Screen time and the state by Virginia Robertson

Australia has long enjoyed an image of sunny freedom, sprawling beaches, easy laughter, democracy with a light touch. Which makes it all the more surreal that in 2025 the nation finds itself arguing before the High Court about whether teenagers should be legally permitted to use Instagram. Two teenagers, in an act of civic engagement that lawmakers should perhaps applaud rather than litigate, allege that the ban robs them of their constitutional right to communicate freely. That it has come to this, a courtroom showdown over the thumb-scrolling privileges of minors says far more about us than it does about the apps in question.

The new law, which prohibits Australians under sixteen from using social media platforms, is the kind of sweeping gesture that governments reach for when they feel obliged to “do something” about a cultural phenomenon they can neither fully understand nor control. It exists at the intersection of public panic, political theatre, and a kind of nostalgic paternalism, an insistence that protecting young people means protecting them from the world, rather than equipping them to navigate it.

At its heart, the ban reveals a generational misalignment of expectations. Adults, remembering their own adolescence with soft-focus fondness, imagine that teenagers today would be happier if they were liberated from the digital labyrinth. They presume that the modern teen, once freed from TikTok, will stroll outdoors, take up pottery, and rediscover the pleasures of eye contact. But such romantic projections ignore the reality that for adolescents and inconveniently for most adults as well, communication increasingly happens online. Social media is less an optional pastime than the infrastructure of contemporary social life.

To ban teens from it is to ban them from the agora, the cafeteria, the town square. It is to impose social exile in the name of social welfare.

Of course, the law’s defenders argue that social media is uniquely corrosive to developing minds. It is addictive, performative, manipulative, and sometimes cruel. But this is hardly a novel human dilemma wrapped in a new interface. Every generation has had its supposedly corrupting cultural menace: the novel, the waltz, the rock album, the video game, the television set. Each has been accused, at some point, of morally unspooling the young. And each time, adults have underestimated the adaptability of youth and overestimated the fragility of society.

The ban also exposes a certain contradiction within modern democracies. We praise young people for civic engagement, marching for climate action, protesting injustice, speaking out online, yet we simultaneously attempt to mute them by restricting the very tools that have amplified their voices. Teenagers are old enough to join political movements, but, under this law, too young to post a selfie with a message that might matter.

Moreover, as technologies evolve, legislating against them becomes both futile and faintly absurd. Teenagers are the world’s most prolific hackers of parental controls, virtuosos of the workaround. If lawmakers believe that a generation capable of jailbreaking its own smartphones will be thwarted by an age-verification pop-up, they have mistaken wishful thinking for policy.

What the law does achieve, however, is symbolic comfort for anxious adults. It gestures toward the fantasy that there was once a golden age of childhood purity, uninterrupted by screens and algorithms. But this, too, is nostalgia masquerading as wisdom. Past generations dealt with their own social maelstroms, war, industrialization, epidemics, economic collapse. Adolescence has always been turbulent; the technology simply changes its soundtrack.

The remarkable part of the High Court challenge is that it is being brought by teenagers themselves, who assert that their government has misread both their capabilities and their rights. They are not demanding unfettered chaos. They are demanding recognition as citizens capable of participating in the communication networks of their era. For adults who frequently dismiss teens as apathetic, the case should serve as a quiet, slightly uncomfortable revelation: young people are paying attention, and they expect to be heard.

One cannot help but reflect on how societies throughout history have treated teenagers, not as full citizens, admittedly, but rarely as the delicate creatures we imagine today. In many cultures, sixteen-year-olds worked full time, married, sailed on ships, ran farms, went to war, and held responsibilities that would stun the contemporary adult who panics at the idea of a fifteen-year-old using a smartphone unsupervised. We have, paradoxically, inflated our expectations of teens’ vulnerability while shrinking our estimation of their competence.

Perhaps our discomfort is less about teens and more about ourselves about the adult fear of a world relentlessly changing, of digital spaces we cannot fully supervise, of youth culture that moves at a speed we cannot match. Banning teenagers from social media lets us pretend that we, the grown-ups, are still the gatekeepers of reality. But the truth is that reality has already migrated online, and our children are simply better at living there than we are.

None of this is to say that social media is harmless. It isn’t. It requires guardrails, literacy, resilience, and yes, adult guidance. But guidance is not the same as prohibition. Education is not the same as erasure. A society that responds to technological complexity by reaching for a legal off-switch is one that misunderstands both technology and society.

The High Court’s decision will inevitably shape the legal landscape. But the larger question, the one that lingers beneath the legal briefings and parliamentary soundbites is what kind of relationship we want between the state, young people, and the digital world. Do we construct policy from fear, or from trust? Do we aim to shield the next generation, or to strengthen it?

Australia’s social media ban has forced these questions into the national conversation. And in doing so, it has reminded us that the real debate is not about apps. It is about agency. It is about who gets to speak, who gets to listen, and who we imagine ourselves to be in a society increasingly mediated through screens.