Curtin Professor Tama Leaver says social media ban could be opportunity or disaster for kids’ digital literacy

Australia’s looming social media ban for under-16s could be a chance to make young people the most online savvy cohort yet — or could be a disaster if it amounts to “hitting the pause button”. Governments and schools are also being urged to use the years when Australian teenagers are banned from social media to embed digital literacy into every subject, not confine it to media studies or computer classes. Curtin University Professor of Internet Studies Tama Leaver said the social media ban, which will ban under 16s from having an account on social media site like Facebook, TikTok and YouTube, was a crossroads moment. “The social media ban is about to create a three year delay,” he said. “If we use those three years to radically overhaul their digital literacy so that when they do turn 16 they have the tools. . . it’s an exciting opportunity. “If the message that people take from the ban is that we don’t need to worry about these things right now there’ s a real risk their knowledge will be less not more. We have to replace that time with something positive.” The Federal Government’s controversial under-16s social media ban will come into effect on December 10. Critics say young people will simply find a way around it, while proponents say it will protect young people from the known harms of social media. Professor Leaver said young people increasingly saw no difference between the online and face-to-face world and school curriculums should reflect that. “What we can see is that for young people the digital and non-digital are not really separated,” he said. “Young people dealing with everything from the manosphere to AI to cyberbullying . . . all of that is caught up in digital literacy and I think we need a much more robust approach to digital literacy. “I think we still treat the digital as something different when they’re actually just extensions of the face-to-face experience. I think we stop treating the digital as the exception.” For example, he said, instead of teachers simply banning children from using AI, there was an opportunity for them to show students “how flimsy” the technology could be when given a prompt so they approached it with scepticism. He said Australia should look towards Nordic countries, which approaches the relationship between young people and the online world in a “less combative” way, rather than the US, which is said was “going in the opposite direction”