Luke Gosling’s taken on social media harm from Meta, Instagram

Here’s a news flash for Meta: the Australian government will not be held ransom by multinational companies who blatantly threaten to avoid Australia’s laws, writes Luke Gosling.

Territorians reap countless benefits from social media.

From staying informed of the latest events like the Darwin Festival in real-time to building their businesses’ online brands, or simply helping them choose their next dining venue based on their friends’ recommendations.

Platforms like X, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok have revolutionised the way we connect with like-minded people and new audiences at apparently no cost to the user.

But there is a cost and you or your kids are paying it.

The seamy underside of social media is becoming painfully obvious with each passing day. Social media has been a massive, underregulated experiment from the start.

Beginning in the early 2000s, tech entrepreneurs perched in their Silicon Valley condos accrued enormous social influence through the pervasive reach of their technologies, which they wielded to grow their empires without even the pretence of transparency or accountability for their algorithms.

The logos of Instagram app and its parent company Meta. (Photo by Lionel BONAVENTURE / AFP)

Although the results are still coming in, the effects of big tech’s rule have been devastating. One 2023 Behavioural Science study of 43 papers linked social media use among adolescents with depression, anxiety, poor sleep, low self-esteem, and social and appearance anxiety — with higher rates among women than men.

A 2018 study in JAMA Psychiatry concluded: “Adolescents who spend more than three hours per day on social media may be at heightened risk for mental health problems …”

That’s the result of just three hours of social media use.

This should alarm us because, as of October 2023, 78.5 per cent of Australians had active social media accounts and spent one hour and 53 minutes a day on them.

Keep in mind that this is an average that excludes users under 16 years who, as parents know, are likely to spend much more time on their devices.

Luke Gosling OAM, MP along side his family Sally, Frankie and Kate Gosling in Parap, NT. Picture: Pema Tamang Pakhrin

As a father of two kids entering their teenage years, I’m particularly concerned by the power that big tech has over what our children see, hear, and ultimately think.

And I know that many parents in the Territory feel the same way.

There’s a hellishly vicious cycle afflicting far too many children.

Heavily curated social media posts of their perfect-looking friends can cause compulsive thoughts about their own body image.

Then the algorithm, sensing the child’s attention being gripped by this content, feeds them more and more posts with unnaturally thin bodies, eventually connecting them with pro-anorexia communities.

It’s a short step to developing an eating disorder at the insistence of AI and machine learning. The very same mechanism leads some young users down the path of political radicalisation online.

Instead of taking responsibility, big tech executives have washed their hands of any, taking refuge in discredited libertarian ideology according to which the market should be totally unregulated.

Let Them Be Kids is a News Corp Australia campaign calling for children under 16 to be restricted from having social media accounts.

We see it in Meta’s stubborn refusal to abide by Australian law by not dealing with Australian businesses to get out of paying for Australian news content that they allowed users to post on their platforms.

Flagrantly ignoring the News Media Bargaining Code — the law of the land.

Punishing Australian social media users for their own actions.

And throwing their weight around by shutting down the Facebook pages of Australian media outlets.

In its latest effort to strongarm the federal government, Meta has again threatened to block news on its Australian platforms, announcing that it would not pay Australian media organisations for using their content despite agreeing to do so in 2021.

But here’s a news flash for Meta: the Australian government will not be held ransom by multinational companies who blatantly threaten to avoid Australia’s laws.

The Albanese government is reviewing the Online Safety Act to protect Australians

from online harms and has launched a new inquiry on the impact of social media in part to hold big tech companies to account for their actions.

Territorians have a right to expect that, like any other business operating in the NT, big tech

companies abide by their obligations to the community, on which their social licence depends.

Luke Gosling is the federal member for Solomon.