About Them, Without Them

When Australia banned under-sixteens from social media last December, I expected to disagree with it. I am not far off the age it targets. But the more I read, the less it was the ban itself that bothered me. Australia became the first country in the world to lock a whole age group out of social media, with platforms facing heavy fines if they let us back in. What stayed with me was not whether that was right. It was who got to decide.

A decision was made about my generation, and about the spaces where we gather, argue, and organise, with almost none of us in the room. Adults debated our wellbeing. We were the subject, not the participants. It was made on our behalf, on the assumption that our elders understand our lives better than we do.

I can see why adults make that assumption. Adults make decisions for children all the time, because children cannot always see every consequence. Trying to shield us from apps designed to be addictive is fair. And the evidence itself is contested. Some studies link social media to worse mental health in teenagers; others, including work in Child and Adolescent Mental Health, find those links too weak and inconsistent to prove much.

But here is what complicates it. Social media, for all its harms, is also where my generation found its political voice. The Gen Z protests in Indonesia and Nepal in 2025 started on social media, and my feed was full of them. To regulate the one arena where the young speak, without asking them about the regulation, says something about whose voice is thought to count.

And it is not just Australia. France plans to bar under-fifteens from this September, Malaysia is drawing up its own version, and the European Parliament has backed the idea. Everywhere, the same move: a decision about young people's digital lives, taken largely without them, as if the people who know these spaces best were the last ones anyone thought to ask.

None of this tells me the ban is wrong. It might protect more than it costs. But protection and participation are not opposites. A law can keep the young safe and still be shaped with us. This one wasn't. What I keep coming back to is not whether we should be protected. It is whether we can be protected and heard at the same time, or whether, once again, being spoken for has been mistaken for being served.