Social media helped me find my voice. It’s a shame others won’t have the same chance

Young people are no strangers to being used as a political football. Unlike older generations of Australians, we live under no illusion of government benevolence. We understand that the burden to advocate for our rights and interests in the face of a multitude of intergenerational inequity crises often lies with us.

Now that the federal government has committed to imposing a social media ban, children up to the age of 16 may soon have to say goodbye to their favourite TikTok trends, Instagram DMs, and, crucially, their ability to engage in political discourse and activism online.

School Strike 4 Climate organisers Ella Simons, then 15, and Anjali Sharma, then 17, at the 2021 rally.

Social media has made it easier than ever for young people to access the news. The online presence of major news outlets, as well as emerging outlets tailored specifically to Gen Z, mean in a few clicks we have a world’s worth of headlines at our fingertips. Australian Communication and Media Authority research released in February found 46 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds nominated social media as their main source of news in 2023, up from 28 per cent in 2022.

For this reason, young people are aware of climate disasters occurring around the globe, including record days and years for global temperatures. It means we are more aware of the decisions that will shape the future we will inherit.

And because of social media, young people haven’t been forced to just sit with this knowledge. Rather, online platforms have functioned as a vital arena for sharing information and mobilising support to challenge injustices.

For so many of us, social media is the birthplace of youth activism. It certainly was for me.

My childhood is littered with memories of hearing about climate disasters, such as heat waves and floods making landfall in my home country of India and bringing devastation to its people, including members of my extended family. It was social media that gave me the tools to connect what I was seeing with the words “climate change”, and it was social media that shaped my understanding of the scale of the problem – that we couldn’t solve climate change by simply taking shorter showers or turning off the tap while brushing our teeth.

Social media was my outlet, the antidote to my first traces of climate anxiety at 15 years old, when I created an Instagram account about climate change. For my eventual 12,000 followers, I made regular infographics and memes, trying to spread awareness of the avoidable causes and devastating effects of climate change.

Fifteen-year-old me was outraged that our decision-makers seemed to be deliberately looking away while climate change threatened lives and livelihoods. Thanks to social media, I could share this outrage, broadcast it, use it as a tool to build support, and find like-minded people to help spread awareness.

It was during this time that, through a sponsored Instagram ad, I first heard about School Strike 4 Climate. A few months later, in September 2019, I stood alongside friends as we watched tens of thousands of people pour into Melbourne’s Treasury Gardens to take part in a historic strike that we had put blood, sweat and tears into organising.

The climate strikes of 2019 brought hundreds of thousands of people around Australia to the streets to march for a common objective. It empowered young people with a way to make a stand for their own future, and was an opportunity for businesses, unions, politicians, grandparents and people from all walks of life to walk alongside young people as they did so.

It captured the attention of our country’s decision-makers. And it would have been next to impossible to organise on this scale without social media. Without the ability to organise online, tens of thousands of people in attendance that day, myself included, might not have turned out.

The proposal to ban young people from social media amounts to a strangulation of our political capital, of our ability to engage meaningfully in political processes that affect our lives and futures. It would obstruct the youth activism that has driven transformative change and given young voices a megaphone.

Yes, social media comes with its risks. But in this proposed attempt to protect children, we risk depriving them of their primary means to advocate for their democratic rights.

Anjali Sharma is a climate activist and was the lead litigant in a class action against the federal government in 2021.

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