In the 17th century, Eton College boys faced a peculiar mandate: every morning, over breakfast, they were compelled to smoke a pipe of tobacco. This was a supposed safeguard, with tobacco smoke mistakenly believed to ward off the ‘miasmas’ thought to spread plague. And any teens rebelling against this regimen — whether through refusal or insufficient puffing — were met with a sound whipping. Today, this bizarre chapter of history reminds us of an uncomfortable truth: societies often impose their prevailing wisdom on children with unshakable confidence, sometimes only to discover later how wrong they were.
Last week there was no shortage of confidence during debates around Australia’s social media ban for children. If you know anyone under 18, you’ll already be aware of the extent to which social media platforms like TikTok and Snapchat dominate the lives of teenagers, and there is mounting evidence linking them to escalating rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm.
Curiously, responses to the proposed social media regulations for users under 16 and the digital duty of care on tech giants have fallen along familiar ideological fault lines. During the pandemic, it tended to be conservatives who bristled at public health mandates, framing them as a gross affront to individual freedom and economic growth. Now it’s progressives who warn of creeping authoritarianism, stressing that bans on children using social media could restrict social support, harm marginalised communities, or set a precedent for Orwellian overreach. The jerseys have been swapped, but the game remains the same.
And much in the same way that social media ecosystems amplify extremes, in the mix you don’t tend to hear the voices that fall somewhere in between.
Admittedly, as during Covid, my first instinct this week was to dismiss those who put forward a view that didn’t align with experts as being wilfully ignorant of latest research. But our instinct to dismiss those with opposing views as hysterical, naïve, or insufficiently moral is itself a symptom of the problem. In fact, the way the public debate this week seemed to fortify into tribalistic echo chambers mirrors the very dynamics amplified by social media: a fracturing of public discourse into factions that prioritise ideological loyalty over meaningful dialogue.
So if we can’t agree on what’s broken, how can we ever hope to fix it? That’s the wider question about social media, extending beyond legitimate concerns over mental health crises or online predators, and it's one that I