Half a world away this week, Australia’s government imple‑mented a law that feels just as relevant to Kansas.
The nation banned social media for teens under the age of 16, including some of the most popular apps for young people, such as Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok. (Some social media remained accessible this week.) Through the ban, Australian politicians aim to short-circuit teenage reliance, if not addic‑tion, to social media and, by proxy, cellphones.
While this is happening 9,000 miles away in Australia, the political and legal debates in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne signal something about Kansas’ approach to social media in our heartland homes and classrooms.
As the dad of a 16-year-old son and a daughter who just aged out of being a teenager, setting boundaries about cellphones has been an almost daily discussion for me and my kids for the past five years. From my son: “Can I have Instagram to work on a project for my club at school?” From me: “Please be sure to store your phone in the kitchen rather than your bedroom when you go to bed tonight.”
Parenting teens in the age of social media demands daily grit. Once you give teens even a little bit of social media access, they will use that limited permission like a crowbar, peeling back further access each day. Providing them even a bit of leverage inevitably becomes more and more.
One social media app becomes two. Two hours of screen time becomes three. Three days a week becomes seven.
As an instructor at the University of Kansas, one of my goals is to make class so engaging and fast-paced that students don’t have time to check their notifications from Instagram or play cellphone games.
Nevertheless, last week, a student continued an epic, if fic‑tional, battle on his cellphone: a game of Clash Royale while I stood right beside him lecturing. Only after I interrupted the class to explain how distracting his gameplay was did he pocket the device.
Teaching teens in this age of social media is like waterproof‑ing a boat constructed of sponges. Just when you think you have sealed every square inch, there is another leak in their attention.
Because we need to change the relationships that our Ameri‑can teens have with cellphones, I believe that the Australia ban is vital — but doomed.
Let me explain. Australia’s so-called fix may be short-lived because of a constitutional challenge filed this week. The New York Times reported that two 15-year-old Australian teens argue the ban “infringes on their right to political communication.” The ban itself might be banned.
Here in the United States, if we mimic Australia by insti‑tuting a nationwide ban on teen social media use, it couldn’t clear a challenge under the First Amendment — and rightly so. Freedom of expression belongs to teens as well as adults. With two decades of social media behind us, the genie is out of the bottle. Social media is certainly protected speech, whether for adults or teens.
If Australia’s ban would be so obviously doomed, especially here, how is it vital?
Australia’s ban widens the Overton window when it comes to teens and cellphones. A major national government has enlarged what we can imagine as an acceptable political inter‑vention aimed at social media. In this way, the Australian ban was vital to restart the conversation about teens and social media.
We needed some government to overstep. All credit to law‑makers down under.
If Australia can enact such a law, then certainly the United States or an individual state (hello, Topeka!) could make some incremental move.
As a culture, we have become irrationally OK with teens sitting at the dinner table with one hand on the Chipotle fork and another on their phone. As parents, we have become OK with teens barricading their bedroom doors to doomscroll each evening. As teachers, we shrug at the student in the back row thumbing through TikTok, an AirPod dangling from one ear.
The extreme freedom of unrestricted teen social media use has failed.
At the opposite extreme, as embodied by the Australia ban, outlawing everything from Instagram to Snapchat likely won’t work for legal reasons.
The solution is in the middle rather than at the extremes (so boring) and about defaults rather than bans (even more boring).
The most promising tactic to throttle the mania of teen social media use is to mandate specific default settings inside social media apps. When users start up the app and provide their age, social media apps could more insistently and aggressively set defaults for settings such as screentime limits, profile privacy and notifications.
Yes, the settings could be changed, but default settings would provide parents guidance.
It would also provide parents cover, similar to the collective action urged by the group Wait Until 8th. That group asks par‑ents to sign a pact with other parents so that there is collective, community will. Default actions could function in largely the same way.
Many social media apps dedicate pages to the safety settings that they implement for teens. But this is some weak tea. Snap‑chat, for instance, creates default settings for teens ages 13-17, including public profiles and location sharing. That’s helpful, but not enough.
The outright ban in Australia makes universal default set‑tings for teens seem politically reasonable. Default settings for teens inside social media are not bans — not even close.
Instead, they are norm-setting, signaling to parents and teens that there are measured and healthy ways to use apps.
From this American parent and teacher to the Australian government, this is my thank you — for acting so ambitiously that my suggestions seem downright gentle.
Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
