'Social media is the new smoking': Thanks for finally calling time on it

COMMENT: "At my son's high school concert, I looked around the room wondering which mum will be the next to lose her child?"

As I sat at my son's high school concert last night, bursting with pride, I also felt a huge relief.

 

 

 

Year 11, happy, well, thriving.

Alive.

But then I thought about the parents in the audience:

Who will be next? 

Who's about to have their lives ripped apart when their child takes their own life thanks to online bullying?

That may seem dire, but as a Parenting editor, I've been living and breathing the stories of the children whose lives have been lost in the most heartbreaking way - so many, in just a few months.

Too many.

This is parenting in 2024.

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"Desperate efforts from social media giants"

You know what else I've seen a lot of recently? 

Increasingly piss-weak, desperate efforts from the social media giants - Snapchat, Meta, Instagram - about parenting controls.

Talk about victim-blaming. Taking no responsibility whatsoever, akin to the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument.

They won't act on the blatant evidence until they're forced to - but the head in the sand approach about social media is not working.

Which is why yesterday's news about the Albanese government's age-limits on social media (no one under 16), and enforcing a Duty of Care on the companies (which they've technically always had) is very welcome news.

Image: Nama Winston

That's an understatement: it's a revolution. 

The reforms are hopefully the first of a wave of steps that will make those exposing children to inappropriate content, and allowing them to weaponise their platforms, accountable.

I'm hoping this is the beginning of the end of an era, just like when cigarettes were finally acknowledged for what they are: poison, responsible for deaths.

As the Barefoot Investor quoted recently, "Social Media is the new smoking."

Important viewing:

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There's a difference between phone and internet access, and social media

I've been a long-term advocate of allowing kids access to phones - for communication and information. Expert advice is that educating parents on how to talk to their kids about the content they create and consume is a much more practical and pragmatic approach.

But social media is an entirely different beast; one that's killing our children. Destroying families.

From the insidious fatal TikTok trends, to the cruelty of the verbal assaults, the spread of fake photos, sextortion, and outright threats, we owe the next generation escalated protection. 

Many of us - myself included - are the first generation of parents dealing with the nuclear fallout of social media. A decade ago, I would never have imagined we'd lose children on the scale that we have.

But here we are.

Let's not be the generation of parents that allowed more kids to die.

Originally published as 'Social media is the new smoking': Thanks for finally calling time on it