Why the social media ban won’t work

This article is part of a debate. Read Ralph Genende’s argument in favour of the social media ban. 

I was 13 when I received my first iPhone. It was 2009, only two years after the device first launched. By the end of that year, almost every teen at my school owned one. We were the first generation to be raised by social media, communicating on platforms like Instagram and Snapchat in their earliest and most unregulated era.

According to the 2025 eSafety Commissioner report, 95 per cent of today’s teens aged 13 to 15 are using at least one social media platform, including Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. On December 10, they will be banned from using these social platforms, cutting them off from their core communication system.

They are far too technologically adept for it to work. Cyber Safety Solutions founder Susan McLean has warned that the ban will be impossible to enforce, while popular TikTok accounts are providing methods to circumvent it. Already, kids are learning how to add “parent managed” or “+mum” to social media pages to pretend the accounts are run by adults.

Even if the ban successfully pushes teens off popular apps such as Instagram and TikTok, it would not be a good idea. Prohibition risks sending them to platforms that are far more dangerous, such as the imageboard website 4chan, which has been the subject of  decades of controversies over hate speech and illegal content.

There is no way to ban every problematic site or monitor teens pushing the boundaries after they have been shut out of relatively benign platforms.