By Byron Kaye and Cordelia Hsu
SYDNEY, Dec 8 (Reuters) – Sydney teenager Ayris Tolson thinks the start of her first summer holiday under Australia’s youth social media ban will be relatively easy as she spends time with her family, but as the weeks pass, she fears she will be lonely and isolated.
From December 10, Australia will impose a worldwide social media ban on under-16s, blocking them from TikTok, Alphabet’s YouTube and Meta’s Instagram.
More than a million under-16s will lose their accounts and, nine days later, have their long December to January holidays cut short as most of Australia closes until February.
“You’re basically isolated for about six weeks during the school holidays,” Tolson, 15, told Reuters. “As it goes on, I’ll probably feel more attached to social media. It’s not such a good time.”
Mental health experts say a release just before the longest school holiday of the year may compound the shock for teenagers who rely on technology for socialization and will not have the basic routines or institutional supports of school.
The cold turkey effect of no school and no social media will be particularly pronounced for children in remote locations or minority groups such as migrants and LGBTQI+ people, who rely more on the internet to connect with like-minded people, experts say.
No quantitative study shows how many Australians under 16 use social media to access mental health services, but a 2024 survey by youth service ReachOut.com found 72 per cent of 16-25-year-olds use it to seek mental health advice and almost half use it to find professional help.
“If you’d been at school there would have been a lot of conversation and chatter around it; it’s a common experience,” said Nicola Palfrey, head of clinical leadership at Headspace, a government-funded youth mental health service.
“If you have more time on your hands and you’re in your head quite a bit, if you’re feeling quite anxious or worried or sad, that’s the kind of thing where being alone with your thoughts is not ideal. Those people start to feel anxious.”
The Australian government has touted the ban – which threatens platforms with up to A$49.5 million ($33 million) in fines – as good for mental health as it will protect young people from bullying, harmful content and addictive algorithms.
At a conference this month, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said some young people from marginalized groups “feel more online than in the real world” and should visit various exempt online spaces, including those run by headspace.
The government will collect two years of data following the ban on “benefits but also unintended consequences”, she said.
YOUTH SERVICES READY FOR INCREASE IN CASES
Already the timing – a by-product of the law’s passage through parliament – is causing changes in youth services that rely on social media to reach young people.
Kids Helpline, a telephone and online service, usually experiences a summer break. This year, it is preparing 16 extra advisers, a 10 per cent increase, for a possible flood of referrals due to the social media ban, head of virtual services Tony FitzGerald said.
School-related stress usually eases during the holidays, but “where young people are disconnected from the ability to potentially communicate with each other on these platforms, that can actually increase anxiety,” he said.
“We will ensure that we have adequate advisory resources available to support this growth.”
Lauren Frost, head of policy for the Youth Business Council Victoria, said she was getting so many questions from youth organizations about how to operate without social media that she was planning a new national body to discuss how to approach young people offline. But for the holidays, even offline options will be lacking.
“The interaction that young people have with teachers or support staff or youth workers will be less, so they won’t be able to play that role of supporting young people in this transition period,” Frost said.
“They feel a lot of fear and a lot of anxiety.”
At Perth’s Fiona Stanley Hospital, a clinic that treats gaming and social media addiction will monitor an increase in presentations over the holidays, head of mental health and addiction services Daniela Vecchio said.
Annie Wang, 14, said she uses various social media apps but wasn’t too worried about the ban because she did most of her communication on Discord, which is exempt because its main purpose is messaging.
For those without Discord, she said: “They’re basically closed off from everyone and they’ll probably be on all school holidays, which isn’t good.”
($1 = 1.5053 Australian dollars)
(Reporting by Byron Kaye and Cordelia Hsu, with additional reporting by Stefica Bikesh; Editing by Michael Perry)