rosie Thomas who's there on the big screen for us there tonight.

Hi Rosie.

It feels like you're in the room with us.

Rosie is the co-founder of Project Rocket, and that's a youth-driven social enterprise which is focused on combating cyber bullying, hate, and prejudice.

She's also an Order of Australia Medal recipient.

And we're also joined by Rana Ibrahimi.

She's the national manager at Mayan, which is the Multicultural Youth Advocacy Network.

Welcome.

She's a fierce advocate for migrant and refugee youth and an expert in social inclusion and humanitarian ethics.

All of you in the room, thank you.

We also have a number of people joining us online.

So, thank you so much for being with us both in Australia and overseas.

And like I said before, what we're really hoping tonight is to have a really practical and open discussion about what this all means.

This is happening and what the landscape looks like and what it means moving forwards for us and particularly for parents and obviously for young children.

Basically the legislation will be around who can open accounts on social media platforms.

So we're talking about Tik Tok, Instagram, Snapchat.

YouTube is different because you don't need an account to watch videos, but there will be restrictions around that age restrictions and who can actually access material.

So what I'll do is go straight to the panel.

If we do have that video at any point, we can go back to that.

Amelia, I might talk to you first.

This is a world first decision.

In your mind, what do you think led to this decision? well look what led to this decision was the concerns of parents and certainly I think that the discourse and even the current discourse is led by concerned parents and the regulator both of whom are concerned with protection of their children with online safety but not necessarily taking a balanced view whereby there might be a consideration of how young people are using social media have used social media as an important source of social connection, social support, identity formation, belonging, youth advocacy, young people having a voice on the issues that impact on them.

So I think that that side of the equation has not led to this to the implementation of this ban.

That implementation of the ban has led around has been led as I said by discourses around risks to children on social media children and young people and I think in many cases some of the risks that are being discussed are at the extreme end of the scale. , even the e safety commissioner was speaking recently in relation to the online industry codes about risks around pornography, extreme and violent content, suicide ideiation, some of these things that I'm in agreement no children and young people should have access to that content, but they are not that is not the whole picture of why of what people are connecting with on social media and what young people are connecting with on social media. , so yeah, I do have some concerns around the discourses that led to the implementation or that are going to lead to the implementation of this ban in December. , because I don't think it has necessarily been a balanced debate and and importantly, young people's voices have not necessarily been centered in some of those discussions either.

The government does say they did talk to a lot of young people and there was actually quite a lot of support for I think 74% or something support for some changes some legislation.

I just want to look at some of those stats and Rosie I might come to you.

You talked to a lot of young people.

Some of the stats are almost three and four children a 10 to 17 have seen or heard content associated with harm.

Over 50% have experienced cyber bullying.

One in four non-consentual tracking, monitoring or harassment.

I do take what you're saying that's they're the stats that have been focused on Amelia.

But Rosie, just in terms of, what you hear, if you had to do straw polls on stats, do you feel like there is a lot of concern around for young people around their safety in this in this space or do you do you feel like, there's more positives than negatives in the space for them? Yeah, thanks so much for thanks so much for having me everyone.

I'm coming to you from Wandery country, so pay my respects down here in N.

Yeah, look, without a doubt, we work with 2,000 students each week all over the country, and we're also employed by our national youth collective at Project Rocket.

So there are 42, 12 to 20 year old roles that essentially do co-ressearch with us.

They steer the direction of our organization and wherever possible, I'll be trying to elevate their views into tonight's conversation.

As Amelia astutely said, we know the harms exist.

All of us are actually dedicating really our professional lives to tackling these harms. , I'll give you another stat.

One in five young people report being excluded, threatened, or abused online.

And that's not good enough and it's completely unacceptable.

But , unfortunately, I think what we've done is we've wrapped up or I should say simplified this debate as a good versus evil and instead we've erased all of the intersectionality that exists.

And unfortunately, the way that it is all of the harms and the risks are wrapped up with so many benefits and opportunities.

And to jump off the back of what Amelia said there, we've spoken about the mental health benefits of social media and we're not here just to understand the nuance of the way that young people use social media and the internet.

We're not so much just talking about them accessing Headspace, a phenomenal youth mental health organization on social media.

Although I will let that 73% of young people reported that they do access social mental health support on social media.

But what we're really talking about here is self-exression and identity and especially for young people who are already facing marginalization.

It really is a lifeline to that community connection and that pride in ways in which they don't have that access offline.

I just want to elevate one voice at the moment.

It's Laissa.

She's a 19-year-old young Muslim all across from Western Sydney and she sits on our national youth collective, and she talks about the power of social media as a lifeline.

The positive cultural representation, identity fight and community connection that she was able to tap into only via social media.

We know this is true a lot of the First Nations young people we work with, LGBTIQA youth who literally don't have physical spaces where they can show up and access support.

So, we've got a lot of unanswered questions here about how we can create these safe places for young people offline, but it's clear that yes, the harms and the risks are massive online, and we need to be addressing them, but not at the cost of young people's agency, their belonging and their connection.

Thanks, Rosie.

We've got already a lot of questions coming in, so thank you so much.

I'll be getting to those.

Yeah, I'll be getting those questions because there are already questions about what are alternative third spaces that we can provide for young people which I really want to get to at some point in this discussion.

Ran, I'll just stick to where we are now.

You are deeply invested in the migrant and refugee experience of these spaces.

What are your insights into how they're used by young people? So very similar to Rosie, we have connection to almost young people in all across the country or all the corners and our access through them ironically is through social media.

Especially those young people who near newly arrived in the country and they are in regional areas far away from accessing to physical spaces.

One thing that we are hearing is a concern that how they're going to pass that settlement process and to settle in safely and how they can navigate the process in the country.

For newly arrived consider that around 20,000 people are arriving through humanitarian entrance only and from there historically 12% of them are children in this age group and interestingly we already have lots of problems with helping them to navigate the system and getting in because their parents do not know English they become the parents they support their parents to settle in and they need this connectivity and disconnecting them.

We have heard through consultation that it's disconnection between them and the rest of the world.

But consider that their connection is through, for example messenger in Facebook or Instagram because they don't have a phone number through the journey that they have to get to the country.

So it's really tricky if we consider that how they are going to help their parents, how they are going to navigate the system and also we understand that it's a protection issue for them because we hear a lot of racism and cyber bullying online.

Even us as an organization are getting trolled all the time on Facebook.

So we don't use Facebook, and we literally step down from X because of the situation over there.

So we understand that we cannot consider that this is the best platform but also we need to understand that the diversity in the diversity exists is quite nuanced and the there are lots of consideration in putting a ban on social media that needs to be diverse and understand that the country is the most multicultural country in the world the most diverse country in the world and it's literally the matter of equity that when it gets to implementation, how we want to make sure that it's equitable for everyone.

Marian, Andre, there's a lot of questions coming through about the tech side of things. , I'll just run through a few of them, but I just I wanted to get a sense from you about , how much of this digital world is able to be tracked and , you do so much work like , how much control do we think we have over what we see and what we , we hear so much about algorithms.

We hear so much about endless scrolling and the dangers to our health.

But I think this is happening, that this ban is happening.

It's been also talked about limiting access until you're 16.

Not so much a ban but delaying access.

So there's a few questions coming in that I think would be really helpful as in someone said is anyone comfortable loading up identity to the internet? So there's this age verification process for example.

And there's also this idea that will that allow these platforms to amass huge amounts of data.

So I there seems to be concerns about how this will happen and technically how it's going to work for these platforms to be held accountable.

Well those are multiple questions there.

Thank you so much.

Let me let me start getting to some of those elements.

So first of all we're let me start with the last one actually.

Are we comfortable letting the platforms amass that much amount of information about us? they already do.

They don't need our ids to know who we are actually.

Even from 2014 we started knowing that our online activity our public online activity is very revealing about us.

It was the beginning of where we realized that inferential privacy is a real issue.

We can predict about the users using only the only a couple of public likes that we put on online content.

We can figure out things like gender, sexual orientation, preference, political preference, psychological profiling in the big five in the big five dimensions, but even things like whether your parents have divorced before your 21st birthday.

So the fact that a lot of our personal information is out there in the hands of the social media companies, we knew that since 2014 and who else knew that also Cambridge Analytica that's how it was built on this type of inferential privacy.

Now we can probably put a pin into the amount of information that the companies have on us.

It's a lot more than we think. , I wanted to come back to some of what we discussed and I really liked Ros's comment about how we have how the benefits and the downsides of those social media are actually blended together and I wanted to come down to some of the some of the some of the things that we know that are harmful and there's increasing amount of data and studies that start coming up that show the downsides the particularly in terms of psychological outcomes.

So we do know that for example the US surgeon general identified that children that use social media more than 3 hours daily they have double the risk of poor mental health outcomes.

So just 2 hours a day.

And then we do know that removing limiting for example limiting social media usage to just 35 minutes already increases almost doubles the almost doubles those outcomes.

But what I found particularly problematic is that there's a new very new study that comes out of the University of North Carolina which shows that when children that ch that check social media at least 15 times a day they actually show and I'm quoting increased sensitivity and reward sensors to and that leads to hypersensitivity to peer feedback.

So where I'm getting with this, the proof is starting to be not only correlational, meaning that we know social media usage and at the same time we see these poor life poor mental outcomes, we start moving into the correl into the causal links and the fact that we see changes in the in the brains of teenagers seems to be one of the indicate seems to be one of the arguments behind maybe putting a delay until the brain reaches a particular maturity level.

And in this case it was it was deemed to be 16 years old.

You had other questions there.

Sorry I went a bit on a tangent.

No no that's fine.

So it's I think there's a lot of questions.

It's really interesting coming in this as if one of us is from the government and the E safety commissioner's office which we're not.

So there's it's there's so many questions I think around how it will actually work how will the platforms actually inter implement this like do you have any sense of I know the government said it's like they're building a plane and flying it at the same time like this is all happening very quickly so in order to get the technology in place in order for it to actually hold social media companies accountable is that actually possible to sort see whether you can't make an account but someone might be able to make an account fake their age for example.

There's a lot of questions coming in which we will get to around workarounds like it's it's it's obvious that there will be people trying to work around it.

That's what happens all the time in any situation. , but is it possible to restrict access in the way that it's been proposed? And can companies actually be fined up to I think it's $50 million if those rules are broken like what's the technology around that space? So that's probably the big issue here, right? What it's the question on everybody's lips?

How are we going to be able to enforce the rules without giving the companies the companies access to our ID documents and there's so there's been a trial and yes they are building the plane as they're flying it there's been a trial but there's a couple of a couple of families of approaches to do this the first thing to know is that in the law it is explicitly forbidden for the companies to request government issued ID so Facebook won't be able to request my driving license to check my age.

Period.

That is not an option.

So, what are the options then? Well, there's a couple of families of options.

The one that is probably currently a most favored as far as I as far as I understand, but the legislation does keep change and the implementation changes.

Also, one of the families based on tokenbased identification.

So essentially the company the social media platform does not request for identification but rather engages a third party let's say another company or another entity which specializes in identific identity and age verification and this is not new anyone that ever had to take a bank loan that the bank externalizes the identific the identity verification to a third party service that does it and then only sends the bank the information that they require.

So in this case a third party would be verifying the identity in the name of the platform and then would only transmit to the platform essentially a thumb up yes above 16 or below 16 which then only transfers the problem from the platform to the company but then the companies are domestically based or could be domestically based and that's a different story.

Then you have the families of approaches which are inferential.

So essentially predicting the age of the individuals based on a number of things.

It can be the way they speak, the way they look, the way they move, even the way they move their mouse.

All of these put together, they can predict the age.

But as with anything inferential when you make predictions, you can be wrong.

So any prediction will come with a confidence interval.

So almost like in voting percentages, like voting intentions, it's they say 3% plus minus 1%.

So it might be 15 years plus minus one year which then comes with all questions and then there's other more exotic approaches, even some of them based on blockchain solutions and other but we're now we're talking about exotic.

Yeah.

What I might do is conscious this is talking about kids and a new world for them.

So I think be great to hear from a young person.

And we've got a video we'd like to play you.

The social media apps that I use are Snapchat and Tik Tok and I normally watch content on both of them and talk to my friends.

All my friends that I have added on Snapchat are people from my school and one friend that lives in the UK.

As well as watching content, I also make some like that's only for like a few people to see like people from my school.

The videos I make are just like relatable things to me, my friends, like inside jokes and stuff.

My mom had a rule where I wouldn't get Snapchat and I did break that rule, but I felt very excluded from my friends how they all haded the same app and I only was stuck with messages still.

So, there was a group on Snapchat that I was added to and there was a person who added some very inappropriate content onto that group chat and luckily I left before I could see too much.

Through my friends, I found out that someone told their parents about it and I was relieved because I feel like they should have got in trouble about what they did and learn that they can't just send stuff to people like that.

Yes.

I think kids under 16 should be able to be on social media platforms as I don't think it's up to the government to make that choice.

It should be about the parents choice cuz I feel like this isn't really going to stop cyber bullying at all.

Like this is not the approach.

I think they should make it so that parents like have more realization about things happening online.

Do I think this ban is good? no, I don't think it is.

It is coming pretty soon at the like end of the year. , I think it's important for like people my age to be on social media because I think some people feel very connected to like talking to people cuz they might not have like that real help of the outside world and might feel safer like posting stuff online or communicating online.

Am I worried of losing access? I do have like a lot of followers on some of my accounts and like a bunch of streaks on Snapchat and Tik Tok as well as a very high snap score and I don't want to lose that because that took a very long time to accomplish.

Rosie, when you hear that video, when you like is this is this something typical that you hear? Yes, absolutely.

And so great to have some youth representation.

The biggest thing we've heard from this debate if you like is that don't talk about us without us from young people.

I can say as a youth organization in the mental health sector for 20 years, young people and our sector weren't adequately consulted.

And I think like these voices just show the nuance and the dynamic of these issues.

Ultimately though, and I think this is what this little legend was telling us, that ultimately bands don't build skills.

Bands don't build empathy or resilience.

Bands don't address the root causes that are human issues around like division and hate.

Fans don't build trusted relationships between adults and young people.

And I think the biggest injustice of all of this is that parents have been left over the last 15 years to carry this huge burden of online safety with zero support and now have been lured into this false sense of security that the problem is fixed but they the problem yeah isn't fixed.

We need to be addressing these real issues.

And so I'm glad to hear that the ban is now being framed as a delay if we simply hold off access until a child turns 16 years old.

We risk handing them a whole world overnight without the skills or the empathy or the resilience to navigate it.

Plus, they've lost all the benefits of, like the incredible young people we know that are musicians online because of their social media that have folders that are creating their own social change movements like Project Rocket that are tackling global issues like climate change by galvanizing literally millions of other young people using social media to call governments to account.

So the real opportunity I think for the delay is to do exactly what this little legend has said and that is really focus on education and design approaches that actually meet young people where they're at.

Amelia, given that this is happening, so it's it's tempting to have a debate here tonight about what should happen, what shouldn't have happened, what discussions should have taken place, but let's assume that this is going ahead.

Yeah.

How can that education of young people, how can young people feel one and parents that they know how to navigate this new world and also do you feel like there will be other spaces that young people will find? Let's say it is about activism or is about connection outside of the social media spaces that are now going to be restricted.

Well, I hope so, Kumi. , I guess the thing to think about here, you know, when you're hearing about young people and how important social media is to them in terms of their social connections and communities that they're building online, is that young people are not without agency.

They're not without capabilities and skills in being able to find the spaces where they can make those very vital connections.

So I guess my hope is that alternatives will be found but I don't think the resources are really there at the moment because there has been such a focus on now implementing this ban or a delay.

Let's look at the language of the delay. , you're going to have young people who are perhaps coming into year 12 or their first year of university and are, you know, accessing social media for the first time.

Whereas they may have been able to have conversations with their parents about things that were concerning online or with their friends and peers.

Maybe they had digital literacy education at school.

I think that there perhaps are less, or will be, fewer guard rails as they're coming into a time when perhaps they're becoming more autonomous and not relying on their parents or school, school systems quite as much for these forms of education.

So yeah, I think where are the resources going to be to create those third spaces? Look, I hope that young people will find a way to find those connections, but a ban is a really blunt tool.

And it means that even young people now who have social media accounts, if they are not of the correct age, they are going to have their accounts deactivated.

I'm pretty concerned about young people's anxiety, levels of anxiety when their accounts are deactivated.

I'm concerned about parents having these conversations with say a 17 they've got a 17-year-old child who's going to have their access to social media continue and then maybe there's going to be a 15 and 1/2year-old child who they're going to have to have a very different conversation with them.

It's like yeah all of your memories your connections with your friends community building some of these really vital sources of connections are going to be lost.

So I think that there is a lot of support that's going to be needed to be provided to parents to have some of those conversations and young people while I don't think they've been centered enough in the debate so far but certainly we need to hear them now and there needs to be a lot of research that centers their voices and experiences what their needs are and that gives them the resources to be able to create those third spaces perhaps with other stakeholders like Rana like Rosie like people who are youth researchers and who are really concerned and interested to hear what young people need.

Rana, looking ahead, have you and your colleagues been considering how to manage that shift and that change and what support you feel like might need to be implemented? Particularly I think yeah for those people for those young people who have say built a community and a life online up until this point maybe it's going to be different for kids say under eight or nine but the ones at that older end of the spectrum what discussions I guess have you been having around that yeah absolutely so u very similar to Rosie we have that moto of nothing for us without us and the conversation right now is well it is on in the question that are Beijing the child rights and beside that because we're not considering the child's agency and with that child agency what we mean and how much of the agency we want to give to the children for an organization like us we say that definitely we need children around the table to create the solution because they are innovative they are creative the Gen Z and Gen Alpha are the generation who were born in digital world And as parents the genics and millennials are not that much familiar are with the digital world that their children are they already coding and I stopped by Instagram I didn't even get to Tik Tok so I guess it's really important to bring them around the table to make sure that they can help us and children and young people that we are working at least I know that they are value based they are right based they are quite passionate about working for what is right for the society and they are eager to create something that can protect them.

So they can be a part of solution and they just need to adults they need adults to understand that and bring them to the conversation and on the other side I think we have 30% intergenerational gap we have to address it in a way and I think one of those ways of addressing is to teach the parents and to educate adults on the digital literacy as So it can be and it can be from children.

Children can train them.

So it it needs something that will bring all of them together.

It's not just the pure responsibility of a parent and it's not pure responsibility of a child or a government.

It needs to be a shared responsibility and a shared approach to address all of these in implementation.

Marriott Andre, what research do you have around or have you read around workarounds? Like when there's bans, do people tend to use VPNs? Like it's quite interesting anecdotally, and I know don't know about parents in the room if you've had conversations with kids.

I know I've had conversations with young people saying, "Are you guys talking about how to work around stuff?" And they go, "Yeah, of course we are." do you have research around that space around what workarounds people might tend to be thinking of like is that a concern for you I guess or where do you think people will be turning to try and potentially keep access to communities that they feel like they will lose access to there will always be there will always be workarounds probably I don't want to indicate any here but I guess it would not become as a as a shock that this legislation only applies in Australia.

So any workaround that makes your access appear from outside of Australia will circumvent at least partially the problem.

So yes, workarounds ex exist and they will always exist, but that is not where that will not blunt in my opinion the effect the effectiveness of the measure because we have seen we have heard that the brunt of the brunt of enforcement up to now was the parents and any parent with a teenager at home will know the pain of trying to forbid their teenager manager to get on a particular platform, particularly if everybody else in the social group has access to that platform.

And even in our in our video here, we were the young lady was saying that she was not allowed to have Snapchat, but she still got it because everyone got it, and she felt like she was missing out.

So it is it is a form of peer pressure and the fact that everyone is on it that will that is currently making the mission of the parents suicidal almost impossible.

But with the new with the new law there's two things that will happen.

One, even if the law is only partially effective we will start seeing those proportions of teenagers that will not be on social media anymore.

Therefore the pressure on the parents at home is going to be less and therefore they will have more ammunition to fight.

Up to now you we could have said no you can't because it you don't sleep at night, but now you can say well no you can't because it's illegal.

But then talking strictly about workarounds the goal is not to necessarily have one effectiveness of 100% but rather to introduce what is called friction.

So all the platforms do in their in their design and I wanted to talk a bit about the design is they make they make actions easy they make the action pathway easy towards a particular goal and that is that's where the simplic that's where the interface is working when there's a gap or is a difficulty in moving from one point to another we say that we introduce a friction.

So if between the moment when I want to go online and and getting online I need to activate a VPN and re-reroute my traffic through some third party country which then limits the speed of the connection and then introduce all undesirable properties.

You will lose a lot of users down that path because some don't know how to do it and others will just find that the new quality of the service is just not good enough and therefore they will they will abandon it therefore improving increasing yet the effectiveness and talking now this is the last point and because you mentioned earlier about design of the platforms some of these platforms they are designed to be addictive that's not by that's not by chance it's by design it there is the most the most addictive reward schedule.

It's called intermittent reward schedule which essentially mean you take an action all the time and you get reward every now and then.

And if that sounds familiar that is exactly what pokey machines do.

You pull the lever all the time and then the reward comes every now and then and you can't predict it then.

And how does Tik Tok work? You scroll up all the time infinitely and every now and then you see something you like.

It is the same design.

It is a digital poke machine.

So it is if you feel you can't get your eyes out of Tik Tok is because well it's addictive.

Rosie I want to put a question to you is protecting our children and the addictive nature of scrolling for example we know that but there's been calls for that endless scrolling to be coded differently within a lot of these platforms.

I don't know if anyone's read Johan Hari's book which is fantastic but when smoking came in when driving came in there's actually an interesting question here I lived somewhere where kids as young as 10 were allowed to drive when traffic and awareness around dangers increased the age limit was increased i.

E a ban if we are talking about trying to protect young kids and I know that you were saying in the beginning a lot of this discussion leading up to this was around the dangers is it not a good thing to protect young people from harm from dangers and per perhaps say look until you're this age we feel like this is a good thing for your health like we don't get you driving before you're 18 we ideally don't get you smoking or drinking before you're a certain age can make those decisions for yourselves.

Is this is there not some positives to this? Yeah.

So, can we first I think like I'm a parent myself and I have a responsibility to protect my child as well.

And I like that you use the example of driving because driving isn't inherently bad for you just like smoking or gambling is.

And that's similar to social media. , and so yes, like I don't think anyone is arguing that social media is a loveydovey safe place that is just wonderful for their kids.

No, it's harmful and it's problematic and social media companies do have these sticky harmful ways of operating that are unhealthy and harmful, and we need to address them.

But in terms of having the most impact to actually address the root causes and this is what young people tell us and it's what I hope for with my child too is we want partnership not protection that yeah I genuinely first of all yeah absolutely having the conversations with young people on a daily basis give me a rule and I'll break it type teenage mentality yes VPNs to mask the competition around finding way to get around the ban.

But also that the recognizing that we might think we're protecting young people, but we're actually sending them into all these parts of the dark internet that is so much more harmful and it's unmodderated.

And so I just have concerns like there's no guardrails, there's no moderation, there's no supervision, and we're not even addressing the harms because we think we fixed it with a ban.

So, I think it's a poor use of it's a short-sighted and poor use of our desire as humans, as adults, as parents to protect our children that we're better off addressing, digital literacy, as I said before, like building trust, building digital citizenship and building the capabilities that way and putting a hell of a lot of pressure on social media platforms, helping governments regulate even further.

Rana, you mentioned some of the bullying and some of the situations that have occurred in your communities.

What would be the ideal situation for you? Like this is coming into place.

We need to find alternative spaces for these communities.

How do you see this working? I I guess we need to look at solutions.

I don't want say parents leaving here thinking, "Oh my god, this is just going to get worse and worse and worse." I feel like parents already feel quite stressed about how much time kids are spending online.

There was an interesting comment here that came through actually, that we're focusing quite a lot on time spent online as opposed to content that we might be consuming.

So, confession, my daughter spent a lot of time on her phone playing games, doing all this stuff.

She's totally fine.

She's matured into quite a lovely young person, but I I get the sense that we we're not arguing here whether the band should be in place or not because it's coming in into place.

So what would be the ideal moving forwards? How are you going to create a space and that digital literacy for the communities you're talking about? Yeah.

So I think there are lots of evidence around what we need to do and what is harm and how harm happens, and we need to look at the evidence and then in implementation and design.

It's interesting because when we do our market research, for example to see how we can communicate with our community which is young people from 12 to 25 and recently from 8 to 25.

We don't get traction on Facebook.

They don't look at Facebook.

They didn't look at us, we don't have a Tik Tok at all ourselves.

So what they got the information from is majority from Instagram for example and from our website.

So we were working with them recently.

We sat together with young people and said how we can get to you and how do you want to what channel do you like us to have a communication with you.

So we were able as an organisation to create that platform on our website to communicate with our young people.

We have Mailchimps for them.

We have WhatsApp groups for them which is closed groups, and they can have conversations with us.

And interestingly on Instagram for example, we don't communicate with young people under 18.

We never did.

We always communicated with their parents and said can you send a message that we want to meet, or we want to have this project for them.

So that was their suggestion because we need to have that ethic submission and consent from them.

And I think whatever we want to create it needs to have that consent from children and it needs to create a safe space for them especially from the diverse groups LGBTIQ young people the newly arrived young people they really need a safe and closed space they don't trust the open social media either and recently I had the conversation Few days before I come here, I had a conversation with an 18year-old who is doing a research with us for her school and she told me that we she's Syrian and she when they arrived she got her phone when she turned 16, but her sister who is younger got her phone and access to social media when she was 12.

And she was saying that I asked the question because you wanted me from my 12-year-old sister and she said I don't care about the Facebook or any of the things that is on Facebook.

I use the messenger to message my friends.

Even we have heard online that the most important aspect of that the whole social media is the connection.

It's not the primary idea of the Facebook which was connect.

It is actually the primary idea of Facebook that you find your friends across the globe.

So I think if we get back to the purpose and set it based on what young people want us and tell us what they're doing with social media, we can design something which is quite less harmful.

Even it was two years ago I think that the Facebook removed our newslets let's from the their platform and we had this argument between Australia and the Facebook and everybody were actually so supportive of Australian government that we want something national maybe we need an national Facebook because we don't want the kingdom of Mark Zuckerberg control us and have this power over us that is removing our newslets.

So I think it's it's not that people are against especially children and young people are against the ban but it's a factor that we are going to implement this policy.

Okay.

And that's the sensitive part.

I want to go ask one more question.

I might ask you Amelia and then I want to move on to quite a few questions that are coming in around there's actually some really interesting stuff coming in around come on just get out to the park and play and there's other ways to there's other ways to connect and someone said use Gmail send emails send letters to connect.

It's really interesting to hear the stuff coming in.

So I'm going to get to those.

Amelia, I have a few questions coming through around digital literacy. , then maybe there needs to be more digital literacy for parents and for kids, but , can such an education actually be enforced? that seems to be a huge aspect of this. , I know that you do a lot of research around young kids, how they're feeling about their digital literacy, but should we be looking at digital literacy as a much more fundamental part of not only children's education, but parents as well? Yeah, definitely.

Because even if there are concerns around risks young people are encountering on social media, we know that the social media ban isn't a silver bullet.

We know that it is isn't a ban, it's a delay.

So, young people will be accessing social media at some point in time.

I'd like to know how well of course, schools teach forms of digital literacy, but in research that I've done with young people from migrant backgrounds.

It's often young people encountering risks online like maybe ideologies around toxic masculinity or something like that or encountering forms of misinformation and disinformation online and working out with their peers online about oh okay I can't trust news on this particular platform maybe I'm I'm not going to be accessing news on this platform anymore I'm going to you know go to the source and perhaps leave this or some of the platforms they're engaging with as a place for playfulness for connection etc.

So young people are learning digital literacies and digital safety strategies through encountering forms of harm at the lower end of the scale online.

I think that needs to be facilitated even somehow working around the ban to have some of that those contents that young people are encountering online and developing their own safety strategies and literacies to work with that reality because that is the world online.

There are risks in the world that is not on social media as well and risk is an important part of young people's development.

It's how they learn agency.

It's how they learn autonomy, how they learn to think critically.

So digital literacy is very important, and it has multiple stakeholders again as RA mentioned are really vital here.

So schools need to be involved in this, youth organizations need to be involved in this, parents need to be involved, young people themselves like I think codeesign is really important in terms of coming up with digital literacy resources as well because some in research I've conducted young people felt that the digital literacy education they got in schools wasn't relevant to them because it didn't deal with the risks that they're negotiating on social media for example.

Often it's dealing with static websites and is this fake or is this real news you know and they felt that was really a bit beneath them like that it was a bit basic in terms of some of the complexities around disinformation and misinformation with on social media and again if that is an important part of young people's development so if there is this delay we're definitely going to need digital literacy education in schools that does focus on social media.

We can't just like pretend that doesn't exist and go out in the backyard and have a game of cricket and you'll be fine.

Those risks are still going to be there when they're able to have an account and when they're going to be able to navigate social media.

So yeah, I think it's important to have those guardrails in place.

Marriott Andre is there an ability for platforms like Instagram for example to release as an interesting question around that to have a variant of their app which doesn't allow for example infinite scrolling.

Yes.

Yes.

They control it.

They build it from scratch.

They can do whatever they want.

They could do versions for kids.

They could tweak their recommener system not to not to recommend toxic content.

But the question is what would be the incentive for that? So, for example, it is known for a while that Tik Tok recommener engine would recommend to teenagers harmful challenges, things like the blackout challenge and other really dangerous activities where young people u well they consume the content and then they film themselves performing these dangerous acts sometimes leading to death.

But they've not done anything about it because any intervention onto their platform design will reduce the engagement which then will lead to less advertisement and less funding.

Yes they can remove the infinite scroll.

Of course infinite scroll is a new thing.

It's a new it's a it's rather new.

We talked here about the history of social media platforms.

Depending if you consider Reddit a social media platform or not.

We had initial forums where people talked topics but then we moved into Facebook where we started searching our friends and it was all friend- centered and then Tik Tok and Instagram changed again the paradigm where we are no longer connecting with anyone.

We are just consuming infinite amounts of content which is dictated not by anyone but by a recommener engine designed to keep us there for hours.

So could they change it to make it safe? Sure they can.

They can also reduce their own income at the same time.

Okay.

I want to because I know there's so many parents in the room, I'd like to just shift the discussion briefly to some parent questions that have come up and then I'd love to look at the poll where we're at with the initial poll because we're also going to do another poll. , Rosie, there's a lot of questions around how parents communicate with their kids around what they can access and what they can't.

Do you have parents talking to you around concerns around their children or positives? like I'm glad that there's something here because we've been trying to fight this at home on our own and we actually feel like at least there's some recognition that some of the stuff that our kids might be looking at is harmful like are you hearing both sides of that from parents and then therefore how they can communicate to their kids about what's going on? Yes, absolutely.

And there is so much pressure on parents, which is why this delay just seems so irresistible because it feels like it's going to fix those problems.

I think you know what we're hearing as well as is similar to what Amelia said is that we need to start having these conversations now as early as possible because there is a potentially arguably a fallout or a transition for when young people are being removed.

A lot of the A lot of younger teenagers, for example, might not be thinking in the long term about what is going to happen on December 10 when this law comes to effect.

They might start thinking about it a week earlier, for example.

So, I think like starting these conversations between parents and your kids now is really important.

It's a great excuse if you attended this thing.

And I also just want to commend every parent that is here because it's it's you parents that are really leading the way.

And I hope you have these conversations with the parent friends that aren't here.

I guess some advice around talking about this stuff because I feel the panic and fear too despite working on these issues for the last 20 years.

I think it can be really hard to suspend our fear and panic and also our opinions when it comes to talking about this stuff.

But my biggest hot tip that we hear works really well with parents and their young people is to just try and approach the conversation with curiosity and judgment.

So rather than leaping to conclusions or even rather than having a conversation a little bit like the one we're having about whether we're proban or anti-ban, let's just talk about the issues.

Don't be afraid to talk about the things that you've seen online that you didn't like and especially don't be afraid to say that you didn't know what to do about it because I actually find that as in those experiences where we show our imperfections as parents that really open up the conversation and build that trust.

So together in that scenario, you can problem solve what you could both do in the future when you see hate happen online or you can problem solve some tactics or strategies for when you might want to use social media and no longer be allowed to.

You'd be so surprised about how this approach of talking about your own experiences really opens it up for young people to do the same.

And I think ultimately that is our goal here as parents is to be a safe, soft place to land for our kids. , one thing I wanted to add here because parents, you're not alone. , Project Rocket and so many other organizations will be here to support you.

And there are phenomenal researchers that are doing research right now to support you.

One of those organizations is , Young and Resilient Research Center from Western Sydney University and they just released fascinating research around the impact of social media on families and their attitudes and perspectives.

And actually the good news is they found way more in common between parents and young people than they're not in common.

So they've found that both parents and young people recognize the benefits and the risks, but they prioritize them differently.

So if this helps going into your conversations with your young people, the research showed that for parents, the focus tends to be very much on the harmful content, the impact on mental health and boundaries like screen time, which is probably no surprise to anyone.

And for young people, the focus for them is , connection, identity, creative learning and for them what they say is they really want guidance in those areas.

So the study also showed that too much monitoring can actually backfire with kids feeling really spied on.

And of course they find ways around it.

But I think at the heart of it is that young people, even though it's really hard to start these conversations are looking for guidance, partnership, support and skills.

They don't want to live in an unsafe world.

They don't want to see hate and division.

They recognize they're not the experts of this, but it's that in that's so hard to sometimes start the conversations between parents and young people.

Thank you.

Cuz that leads me to one of the other questions here which you've actually answered a lot of them, but to parents on the panel, what tips and tricks can you share about how to minimize harmful aspects and to build kids positive online skills? Ra, what do you think about that? what parents how can they help build those positive online skills? I know you're saying that a lot of the communities you work with the kids the ones who have got the online literacy and they're teaching the parents but what would you say to that? yes exactly that's the thing we hear a lot of parents who are worried because they're not familiar with the space at all and there are a lot of unknowns around what's going to happen. , one of the tricky questions I got a lot is that are we going to buy many devices for them and when they get to like buy one device when they turn 16 get another device which is a lot of costs for many families and they were worried about the cost of this process for the family as well.

So I think one of the responsibilities that actually government can pick up is investing in digital literacy for parents and investing to clarifying how it will look like specifically for parents and one of the things that we can do we usually are the bridge between the parents and children, and we navigate it together through code design.

So we bring them together and we ask questions in the way, or we ask parents to ask their questions from the younger adults and from children and then we in interpret it for both generation to understand it.

So we can play the mediatory role but I think a big part of it is also coming to the government and right now e safety commissioner to provide this information as much as possible and clarify many things for the parents have town halls town hall meetings and bring parents together and answer their questions because with the fear of unknown we can continue but as much as we get information, we can solve many things.

And we like it or not, parents are not digital savvy.

So even if we spend time on giving them information, right now they are struggling with navigating chat and all of these AI tools.

So I wonder how much it takes time for a parent to just get to the speed of digital age and learn all of these things.

But they can at least as Rosie said talk about the pros and cons and what happens when you get an accepting code on your digital things.

All of these processes or what is good what is not good.

Simply is something that can create can be created through conversation and everybody actually needs to address that together.

It's not something that only parents work on it or only children or work on it or only the implementers work on it.

Amelia, there's quite a few questions coming through and I won't read them word for word, but quite a few questions coming through where I sense this divide.

There's no wonder they're called iPad kids because parents have chucked them in front of iPads and they've just been on social media since the beginning.

Why don't you just bring in sleepovers and phones like the good old days? send your kids to the park. , parenting is about parenting and it's hard work.

So, don't complain.

I feel like there's a divide in a way happening here where we've got a generation or generations of young people who social media is what they've grown up with. , parents who have been trying to probably monitor that and manage that.

And then this is how we grew up and there's no judgment on either end.

But how do we bridge that generational differences or differences of how we should be raising our kids? There is a lot of criticism often just anecdotally.

You see a kid in a cafe and they're on a phone or on an iPad and it's like they should just sit there and draw.

So, what research do you find around that? Do young people feel like they're understood by parents? Do parents feel exacerbated by the fact that they can't get their kids off the devices? Because there seems to be quite a lot of commentary in that space coming through.

Yeah. , I'm a youth researcher, so I center the voices, views, and needs of young people.

But in a recent research report, I was interested in looking at the differences between adult stakeholders, so teachers, educators, people from youth services, policy makers, the views that they had on digital and social media as a technology.

And then the views that young people had in terms of what meaning it had, what what importance it had for them in their everyday lives like it and again you really saw these differences coming through where adult stakeholders are like there tended to be a bit of a fear around technology full stop.

You know, social media being something that they thought was harmful, but the next debate is obviously going to be around AI and AI companions. , it will be the same debate.

And I think that the reason for that is that young people think I grew up, I had sorry, I had these fantastic experiences, and my kids are missing out on what I had.

But I don't think there's always a lot of attention that might be given to the forms of creativity and play and the discoveries, the excitement of young people engaging in these really, different worlds that are being created that they're co-creating in some in some ways through digital media, through social media. , it's almost a sense like they're not doing what I used to do to get enjoyment and I don't really understand it. , but I would encourage I guess to get past that generational divide.

I would encourage certainly parents to speak to young people not only about risks that they might be exposed to through social media or through digital media or through games or in interaction with Geni Gen AI, but to ask them why are you talking to a AI chatbot for this many hours a day or why is it that you're connected to social media? what it is it that you're doing, what are you getting out of it? Because I'm pretty sure that all parents in the room had similar conversations with their parents where their parents may have been disapproving of, a certain music that they were listening to.

Maybe it was television as screen time that that their parents didn't necessarily agree with.

We've we've heard a lot of these debates around every new technology that comes in. , it's bad because young people are glued to it and they're not doing what I used to do.

But I but I really do genuinely believe and I think that many of us here believe that young people are forging important connections online doing, their creativity is being encouraged.

They're engaging in forms of play that might not necessarily be the same as what their exper their parents experienced but still very important to them very important to their peers important to their social development so I think in some ways it's about a bit of give and take like maybe these really hard positions that are taken there needs to be a softening of that I think Rosie mentioned this having a really a soft understanding of what why is it that you're engaged in social media for this many hours a day? What are you doing? Like why is it important to you? some of those conversations I think can help bridge that those barriers and bridge that gap.

Rosie, questions that come up often and ones actually come up here tonight is a parent worrying about their son finding a sense of masculinity through extremism and hateful spouting of views online that don't represent the majority.

Is there a positive to there being limits to what that young person can see online and their views being formed in a more regulated majority space, not through social media platforms?

Yeah.

I think one of the most harmful outcomes that rightly so we're spending time talking about at the moment is the manosphere.

The idea that online spaces can be luring you know young men, teenagers in and through benign messages around going to the gym and getting fit and being your best self but ultimately leading to much more violent ideologies like misogyny for example. , and then of course with those addictive features that we've been speaking about tonight, it's this idea that young men in particular can get trapped in this space.

And we also know that there are additional challenges with young men and when it comes to mental health and access and support that are unique , actually to young men that are quite different to , girls and the way that they relate to one another and their social settings.

So without a doubt, this isn't a massive concern.

And there are some amazing organizations like the man cave and Movember who are addressing this work.

If you're actually parent in the room and you're concerned, I really recommend you checking out those organizations.

So absolutely, but I guess on with what we've said tonight and maybe one additional piece of research I want to layer in is that at Project Rocket we actually recently did a study with 500 young people aged 13 to 15 about the impact of social media for them.

It's called their online realities essentially.

And we found that most teens, so 44% of teens reported both positive and negative experiences online, 41% report only positive experiences, and just 3% report only negative experiences.

And I'm absolutely not dismissing that small group and the problems they face, especially when we're talking about really extreme issues like the manosphere.

But I think it really does emphas emphasize just to calm the farm I think in the room as well.

That there's a lot of fear going on at the moment.

And hopefully these conversations or this delay is going to have a really positive effect where we start having a springboard or an entry point as parents, as governments to actually be intervening on these really insidious issues that are impacting young people.

Thanks, Rosie.

We're just going to pull up the poll and see where we are at.

There were nearly 100 votes for that initial poll, and I'll just like to discuss those findings.

So, oh that was has our opinion shifted.

Can we just look at the original one as well? That would be really great. , looking at that age? Ah, thanks guys.

Thank you so much.

Basically, should we be restricting this the access? I'm not sure where the results are .

I can pull them up here.

Basically, majority was for that age restriction.

So, I think it's really important to talk about that because on the panel here, we're looking at this is not going to be great.

We're going to restrict access for young people these communities that they're going to access.

But when you say look at the poll, it's like bring it on.

So how do we address that? the reality is there's a at least in this room there's a sense of this is actually let's limit the access at least until a bit older in life.

There was actually an interesting if we go back to that car driving analogy you it takes a while you get a license and you drive when you're older.

There was an interesting comment here about saying when young people go to access social media, especially young girls should they do some test to know that they understand how to use it properly and what the harms might be.

We do a driving test when we get in a car should there be something like we do a test before we access social media.

So I'm just trying to reflect the poll there.

And people's views haven't changed that much.

So what does that tell you that there's still, there is support for these restrictions? Yeah, definitely. , I'd be interested to ask every single person in this room why the social media ban is so important to them and why they think it is going to address these online risks and help their children or young people in their lives.

There's there's a lot of comments around data privacy, leaking of information.

M there seems to be a sense a valid sense that our information is not safe that the content we can maybe see is not necessarily safe.

So amongst all the very valid opinions here around young people need these spaces this is their way to communicate there does still seem to be quite a sense of this is actually maybe a good thing.

So I think that disconnect or not even disconnect but that is actually important to look at and chat about as to why we think that might be well it's related to your initial poll when you said how many parents are in here.

Yeah.

Most of the room put up their hands and then it talks to what Aidia said about the disconnect between the generations and what people fear.

So it parents want safety and parents are here.

So okay.

Rosie.

Yeah.

What would you say to that? Well, I feel so motivated.

Like I'm actually itchy on my chair now because I really want to bridge this divide.

And I think I'm really privileged to come from a space where I get to work with young people day in day out and we deliver digital literacy programs in schools, we deliver anti-bullying programs, we've externally evaluated them, we know they're effective.

And so I think when we know that there's this solution here, but it but it isn't being rolled out at scale, it isn't being funded. , as I said, digital literacy is being left up to young people as peers to fumble their way through it with scars and battle wounds at the end.

For parents who understandably have been given no education, no training, no support, but expected to hold the burden, I'm not surprised that this divide exists, but I feel really motiv motivated to close the divide.

And most importantly, I feel motivated to be part of a conversation that brings together young people's views and their experiences their strengths and their struggles and the potential that they have to a room where parents can get to see that.

Because maybe we just get to see parts of young people and especially on social media that perhaps parents just aren't getting to see.

We've got about 10 minutes or so.

So, I'd love to spend the next 10 minutes. , we all accept this is happening.

We've all looked at the concerns.

We've all looked at the positives.

We sense that particularly in this room, there's a real sense that this is something that maybe parents feel like might be supportive for them in this social space.

Rana, if there was one thing you could say around from December when this ban comes into place to not reassure but say look this is what's happening.

This is what we're going to do to support parents and children through this.

This is the practical way in which we are going to navigate this transition.

What would you say? Well, I totally understand when we always kept it 50/50 until it got to the implementation, but I definitely think it needs huge investment on how you're going we are going to implement it and again I said it before I think definitely code design is the way going through and it's not just I really don't like to see it.

It's just a parents responsibility to go and navigate it and understand it and I don't want it to sit on the lap of the parents to have another responsibility adding to all of their responsibilities.

I think it's a shared responsibility as long as we do it in a shared way.

I think that's the best solution.

Amelia, in terms of all the research you've done around young people and how they feel when they navigate the digital world, what would what do you think young people need to be navigating that digital world, this new digital world in a way, and make them still feel connected to their peers and to their communities with these guard rails that will be in place? Yeah, I' my motivation is always to do research with young people to see how they're navigating this new landscape.

It's a completely new landscape for them.

So what questions I guess yeah if you look 6 months down the line after the ban, what questions will you be asking young people? yeah to fill your research pot.

Well, I would love to do that research, and I would like to hear what their experiences are of digital exclusion.

Because we talk a lot about the inclusion of young people of their voices, how important it is for them to participate in the issues that matter to them and to have a say in them.

I just I feel like that's what I would ask them.

I would be asking how they're dealing with the ban 12 months on.

Has it been positive for them? have certain risks diminished or have do they feel safer? these are the things that I would ask them.

But I would also be really saying asking them, is there a sense of something that they have lost? Are they trying to find new ways to forge those connections again that may be lost once their account is deactivated? , how are they doing that in which setting? Are they doing it in local neighborhood setting through school? Are some of those opportunities for voice and for having a say on things that matter to them being provided more so in the school environment? because often in re research I've conducted with young people social media is the space where they can advocate for themselves have a voice in a way that and I do research with young people from migrant communities as well in terms of them have advocating for themselves some sometimes it is on social media because the mainstream media may speak about them about the communities they belong to but may not touch upon their lived experience.

That the debate that happens in well debates that happen in mainstream media may not be balanced.

So in some ways how are they going to be connected with for example research that I have done have sh has shown how important it is for opinion leaders on social media or influences on social media that come from young people's communities that speak to their lived experience what they have to say about issues news and information that may be shared through those channels that they're not going to access otherwise are schools going step in and perhaps allow for this broader, more diverse debate around, young people's voice, the issues that concern them.

Is that space going to be opened up within the school environment? Because at the moment, schools also are very focused on risks and on restricting young people from being able to from engaging with things that may cause harm or that may cause the school reputational damage even.

Is there going to be a little bit of risk taking care of schools to provide that space for young people that may be lost in terms of the online environment? Rosie, do you think there could be some positives that maybe I'm not saying you haven't considered, but look, maybe if you did a poll of young people in 6 months time after the ban, do you imagine that some may say, "Oh, look, I'm actually been feeling less anxious.

I feel like I'm comparing myself less to others.

I don't feel like there's as much bullying as I was experienced." is there room for those kinds of questions to come into this space? Do you think that there might be some knock-on effects that maybe we don't know about yet? Oh yes, absolutely.

Ki in fact young people not all young people are against a ban either because young people aren't a homogeneous group of course.

They have a rich intersectionality of different experiences and identities, and some are for the band for those very reasons.

Typically what we have heard from the young people that have said that they're for the ban was more yes, but the other kids will get around it or they'll just go to other places.

So for me again it comes back to those practicalities but look I'm I'm hoping that there will be positives as I said before what I want to see is mandatory digital literacy education in schools.

So I hope this delay because we are bracing ourselves for the fallout with schools and young people and parents in dealing with the flow on implications the unintended negative consequences of this but my hope is that this does crack open conversations that it does hold social media platforms more to account I don't want to stifle the good things that they are doing like for example Instagram teen accounts which they looked before there was even talk about a ban that bring in into effect some of the features that the ban is hoping to bring into effect.

Anyway, so I'm really hoping though that we can start to work together because we need to move away from this division and debates and polls for and against and instead actually prioritize young people because when we treat them as empowered citizens that are capable of being agents of change in their own lives and when we give them the tools and the skills and we create school environments that allow them to be who they are and them where they're at, then young people can tackle online hate. , that they can navigate the harms and they can experience the benefits and become leaders and have positive relationships and positive mental health and loads of resilience because they've navigated the risk that they've been exposed to some level of risk.

So, I don't think that I think in six months time we'll be reassessing this thing again because I just don't think it's going to work. , but I'm hoping that what comes next is something that is a bit more applicable, practical, and actually values young people as citizens.

Finally, I think I just want to maybe balance out all the questions, so I make sure I've asked everyone everything.

Mario Andre, if you look six months down the line, you talked a lot earlier in the panel about those known harms, the addictive nature of social media and such.

If you look six months down the line, do you imagine data research that comes in where perhaps there is a different level of freedom that younger people might be feeling around that space because they're not as glued? Do you feel like there's going to be some disconnection? Where do you think that data will kind of point? We already have indications via studies where they've looked into people reducing their connectivity to digital environment in general but to social media also and always unanimously these studies they show that once we reduce the connection the connectivity once we reduce the inflow of information then I actually have the I actually have it here 90% of the participants showed improvement in at least one psychological outcome.

They showed improvement in at least one psychological outcome.

Okay.

So reducing the connectivity they showed reduced connectivity leads to improved psychological outcomes, and I can actually attest to that myself.

I have my own proof.

A couple of years ago I was on holiday with my family when I managed to drown my phone.

Just a long story.

But this result was half a half a holiday without a home without a phone.

The home was also home. , and I have to tell you that was the best half holiday that I've had in such a long time.

The only thing that I missed was the ability to actually call my family when I got lost in the supermarket.

And that's why now I have this.

Does anyone know what this is? And this is my right to disconnect.

So I think I think there will be good outcomes.

All right.

Well, thank you so much for your time Rosie for joining us from Melbourne.

Thank you so much Rana Marie Andre and also to you Amelia for joining us and to you all for your questions and for your input.

I didn't get to all of your questions, but I hope that I addressed some of them in the room in a bunch.

Look there are resources available online so we're looking at a few months away.

If you go to the e commissioner website there's some FAQs up there like what will it mean? how do I talk to my kids about it? , what will the what will how will the technology work? , one of the things I do want to point out which I think is one of the concerns that some parents have had is, if you and or your kids who are under 16 do platforms that you're not meant to, the onus and ban and the fines are on the social media companies, not on the parents and not on your household.

So that's there's some quite interesting questions there that you can have answered if you do have questions around that.

I understand there'll be some announcements soon in the next few months because there's obviously still some delays around putting in the technology around how it's actually going to work.

So there's a lot still in train, but I really appreciate you guys having the conversation tonight and for you guys also participating.

So thank you so much.