Australia Begins Enforcing World-First Teen Social Media Ban
Key topics
As Australia kicks off its world-first ban on social media for teens, the debate rages on about the implications of such a move, with some commenters drawing parallels to similar laws in the US, like Florida's, which are facing federal court challenges. The discussion quickly spirals into a broader conversation about government control, with some warning of an "authoritarian state" and others pointing out that regulatory capture favors big tech. While some predict drastic measures like dissolving Congress, others bet against such extreme scenarios, instead suggesting that more subtle tactics like gerrymandering and voter suppression could maintain the status quo. Amidst the speculation, a few voices note that the concentration of power in the Executive branch has been a reality since the Bush Doctrine, adding a layer of complexity to the discussion.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
23h
Peak period
97
24-36h
Avg / period
17.8
Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Dec 9, 2025 at 1:12 PM EST
about 1 month ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Dec 10, 2025 at 12:27 PM EST
23h after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
97 comments in 24-36h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Dec 15, 2025 at 7:20 PM EST
27 days ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
Italy transitioned from a regency into democracy - which the fascists used to seize power and form a dictatorship [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_fascism].
In the US, while one can certainly argue ‘they knew what they were voting for’, the Trump voters I knew vehemently denied what is now the obvious plan re: economic policies, starting new wars/crises, etc. that are now the norm.
It doesn't mean you couldn't unelect the party democratically though and thus the leader. The public can unelect them from power by voting out the Nazi party of which Hitler was leader (through again, a vote). So this is a case of what I'm saying actually being relevent – if people voted against the nazi party, hitler would not have risen to power. He only gained that power because the democratic institutions, the people let him. This is a case for more and better democracy, of valuing that institution. I've encountered Trump voters who were actually bernie bros and accelerationists - they voted for trump as a fu to the establishment. I think the have a moral responsibility to not vote on those urges and whims. I think this that's bad, even if I can feel the sentiment sometimes, and I think that sort of "democracy bad" is actually a harmful to discourse and simple not true.
We need to bolster democracy for the people, not call it toothless while invoking communism and fascism. I don't ultimately blame Trump for his rise to power, I blame the people for being fickle and perfectionists. Democracy is precarious and precious, not a perfect ultimate catch all. The people need to foster it otherwise the rising tide of populism and fascism will drown it.
Putting on my tin-foil, devils-advocate hat... AKA I don't necessarily believe this but I also have no counter-argument:
Mostly performative. When it's decided that something actually needs to pass, then you'll get some sacrificial lambs that vote across the aisle. Typically they'll be close to retirement or from a state where they won't be heavily punished for that specific vote.
I would think at least some of this should be obvious, but I guess not?
From a political standpoint, the statement "from a state where they won't be heavily punished for that specific vote" is a weird way to put it, since if you framed it in a positive light it would sound more similar to "the state population falls on both sides of the issue and thus either vote could make sense from their legislator depending on exigent circumstances and other factors".
Please explain how that's "exactly the same".
And also... the supreme court keeps issuing partisan decisions.
So... what is left? Number 3?
I guess you're arguing that federalism protects people, but how does it do that in a way that isn't already being eroded?
Democratic People's Republic of America.
That's how you know it's a fully totalitarian state.
perhaps we ought to consider banning social media for adults or maybe just dystopian movies.
And yet...
If Congress steps away from doing anything but serving donors (helped by the filibuster), and the captured regulators don't have to obey the President, there's actually no democracy left. We're in the impossible situation where Trump not being in control is scarier than Trump being in control.
Even scarier is that the people saying that we're on the way to becoming an authoritarian state are saying that because they think that the voters get too much say. Authoritarianism is when we don't beatify Dr. Fauci, or agree that it's fine for pregnant women to take Tylenol. The upper middle class, in its complete narcissism and fall into self-indulgent fantasy, is entirely focused on aesthetics.
edit: when replies that say that there's already a problem, but seem to be heretical about the covid response get flagkilled, there's a blessed opinion. I have no idea how elite echochambers are supposed to avoid an authoritarian state. Your bosses are kissing Trump's ass, and you're working hard doing things that advance their agenda. They couldn't do it without you.
That is basically what the Heritage Foundation wants to do.
[1] https://theonion.com/facebook-announces-plan-to-break-up-u-s...
This muskian "I am above laws so I'll break up the USA/EU" is asinine and societies should come down on it like a ton of bricks.
I think (I hope!) we all agree with this sentiment.
But societies also need to be stronger than states, especially in an age of connection and sharing.
States are the main source of uncertainty and violence in the world right now, and I think it's reasonable to hope that the internet will bring the age of peace we pray for.
Obviously the social media giants are not it. They are closer to states than they are to algorithms.
But I'm wary of siding with states over web apps. What we need are healthier (meaning, chiefly, more decentralized and less rent-seeking) web apps.
This seems like nonsense. All the tech industry does is convince people. It doesn't force anyone to do anything. No one holds a gun to anyone's head forcing them to consume <insert content you disagree with>. In a country of equals, everyone's opinion, including <position you disagree with>, should hold equal sway, and be resolved via democratic due process.
Just because many people hold <position you disagree with> and vote for <politician you find repugnant> doesn't give you any sort of reasonable justification to limit the freedom of others to advocate (including on social media) for it.
* So-called "intellectual property" laws dramatically skew what can and cannot be shared
* Censorship at the behest of world governments is rampant, and completely overran anything representing a nonviolent scientific dialogue during the recent COVID19 pandemic
* States, with their monopoly on the legitimate initiation of force, pick winners and losers at every level of the experience, from chip makers to the duopolistic mobile OS vendors to their app stores to the social media offerings. Sure, network effect may describe the reason people join and stay, but the availability of places to join and stay is in no sense a market phenomenon
Consider: the major social media barons meet with POTUS all the freakin' time. Do you suppose that's just because they enjoy his company?
If anything, it seemed like the denialism was amplified by the censorship. What fell by the wayside were the serious, rigorous dialogue that had previously been the best thinking on epidemiology and public health.
I was a moderator and frequent contributor to /r/ebola during the 2014 outbreak; during that time I reached out and began to form relationships with (and respect spectrums for) various epidemiologists and academic departments. And it was really hard during the COVID19 pandemic to watch people like John Ioannidis, David Katz, Sunetra Gupta, Michael Levitt, etc. be totally cut out of the conversation while a group of second-stringers who were willing to toe the corporate line took their place.
Was it your experience that the censorship worked to _stem_ denialism? It seemed to me that it made it much louder and much worse, muddying the water of genuine discussion and research.
It was the final attempt of social media even trying to be something more than a cancer. Now? Every social media platform (especially Facebook and twitter) would have zero problems being the driver of modern day pogroms, complete with running betting markets on the outcomes, if it would keep their share prices up.
Agree! let's get rid of these :)
> Censorship at the behest of world governments is rampant
Agree! States have always pursued censorship to maintain power. That doesn't contradict the point that social media companies themselves are not state actors, and are not the problem.
> States ... pick winners and losers
I'm not sure I'm 100% on board here. States may thumb the scales, but the fact of the existence of FAANG/MANGO seems much more like a market phenomenon than an interventionist project.
> social media barons meet with POTUS all the freakin' time
There is almost no clearer display of corporate self-preservation than social media vendors kowtowing to the president.
Much of what you're outlining is standard run of the mill corruption. The US Government (and others) is acting in contradiction to its stated principles. This is not a new phenomenon, and seems in the category of core human governance challenges.
And I must say, I find your argument and phraseology very convincing. I agree with everything you've said here; states are not imbued with any particular magic. They simply convince people to do things that, if people weren't filled with the mindset of exceptions that seem to come when engaging in public services, they'd never ever do.
This could be amended to "States have a monopoly legitimate on violence". Your comment seems to deny the existence of "legitimacy" as a concept. I would ask how you would distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate use of force?
As long as it's not farming, defense or healthcare of course. Historically speaking at least.
Additionally, people that post on those platforms originally gained notoriety on the bigger tech platforms, and took their audience with them.
The EU is not popular, within Europe, at all. Maybe the idea is great, but the implementation is certainly not.
Also, the votes you are described are all about the implementation of certain ideas/legislation inside the context of the EU, not about the organisation itself?
I'm a European citizen, stating the obvious. Happens to be the contrary of what most ppl in here think it is.
> Member states joined the EU through mechanisms of their state. (Acts of parlements, referendum or something else).
They did. That was a long time ago. When the EU was created the expectation was to align salaries, social welfare networks through access to cheap lending through the common currency, even though politicians like Margaret Thatcher understood the role of the ECB the moment it was proposed. Indeed her last speech as a PM in the house of commons is legendary[^1].
> Also, the votes you are described are all about the implementation of certain ideas/legislation inside the context of the EU, not about the organisation itself?
Most voters don't make that distinction. The fact that every time a government wants to implement an unpopular idea uses the EU as an excuse doesn't help ofc.
To recap: given the opportunity, the majority of countries in Europe would choose to live the EU today, if you ask them. It was much easier for the UK to do so, because they were not part of the monetary union.
[^1]: "[...] the point of that kind of Europe with a central bank is no democracy, taking powers away from every single Parliament, and having a single currency, a monetary policy and interest rates which take all political power away from us.", M. Thatcher, Excerpt from her last speeh as UK's PM (1990).
You may not agree, but VDL and KK have more balls than most men who have run the EU in recent history.
Ps. I know HN likes the EU very much because they see it as an opposing power to their home issues but it’s not that. The EU, in its current form, has many structural problems. That doesn’t mean that Europeans like Musk, Trump or Biden.
When much of government ( federal, state, local ) communication is done via social meda, would it be legal to ban anyone from accessing it?
Or are official government social media sites required to be accessible to everyone?
The Supreme Court has even struck down state bans on selling violent video games to children because it violates a child's first amendment rights.
A full ban on social media including information from the government itself? That passing Constitutional muster would require some legal gymnastics and scientific evidence that social media causes extremely harmful to children - evidence that is sorely lacking despite what people believe.
In the previous era of principles, sure. In The Year of Our Dear Leader, 2025? The Republican Supreme Court just needs the order from above, and the Constitution will say what the ruler says it says.
I remember when social media was sane 15+ years ago. The problem is the business model, not socializing. It's crazy to ban it when being a teen is the beginning of socializing!
If you're posting as well, or at least commenting on stuff and having discussions with people you know (even if you just know them online), I think that's fine. Like forums, or being in group chats with friends on Facebook, or sharing photos you take with a specific community.
It's when you're only consuming (like scrolling TikTok or Instagram), or when your comments are written for the algorithm rather than for actual discussion (like on Reddit, or even Hackernews to an extent), that social media is an issue.
If you found a community on Facebook, you’d likely have found it regardless without it.
The algorithms create the engagement, the engagement lures in the ads, not the other way around, at least that's what I think right now.
And in fairness, dosage is the difference between a painkiller an a heroin addiction.
So why are we surprised that when we put a TV in the kids' hands things got even worse? Meta testified on the stand recently that they're not a social media company anymore, they're now all about video. Tiktok is the new TV. Every app wants to Tiktokify. The money from TV, just pushing an endless stream of video to someone, is very good.
We were able to go back to one TV in the house (at least I was), and even avoid a big chunk of the ads when watching TV (by paying for Netflix/etc) and even radio (Spotify/etc).
Except we now we put a garbage TV in every hand.
It's a terrible idea because it's a tiny screen; because it's not a shared experience, but an isolating one; because it's been proven that it's bad for eyesight/myopia. But most of all, it's terrible because the content is crap.
Spending hours watching a never ending sequence of low effort 2min videos that need to deliver on the first 30s (or they're skipped) is not the way to make anyone smarter.
Australians are very aware that it destroys people’s brains.
Same shit, new generation.
I would argue that it did, we just did a poor job of measuring it.
Anecdotally, during my childhood I moved from a place that had very little TV advertising to a place with a normal amount and it had a noticeable impact.
Well, there's at least a few reasons this is different than the current situation.
1) It's expensive to make a TV show, it's free to do a fortnite dance or eat a tide pod and post it to several websites. The amount of low-effort, low-quality, probably-harmful content on TikTok or whatever is exponentially more than low-effort, low-quality, probably-harmful TV shows/ads.
2) The availability is on completely different scales. TVs are (basically) fixed in a specific place. Phones are, for most people, within arms reach 24/7.
3) What can be shown on TV is significantly more regulated in most parts of the world, and control mechanisms by governments are more robust (pull a broadcast license, etc.). It's harder to take a website (or TikTok, whatever) offline than it is to pull a harmful show/advert off of HGTV or whatever your favorite channel is.
Then we got the one-two punch of social media apps on phones, and everywhere we saw these get adopted, we saw depression and anxiety increase en masse.
My own theory is that if you have to pick one thing it's the phone, because screen time/attention skyrockets when you get one of those, and they can have you freaking out about whatever clickbait they're feeding you pretty much 24/7. When I grew up there was just a computer in the den and when I wasn't in the den, whatever I'd viewed on it was out of sight, mostly out of mind.
That is not true. Distorted body perception, anorexia etc. due to omnipresent photoshopped models in magazines and poster ads where a thing decades ago.
Things escalated with social media, but there were issues long before that.
The escalation, the ubiquitousness, is the problem.
It's like the difference to your health between having a can of coke week and drinking a 2 L bottle of coke every day.
Ads mean that you want to keep the user on your platform as long as possible. They are incentivized to make it addictive at the most fundamental level. A company selling movies doesn't care how often you watch the movies you buy, they just want to convince you to buy them. A company that makes money for each minute you spend watching a movie would put out very different products.
Analytics mean they can precisely see the effect of any given change to figure out what makes the product more addictive.
Personalization means they can tailor your experience to be addictive to you, personally, rather than just generally addictive to people.
And scale means they can afford to pay enormous amounts of money to a lot of smart people and have them work full time on the problem of making the product more addictive.
I don't know what you do about it.
Jonathan Haidt talks about how once social media usage became ubiquitous among teenagers around 2015 mental health problems began to skyrocket. And a big part of this was the algorithm serving up content designed to make people feel bad, but another part around feelings of being bullied turned out to largely be kids seeing their friends hanging out with each other without inviting them and this provoking feelings of alienation. That’s inevitable, I felt bad when I found out about parties or hang-outs I didn’t get invited to at that age as well. But I didn’t even know about 90% of them, and those I did I heard about through passing references rather than a stream of pictures and albums about how much fun everyone was having without me.
I think some level of a sense of isolation is inevitable under those circumstances, though I’m not sure that by itself would rise to the level of banning it outright. At least not before trying other interventions like addressing Meta’s “19 strikes before banning you for CSAM” rule. Kids are just the canaries in the coal mine here. Whatever these services are doing that is cooking developing brains is still turning up the heat on adult brains too, we can’t try to pretend we can be psychologically healthy engaging with something that we know is spiking depression and anxiety in our kids.
Before then I used to use lunarstorm. Was that the sane period of social media? Maybe, my memory is fuzzy: it's been a while.
Hey you spent 500ms looking at this pretty girl dancing, how about some ass now?
I get straight up PORN ads on Facebook too. Twitter at some point showed me porn as well, even if I had specifically curated it to show JavaScript content.
But you can’t solve that issue with policy. It’s a cultural issue. People are not willing to pay for the content they consume (with money).
Not to mention you would collapse the US economy (I’m not sure if you’re US based, just speaking from my perspective), and likely others, if you applied a blanket ban on ad-supported media.
Also, what's an 'ad' is an extreme spectrum nowadays with free stuff given out in exchange for a post, people trying to act like paid influencers to fake it until they make it, paid influencers, and listicle affiliate link slop.
Complaining about ads is kinda like complaining about homeless people. You are just servicing your own annoyance without actually engaging in critical thought. It is selfish behavior.
Alright Australian lawmakers, you heard the man, chop chop!
Since when is slop-producing ad-machine social media the only access to speech, press and association?
Libertarianism really does hit a wall when it comes to kids, in so many ways, doesn't it?
The amount of human hours spent watching others play video games / gamble / creating parasocial relationships: https://twitchtracker.com/statistics/watch-time
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=youtube.com
https://www.wionews.com/trending/australian-teens-defy-under...
It's a relatively uncontroversial ban, with public support in Aus because of mental health concerns, and key social media sites complying.
VPN's come with their own minimum age 18 T&C's. As do the credit and debit that are usually required somewhere along the line to pay for the services.
Historically, if it's awkward to circumvent most people tend to comply; which means in turn that minority that can figure out a way around it are unlikely to find many of their friends present. While for majority there's unlikely to be much of a draw or peer group pressure to circumvent.
I'm sure Aus gov will monitor, media will highlight problems etc, but would be surprised if it was not actually quit effective.
It's half of the "teens" someone experiences before hitting the age of majority. I think it's fine to say "teen" in the title.
Idk that anyone takes this so literally, I've always understood it as "in their tens" but that may be my origin
1315 more comments available on Hacker News