Program: From prohibition to social media - what makes bans succeed ... or fail?

Sana Qadar: Welcome to 1925 in the United States of America. The country is five years into Prohibition, which means, officially at least, the sale of alcohol is banned across the country.

Sana Qadar: But that doesn't stop a lot of people. Bootlegging the illegal production and smuggling of alcohol into the country from neighboring places like Canada or Mexico, that's become more common. Speakeasies spring up across major hubs like New York City, and customers just gotta cross their fingers and hope that police won't discover these clandestine setups.

Sana Qadar: But by the late 1920s, opposition to the laws among the American public is growing. In some cities, violent crimes increase under Prohibition. The opposite of what the ban was meant to achieve. And in 1933, a little more than a decade after it began, Prohibition is repealed.

News archive: The lid is off in many places with the downfall of Prohibition being celebrated in real old-time hilarity. Hotels and nightclubs report a real pre-war spirit among those revelers.

Sana Qadar: That is a ban that clearly failed. But there have been plenty of others through time that have been successful, including examples in Australia's own recent history.

News archive: Prime Minister John Howard's hailed the agreement on tough national gun laws as an historic and extraordinary outcome.

News archive: I would hate to contemplate the future of this country if we went willy nilly down the American path.

News archive: We are going to ensure that in Australia, there are no remaining avenues for tobacco companies to market and promote their products, particularly to young people.

Sana Qadar: And now there is another significant ban on the way.

News archive: And this one's for the mums and dads. Social media is doing harm to our kids and I'm calling time on it.

News archive: Australia's social media ban for kids under 16 comes into force in early December. The federal government argues it's needed to protect children's mental health.

Sana Qadar: From ABC Radio National, this is All In The Mind, I'm Sana Qadar. Today, why do certain bans work and others fail? What factors play a role? And which way will the social media ban for under 16s go?

Dr Kate Harrison Brennan: So bans tend to be often temporary measures, but sometimes they are more long term, trying to control access to a harmful substance. A substance is understood to be harmful across a population. So there have been all sorts of examples of bans in history.

Sana Qadar: This is Dr. Kate Harrison Brennan. She's the director of the Sydney Policy Lab at the University of Sydney.

Dr Kate Harrison Brennan: And sometimes we might associate them with prohibitions as well. So a prohibition of alcohol, it might be a ban of access to material that's deemed harmful, or it could be something that is banning more widespread use of an item like plastic straws or plastic shopping bags are more recent examples.

Sana Qadar: But the ban that perhaps looms largest on the Australian psyche involves guns.

News archive: In southern Tasmania, a standoff continues between a gunman and special operations police after a horrific massacre at the Port Arthur historic site.

Sana Qadar: In 1996, in the wake of the Port Arthur massacre, in which 35 people were killed and 23 were injured, the Howard government acted to buy back guns from thousands of people and make it a whole lot harder for people to get access to guns in the first place.

News archive: The new laws were a test of mettle for John Howard. The new prime minister wore a bulletproof vest at a rally in Victoria.

Dr Kate Harrison Brennan: Effectively kind of creating an amnesty and restricting access to firearms was really significant in Australia. And the data shows pretty clearly that if you look at a graph, the use of firearms for widespread killing of people just dropped off a cliff after those restrictions were brought into place.

Sana Qadar: Kate says other bans that have worked pretty well include the ban on lightweight single-use plastic shopping bags, which she mentioned briefly a moment ago.

Dr Kate Harrison Brennan: Although that took some 20 years after an initial move by a council in Tasmania to this becoming nationwide.

Sana Qadar: And the ban on advertising on cigarette packaging.

Dr Kate Harrison Brennan: Like a lot of the rest of the world, we took a long time to deal with tobacco, but eventually we became famous for as a country taking a position on tobacco advertising.

Sana Qadar: But on tobacco, it has to be said, while smoking rates are down, the mix of measures to tackle smoking, which in addition to plain packaging includes high taxation, that has created a pretty lucrative black market for tobacco products in recent years, worth about 10 billion dollars. Maybe we didn't learn all of the lessons from Prohibition.

Dr Kate Harrison Brennan: Colleagues in public health always raise really importantly the issue of when you ban a substance, it's human nature, people will find a way of getting around that. And so we often say when substances are banned or controlled, that other forms will pop up. And so the development of black markets is endemic and really problematic because of this kind of displacement of access underground in ways that then can actually create further harm.

Sana Qadar: So what is it then that makes a ban more likely to be widely accepted and successful? Well, Kate says there are three elements.

Dr Kate Harrison Brennan: The first factor in driving understanding and acceptance is people being persuaded of the inherently harmful nature of the substance as being banned or controlled. So, for example, the way that plastic bags, shopping have been banned for use. That has taken some 20 years of people understanding when they use a shopping bag at their local shops. The full life cycle is kicked off from that. That, of course, doesn't end with potentially a marine animal being harmed because it gets caught in a plastic shopping bag. But it continues on for many thousands of years because the plastic simply doesn't degrade.

Sana Qadar: So maybe people weren't fully convinced of the harms of alcohol back in the 1920s. Plus, while alcohol is harmful to our health, many would argue it also has social and cultural benefits. You'd be hard pressed to make that same argument for plastic bags. Kate says the second thing you ideally need in order for a ban to be successful is a reasonable alternative, something that can fill the gap left by whatever it is that you're banning. And then the third element is...

Dr Kate Harrison Brennan: How we frame a ban or a control of access to something overall, whether it is something that should best be understood as a prohibition of an inherently dangerous substance or, in fact, an abolition which kind of raises the stakes a bit by making the case that by removing this substance, we actually would have access to greater freedom as humans. If a ban is able to be framed, hitting each of those three points, then it has a much greater likelihood of being successful. It's an inherently harmful substance that people can understand how that operates. A substitution or an alternative is feasible, desirable, and the removal of access to that substance ultimately would just give us greater freedom as humans. If you can do all those three things, these types of interventions tend to be far more stable in the long term and effective.

Sana Qadar: Interesting things also happen once a ban is in place. This year, a group of European researchers published a study looking at the opposition towards bans before and after they take effect. They found a consistent drop in the opposition to a ban after it's been implemented versus when it gets announced, which I have to say is kind of been my gut feeling about bans or any big policy changes anyways. They seem to cause the most amount of noise leading up to implementation. And then once the dust settles, the noise settles, too. The researchers in that European study said part of the reason why this happens is that when a ban gets announced, we are really focused on what we're going to lose personally. Once it's put in place, we're less likely to fixate on the personal loss and more likely to think about the gains we get as a society. Other research has found that once laws are put in place regulating behavior, people feel empowered to confront those going against the law. For example, confronting someone who wasn't wearing a mask during COVID-19. We become more likely to police others' behavior and further reinforce whatever the new ban or law is. So the big question is, how do these ideas and particularly the three factors that Kate mentioned that can make a ban more acceptable fit into the new social media laws for kids? To answer that, I'm going to leapfrog over the first factor that Kate mentioned for a moment, which is that people need to be persuaded of the inherently harmful nature of the thing being banned. We'll return to that. I want to start with factor number two, whether there are reasonable alternatives to the thing being banned. And Kate says that still needs to be worked out.

Dr Kate Harrison Brennan: If we want an introduction of a minimum age to be successful, we need to think pretty swiftly about what is the substitution going to be as teens and tweens are not connecting online under the age of 16, like they have been. But they still have this drive to connect socially. How are we going to facilitate that?

Sana Qadar: And that's a tricky question to answer, right? Because as she explains, communities, cities, the lives of modern families, all of that's changed significantly over the last two decades. We kind of need to redesign elements of how we live for this to be successful.

Dr Kate Harrison Brennan: Put simply, this might mean for an individual family thinking through getting back the old landline phone, how are kids going to connect to their friends? Could they have a mobile phone that is on a cord, it's in the kitchen or it doesn't leave the kitchen, it just gets used there so that kids can contact their friends easily? It might look like in some communities facilitating more sports or community activities after school or indeed like organized, subsidized after school hours care.

Sana Qadar: In terms of element number three, how a ban is framed and whether it's seen as a freedom giving move, here's how she sees it.

Dr Kate Harrison Brennan: My point of view is that social media is designed using persuasive design. You could substitute the word there of addictive design. These online worlds create something that is kind of super normal. It's very addictive because it dumps dopamine in our system and tells us, you know, this is this is what we deep down are kind of made to do. And so it has significant effects on children's brain development and social and emotional development more broadly. And so this measure really, in my mind, is trying to ensure that children have the freedom not to be persuaded by social media at such a young age, but actually have the freedom to have a real childhood and to actually develop social bonds that are at a human pace. And so it's got incredible potential to enable Australia to be one of the best places in the world for children to grow up. But as we've talked about how you characterize this is really determinative. And it's why it's so important to have these types of public conversations about the nature of the ban or the imposition of a minimum age here on social media.

Sana Qadar: This is probably why in a lot of the federal government's communication around the new laws, they're not actually using the word ban. They're calling it a delay in access to social media or a restriction. However, in the media and elsewhere, it's the ban language that's caught on.

Dr Kate Harrison Brennan: But what's important here, again, is that teens need to have the opportunity to understand the rationale of this, and they deserve that opportunity to be brought into the rationale of it, but also to see this as a freedom giving move, not a freedom removing measure.

Sana Qadar: So that is part of the argument, at least in favour of the social media ban slash restriction slash delay for under 16s. But as we know, not everyone sees it quite that way.

Ciara: Hi, my name is Ciara Walsh. I'm 14 years old and I think that the social media ban is a bad idea.

Lily: We should have rights to choose what does and what doesn't work for our families.

Eva: I think overall, it's kind of just like a band-aid solution. I don't know. I feel like there's two things that are probably going to happen. Kids are going to get past the verification methods and stuff, and then other kids will get pushed into more unsafe social media platforms.

Lily: My teenager in my life is incredibly into their artwork and uses social media to connect with other artists all over the world.

Ciara: The other day in class, I was talking to my teacher and he thought that it was a good idea. And I asked him why. And he said, because when his son was like 12 and first was allowed to use social media, he got super addicted to his phone and never came out of his room. But my rebuttal to that was that if that happened when he first got social media, it doesn't mean that that's not going to happen when he's 16. It just means that he's going to become super obsessed with social media when he's 16, when you have exams and like, you know, studies are really important at that time.

Sana Qadar: Now, I have to say, although the majority of people who sent us voice notes with their opinions were not jazzed about the social media ban, I'm just going to stick with that language for consistency's sake. It won't shock you to learn that it's not exactly a representative sample. By comparison, a 2024 poll by YouGov found 77% of Australians back the under 16 social media ban, with only 23% opposing the measure. And this poll was based on a sample of 1515 people. But the results were weighted to be representative of the population by age, gender, education, income and other factors. And so that suggests there is broad support for the ban, which is the first element Dr. Kate Harrison Brennan from the Sydney Policy Lab mentioned, the first element that you need in order for a ban to have a chance of being successful.

Dr Kate Harrison Brennan: The first factor in driving acceptance is people being persuaded of the inherently harmful nature of the substance as being banned or controlled.

Sana Qadar: And look, we know that youth mental health is in the tank. A Lancet study from last year found in less than two decades, there has been a 50% increase in the rates of mental ill health among young people in Australia. But, and there is a but, in terms of just how much social media is to blame for that, that is actually really unclear.

Dr Alexis Whitton: So the interest in the link between social media and mental health has been around since the late 2000s, and we've seen a surge of scientific publications come out really since 2010 when social media platforms became more mainstream.

Sana Qadar: This is Dr. Alexis Whitton. She's an associate professor and psychologist at the Black Dog Institute and the University of New South Wales. Part of her work involves developing web-based interventions for mood disorders like depression.

Dr Alexis Whitton: Now, what's really interesting is that although there's such a wealth of research in this space, the findings are really inconsistent. So we see findings showing correlations between higher rates of social media use and worse mental health, but we also see research showing either no correlation or beneficial correlations for certain subgroups. So this is really complex and it's difficult to make sense of sometimes.

Sana Qadar: I feel like that's counterintuitive to what a lot of people assume is in the research literature. Like that feels like news almost, that we don't actually have it pinned down that social media is causing mental health problems because there's been so much written about this.

Dr Alexis Whitton: Sure. And I think sometimes complex explanations for something that is so salient and important as increasing rates of youth mental health. When we look at technology, that's something that's very visible. It's something that parents and teachers can look around and they can see that that is something that has changed since when they grew up. It's also something that's very appealing that we can maybe control and try to regulate as a solution for what is actually a really complex issue.

Sana Qadar: So do you think the legislation is misguided or predicated on like a shaky foundation?

Dr Alexis Whitton: So one of the core motivations behind rolling out this social media legislation is that there is such a wealth of evidence on the correlation between social media and mental health. Now, we know that correlation does not imply causation. And it is just as likely that the relationship goes in reverse. So we might see that young people who are experiencing mental health difficulties are more likely to go online and spend more time online searching for help and support. And it could also be bidirectional. But in the face of evidence that suggests there might be signals of risk, one perspective is that it is right to act now as a precautionary approach to try to mitigate risk. So that's where this is coming from, even though we don't have definitive evidence of causality.

Sana Qadar: Why isn't there causation data after all this time that we've had with social media and smartphones?

Dr Alexis Whitton: Measuring social media use is incredibly difficult. A lot of studies rely on self-reported social media use, which has a range of different problems with inaccuracies in recall. And so one of the issues comes down to a lack of reliable data on social media use itself. The other side of this is a lack of longitudinal studies. So if you take a sample of young people and you measure their social media use and their mental health symptoms, you might find an association. But to establish causality, you need to show that increased social media use occurs and precedes the onset of mental health symptoms or exacerbates it. Right. And those studies are really difficult. You have to follow young people up over many years and you have to capture social media use in a very granular way.

Sana Qadar: Can I tell you what I feel just as a parent of like a five year old? Who's not quite at the stage of knowing about social media or being on it at all. I feel kind of relieved because I'm like, OK, by the time he reaches the stage where he's aware of this and wanting it, I can be like, sorry, the government says you can't have it. That argument is off the table for me. Do you feel like there are parents that feel that way? Like that's a significant cohort of people? Or what are you hearing from parents? What are they saying?

Dr Alexis Whitton: Look, I also as a parent of a five year old, I can absolutely empathise. In some way, this legislation makes the job of being a parent simpler in some ways. You know, it does take that argument out of their hands to some extent. But what the research is showing is that young people will attempt to access social media platforms anyway. So parents shouldn't be lulled into this sense of security. And it is really important for parents to maintain an open dialogue so that they can understand whether their child is accessing social media in unregulated spaces and so that they can be attuned to some of the harms that they may be encountering in those spaces.

Sana Qadar: That is useful advice because there are harms aplenty.

Seb: Yeah, so basically it was just really gruesome out-of-pocket videos like shootings.

Sana Qadar: This is Sebastian from Adelaide. He is 18 years old now, so he won't be affected by the new laws. But he was about 12 when he first got social media and about 14 when this kind of graphic content first slipped into his feed.

Seb: People getting run over or like leaked footage of just things that quite gruesome and would shake up a little kid.

Sana Qadar: And how are you coming across these videos? Was it like friends kind of sharing this or the algorithm just at some point throwing it up? How would you come across these?

Seb: Yeah, so it was mainly just Instagram reels. But some days you'd have a completely normal page and your algorithm would just be showing you sports or your friends or something. And then the next day it would just be showing you these gruesome videos.

Sana Qadar: And would you like talk to your friends about it? Like what would your friends say when everyone was seeing these things?

Seb: Yeah, they would be shown and then everyone would just have like a big reaction. And yeah, it got a bit squirmish, but then it wouldn't really be spoken about again.

Sana Qadar: And so what did you do when you saw those or how did you feel?

Seb: Well, at the time, everyone was saying it. So I just thought it was a normal thing on social media. So I didn't really have anything else to think of it.

Sana Qadar: So it didn't it didn't freak you out or bother you at the time? It felt like kind of socially normal?

Seb: No, it did. It did freak me out. And like, obviously, I was like, geez, that's really strange and gruesome. And when I look back at it now, it's like it shook me up. But yeah, now seeing it that I've been on social media for a long time, I feel like kind of normal something to say like that.

Sana Qadar: So what do you think of the ban?

Seb: I think it's a good thing for younger kids. 16 is probably a bit old. I probably have it like around 14 or something like that.

Sana Qadar: Looking back now, do you feel like 12 years old was too young to have been logging onto social media for the first time?

Seb: Yeah, honestly, probably.

Sana Qadar: One of the highest profile supporters of Australia's social media ban for under 16s internationally is social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He's the author of the bestselling book, The Anxious Generation, and he's really vocal about the potential negative impacts of social media and smartphones.

Jonathan Haidt: Australia is leading the world. Australia, your leaders found the guts to say, look, we're just going to do it.

Sana Qadar: This is him speaking to the ABC recently on our morning news program, ABC News Breakfast.

Jonathan Haidt: What I would like to say to Australian families is as long as everyone understands that you're all in this together, it's going to go better than you expect. The other thing to add is the point of this whole movement is not just put down the phones or get off social media. The point is to restore childhood.

Sana Qadar: If you're not familiar with his work, Jonathan Haidt is known for arguing that the phone based childhood that many kids have now has harmed child development and is directly tied to the youth mental health crisis we see today. But his work has also faced criticism for overstating this link and kind of ignoring the whole correlation doesn't equal causation issue. Despite that, he still gained a large following for his ideas. But Alexis from the Black Dog Institute has a really compelling rebuttal to some of his arguments.

Dr Alexis Whitton: Look, I think the arguments put forth by Haidt are very much grounded in research on American youth and the Australian context is quite different. You know, we are a geographically very dispersed population and there are young people whose only manner or way of interacting socially and gaining access to mental health support is online. I also think that it is really difficult to study some of these more complex socioeconomic drivers of mental ill health. They are country specific, but those complex issues aren't as easy to digest into accessible, engaging pieces of literature. But I certainly agree with the premise of it. It is important to create safe spaces for young people online. It's just that we really need to make sure that the way this is being implemented has the intended effects and doesn't cause unintended harms. That's why it's so critical to evaluate this properly.

Sana Qadar: To that end, the government is funding research into the impact of the legislation. The e-safety commissioner has appointed an advisory group of 11 experts from Australia, the UK and the US. And this group is being led by Stanford University's social media lab. They will evaluate the implementation and outcomes of the under 16 social media ban, or in their language, the social media minimum age obligation. One of Alexis's colleagues at the Black Dog Institute is on the advisory panel.

Dr Alexis Whitton: Now doing this sort of evaluation, which the government has committed to funding. It's not simple. If you think about the conditions of this legislation, the responsibility is on social media platforms to identify accounts held by those under the age of 16. And take reasonable steps to remove them. Now, otherwise, they face considerable fines in the order of 50 million dollars. Now, you can imagine the incentive to provide data. That's not going to be that high. So assessing the rates at which young people are still accessing social media is going to be quite difficult. But we really need that data to be able to tell whether this legislation is doing what is intended.

Sana Qadar: So all of that's to say, whether this ban becomes a success story or a cautionary tale will depend not just on policy, but how families and platforms and young people navigate what comes next. And in the meantime, if you have a young person in your life, whether or not they will be affected by this ban now or later down the track, if you want to limit their screen time in general, Alexis's parting advice is something that I've heard a lot. You've probably heard before something that sounds very simple, but is often so hard to do. You need to model the behavior you wish to see.

Dr Alexis Whitton: And it might be a time to discuss new family approaches to social media use together rather than something that impacts the young person and that they're navigating on their own. So really treating this as an opportunity for the whole family to evaluate their digital behavior.

Sana Qadar: That is Dr. Alexis Whitton, associate professor and psychologist at the Black Dog Institute and the University of New South Wales. You also heard from Dr. Kate Harrison Brennan. She's the director of the Sydney Policy Lab at the University of Sydney. Thanks also to 18 year old Sebastian from Adelaide. If you're a really keen listener, you might remember his voice from our episode earlier this year titled Fighting for Focus in the Age of Distraction. Thanks also to Eva, Ciara Walsh and Lilly Mae Martin and everyone who sent us messages and voice notes with your opinions about the ban. I'm really sorry we couldn't include everyone in the end, but we really appreciate the effort that you all took to send us your thoughts. So thank you. Final thanks for our producers, James Bullen and Rose Kerr, as well as sound engineer, Micky Grossman. I'm Sana Qadar. Thank you for listening. I will catch you next week for our final episode of the year.