South Australia last week began consultations on a proposed social media ban for children under the age of 14. The federal government quickly announced its intention to follow suit with a national social media ban for children (age to be determined) by the end of 2024. This announcement comes hard on the heels of an increased attention to the harms of social media. Specifically, a lot of that attention has been related to reporting of sexism and misogyny in schools. 

In other words, plans to ban social media for children is exactly how an ‘education crisis’ moral panic plays out. 

A perfect storm

Incidents of young men behaving badly in schools getting media attention exists alongside a long debate about whether children can be banned from using social media. The perfect storm of four well-documented types of moral panic (young male deviance, sex and violence, schools and teachers, and the evils of the media) have led to a mediatisation of education that has sustained public anxiety. 

The evidence that the media causes immoral behaviour is fuzzy (though it is stronger in relation to some acts). But that fact is overshadowed by the confident public appeals to common-sense and intuition by people in positions of authority. We saw this debate play out about Dungeons and Dragons during the 1980s Satanic Panic. We also saw it in 1999 after the Columbine school shooting. The two young shooters’ media choices were extensively scrutinised because they were listening to Marilyn Manson and playing shooter video games.

Such mediatisation of an event sustains well-placed public anxiety for longer than it might otherwise have been maintained. When public anxiety is prolonged, policy makers in a democracy are forced to act. The trouble is that journalistic polemics freeze debate and the kind of important dialogue necessary to address the problem. 

As such, policymakers react to a moral panic with poor policy. In the case of the current social media ban proposal, that’s a reactionary authoritarian policy that stagnates what might be otherwise thoughtful localised protocols working to address underlying community problems.

What is a moral panic and why is the social media ban an example of a moral panic? 

The term ‘moral panic’ has been used by social media scholars in response to the proposed bans. But what is a moral panic? A moral panic generally means that the extent and significance of a concern has been exaggerated or overblown. What makes something a moral panic is when a public fear is politically positioned to the point that systems of power begin to respond to it. This means that there is a significant difference between generalised worry about children using social media, and the generalised worry deliberately being used to justify policy.

Being labelled a moral panic does not mean that the foundational morals and values of the nation are safe. Nor does it imply that the reaction is invalid, hysterical, delusional or fantastical (though it might be misused in that way). Labelling something a moral panic is a rhetorical flag that signals an intense and condensed political struggle. Identifying a moral panic helps a political sociologist identify, quite clearly, the lines of power in society. In other words, it helps identify who is influential, who is a political actor worth watching and who are the traditional political actors being ignored. 

Trying to shift the political agenda

“Moral panic’ is a powerful rhetorical device. When a social group, whether academic, political, legal, or journalistic, labels something a moral panic it usually means a power broker is trying to downplay the public anxieties sparking the panic in the first place. It means they are trying to shift the political agenda by signalling to policymakers that the political agenda is not actually responding to a wide public need. Labeling something a moral panic signals that decisions are reactive and being applied at a surface level, without deep thought about the actual cause of the anxiety in the first place. 

At the end of the day, if a social media ban is democratically popular, no amount of thoughtful, expert advice will have any effect. Ironically, the tools that social media researchers are experts in are the same tools that have shifted how politics works, anxieties are spread, and policies are made in Australia. Experts have to acknowledge this shift in how democratic nations now make laws, and advise policy makers within that reality (at least until the technology companies are better regulated).

What do schools have to do with the social media ban?

Schools may welcome this ban because it means that they can use the law to make policies to limit student social media use beyond ineffective mobile phone bans that do not acknowledge students can still access social media sites on their BYOD devices, or even the school-provided devices via a proxy. 

But all the bans in the world will not address the fundamental social issues that create problematic classroom and schoolyard behaviours in the first place. It is not social media that leads young men to distribute ranking lists of their female classmates, nor was it AI that caused them to place the heads of classmates and teachers on naked bodies, nor is it the algorithm that causes them to call their female teachers and classmates foul names. All these tools do is make it easier but even if the tools are banned, misogyny will find another way. 

So the real issue is the lack of time and space that schools have to engage in difficult conversations about how to act in society. We have seen scholarship after scholarship after scholarship about the curriculum crunch and the time poverty of teachers and school leaders. We have seen debate after debate about how to fit more into the curriculum, and very little about finding the time to have conversations about democratic values like equity, inclusion and diversity. Time that is necessary to process big feelings as children come to understand their world. 

Students need time to process ideas

Often this world holds no resemblance to what they thought the world would look like because important skills like critical and media literacy have shattered their world view. It is quite natural for an adult, let alone a teen, to lash out when their worldview is challenged. Teaching of these skills needs time to allow students to process the ideas but schools are so time poor that often critical skills are shoehorned in because a teacher thinks they are important. The reality is that critical skills are not something that can take one lesson. They develop over time, even years. 

The concerns of parents, teachers and school leaders about sexism and violence happening in their own communities has been heard by politicians but because moral panic mechanisms have been deployed through the mediatisation of schools, young men, sex and violence, the political solution is poor and will not address the real issue. Schools and their communities need time to come up with a localised plan. This might include banning social media, but that cannot be something the federal government decides.