Social media ban targets the wrong age group and the wrong type of media
Nov 21, 2024
To reduce social harm, instead of a ban on teens accessing social media, should we consider a ban on over 60 year olds reading and listening to News Corporation outlets?
Announcing the Government’s proposed ban on social media for under 16 year olds, PM Albanese said “Social media is doing social harm to our kids. I’m calling time on it.”
Two main types of social harm concern supporters of the ban. The first is the impact on teenagers’ mental health. Here, the evidence is, at the very least, contested. The second is the specific impact on kids of the general ill of divisiveness and misinformation often attributed to social media. In this case, the ban has the wrong target.
Evidence on the mental health issue is contested. Writing in the Conversation on 11 November, Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz of the University of Wollongong and Matthew B. Jané of the University of Connecticut said
Does reducing social media improve teen mental health? With the current evidence, we don’t think there’s any way to know.
Three days later, also in the Conversation, Danielle Einstein of Macquarie University reposted
There is reliable evidence social media harms young people – debates about it are a misdirection.
Although she doesn’t mention him, supporters of Einstein’s position frequently cite US researcher Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation. But Haidt’s arguments and evidence in the US are also hotly contested – not least in a scathing review in Vox (12 April 2024).
Summing up the current status, Cam Wilson noted in Crikey on 19 November
Mental health and childrens’ groups have signalled their issues with the ban, and now a group of 140 Australian and international experts have signed an open letter raising serious concerns, arguing there is little evidence suggesting the ban will work.
Critics of social media’s impact on young people have a second area of concern. This is the specific impact on kids of the general ills of divisiveness and misinformation often blamed on social media.
As the Scanlon Institute 2024 Mapping Social Cohesion Report stated
social media . . . is widely believed to be responsible for the dissemination of most of the fake news and misinformation Australians are exposed to.
Releasing that report on 18 November, lead author Dr James O’Donnell said he had expected to find that social media use might be fuelling polarisation of attitudes, especially towards faith groups.
In fact, the social media users were less likely to have a negative attitude towards Jewish and Muslim people, irrespective of where they were on the political spectrum.
More generally, younger people, the heaviest users of social media, are significantly more tolerant than older generations. The Scanlon report shows they are more likely to believe that accepting migrants from many different countries makes Australia stronger. This ties in with the results of both the 2017 same sex marriage postal survey and last year’s Voice referendum. The Yes vote in both had the highest support among young people.
The key drivers of divisiveness and misinformation lie not in social media, but elsewhere.
Similar patterns to Scanlon also appear in the US in a 2017 report by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Levi Boxell and colleagues studied nine different areas of polarisation between 1996 and 2012. Attitudes polarised in eight of the nine measures they looked at, with the changes typically becoming greater the older the age group. In four of Boxell’s areas, young adults saw declines in polarisation, while the over 60 cohort experienced large increases. As the researchers commented:
The young are the heaviest users of social media – but are also the group least likely to suffer from increased polarisation.
This US data supports the Scanlon report conclusion here that most Australians are not unduly influenced by inflammatory information and misinformation on social media.
So what is driving the polarisation and divisiveness? Media consumption may well play a role – but it is not social media. Older age groups overwhelmingly get information from more traditional media. Studying those sources, the ABC’s Media Watch has highlighted many examples of misinformation and encouraging division by, in particular, News Corporation outlets.
Divisive rhetoric on Fox News in the US clearly had polarising impacts there. In another NBER paper, Andrey Simonov and colleagues showed in 2020 those impacts on social distancing during Covid. Other studies document similar impacts on subsequent vaccination rates – and health outcomes.
The Government states it is concerned about social harm from media. A ban on teens’ use of social media is targeting the wrong age group and the wrong type of media. Polarisation and increasingly divisive attitudes are more common amongst older age groups – who make much less use of social media. Looking at the information sources the older age groups use, the role of traditional media – and in particular News Corporation publications – is more significant.
To reduce social harm, instead of a ban on teens accessing social media, should we consider a ban on over 60 year olds reading and listening to News Corporation outlets?
Tony Ward is, since 2011, a research fellow in history at the University of Melbourne. Prior to that, he had a varied career in academia, senior executive positions in the state public service, and 17 years as principal of an economic consulting company. Tony has published two books: Sport in Australian National Identity (Routledge, 2010) and Bridging Troubled Waters: Australia and Asylum Seekers (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2017). He has also published numerous articles in academic journals, ranging across the economics of inequality, sports history, and Australian migration history. In addition, he has written several well-read pieces on The Conversation website, and contributed to several submissions to the government on economic and social impacts of public policies. Tony has a PhD in economic history from Monash University (1984).
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