I grew up alongside the Internet. As a young, homeschooled, evangelical teenager in the 1990s and 2000s, I did everything young teenagers do with the Internet: I used social media, frequented chat rooms and forums, messaged friends and strangers on apps, searched for information about the world, pirated music, played FarmVille, link surfed on Wikipedia, viewed pornography, and so forth. While the Internet has changed in many ways since its inception—most notably due to the corrupting power of algorithms—it remains the same as always: potent and addictive while both empowering and dangerous.
The news of Australia’s social media ban for children, therefore, has hit me hard. Being online since I was a kid radically shaped who I am. While sometimes that shaping was negative, it also came with many positives: access to information about the world, exposure to diverse and opposing viewpoints, help with finding others like me, communities to challenge me to grow and evolve, and platforms to speak up and out about my experiences. It breaks my heart to think that many children will no longer get those same experiences and opportunities.
It also angers me, because I believe children have a right to access social media and the Internet. Taking away these tools is a fundamental violation of children’s rights to expression, community, and information. The United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) declares, for example, that children “have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice.” Similarly, the Convention states that children have rights “to freedom of association and to freedom of peaceful assembly” and to “access to information and material from a diversity of national and international sources.”
Banning social media or otherwise restricting children’s access to the Internet is a significant attack on all these rights. And this isn’t a theoretical concern. This will have devastating impacts in real life, especially for isolated and abused children who find social media and the Internet to be lifelines or avenues to support or freedom. Already, other countries as varied as Denmark and South Korea and the United States are considering how to follow Australia’s lead—a lead that could soon extend to age verification for simply using search engines.
It was through social media and the Internet that I created communities for abuse survivors like Homeschoolers Anonymous, formed advocacy organizations like Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out and the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, met friends and peers and fellow advocates at the Child-Friendly Faith Project and Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment (GRACE), connected with exvangelicals like Cindy Wang Brandt and became involved with Unfundamentalist Parenting and Parenting Forward, and networked with people interested in and passionate about child liberation theology. I owe all of that to social media and the Internet. None of that would have happened without those tools existing and without my intimate knowledge of how to use those tools—knowledge I developed as a child.
Now, don’t get me wrong: it’s not that I think social media and the Internet are harmless or innocent. As a millennial who grew up with the Internet, as well as a child protection professional with an MHS in Child Protection, I am fully aware of how unsafe the Internet can be. I am fully aware that predators lurk everywhere, that they have sophisticated tactics for grooming children for abuse and trafficking, and that social media in particular has become capitalistic and all-consuming of children’s lives and attention. I do not dispute any of that.
But I simply do not believe that a ban on social media for children or restricting children’s access to the Internet will address any of those concerns. This is for many reasons. The most important is that adults will never understand social media and the Internet like children and young people do. If you grew up with social media and the Internet, you should be intimately aware of the fact that older people struggle immensely with them. Ever since the tools were created, children and young people have drastically outpaced adults in their understanding of both and in their ability to use and manipulate both. As a result, children and young people have an ever-expanding and evolving knowledge base for how to circumvent the boundaries adults create for children online.
I am not exaggerating here. Sometimes people ask me how social media and the Internet can save the lives of isolated and abused homeschooled children. “If the children are so isolated and abused, how would they get access to social media or the Internet?” While this question incorrectly assumes all isolated and abused children are chained in windowless basements instead of walking among us every day, it fundamentally underestimates children and their ingenuity. If you know homeschool alumni who were isolated or abused as children, or if you spend any time on forums for such children like Reddit’s Homeschool Recovery, you understand even isolated and abused children figure out how to access these tools. Whether it’s using the family computer at 2 am or sneaking away to a library with computers and the Internet, children will find a way. They will find a way around your passwords, around your tracking systems, around your content blockers, around your bans, and so on and so forth.
While this fact highlights how boundaries and bans are mostly ineffective, I am not interested in efficacy right now. What I am trying to communicate is something more important: children and young people are better at and safer with these tools than adults. This shouldn’t be a controversial statement. This has always been the case. While adults do use social media and the Internet to groom, manipulate, and prey upon children, and always have, it has always been adults who have been most vulnerable online. It is adults who fall for online scams about wiring money to Nigerian royalty or a mail-order bride from Eastern Europe, not children. It is adults who fall for phishing emails that get them to share their passwords, bank account numbers, and other personal information, not children. It is adults who read and share extremist disinformation that fractures the public square, not children.
Can children be scammed online? Yes. Can children click on unsafe links and accidentally download viruses? Yes. Can children read and share extremist propaganda? Yes.
But adults do those things as well—and much more so. So, if you’re going to ban social media or restrict Internet access for children because they do all those actions sometimes, you should ban and restrict these tools for adults, too—especially older adults. Older adults are highly vulnerable to online abuse and manipulation, yet no one is suggesting banning Boomers from Facebook.
Why is that? Because it would be offensive to adults. Because we treat adults and offenses against them more seriously than we treat children and violations of children’s rights. Australia’s social media ban is childism and adultism, pure and simple.
Thankfully, human rights organizations are recognizing this and speaking up about it. Recently, Amnesty International noted that, “While social media platforms’ practices are harmful to younger users, young people also have a right to express themselves online, access information and participate in the digital town square.” Similarly, the Australian Human Rights Commission warned that the ban “will affect various human rights contained in international human rights treaties, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the CRC.” And the Human Rights Law Centre argued that, “Instead of piecemeal age restrictions, we need an overarching duty of care that ensures digital platforms prioritise the safety, privacy, and wellbeing of all their users, not just the youngest. These laws would undermine the human rights of young people in unacceptable ways, including their rights to freedom of expression, access to information, and privacy.”
Social media and the Internet are children’s rights because they are human rights. Are rights always safe? Of course not. This is why rights carry responsibility and can be limited for public safety, for children and adults alike. But dangerous rights are rights just the same. Children must be taught Internet safety just like adults and social media companies must be held accountable and liable for their actions. But taking away rights from a marginalized group is authoritarian.
Banning kids from being online is, in most cases, neither good parenting nor good policy. It’s what an evangelical homeschooling parent or a Christofascist would do.