How a mother's grief and a media campaign forced Australia's world-first social media ban
A unique alliance of grieving parents, journalists and politicians achieved what tech giants thought impossible — the world's first ban on social media for children under 16.
Emma Mason has told the story of her daughter Tilly’s suicide perhaps 500 or 600 times. She’s told prime ministers and bureaucrats and journalists from the US, and Denmark, and Britain, and Japan, and Germany.
It never gets easier, she says, because each time she never knows which part of the story will “catch in the back of my throat”.
She had spoken in the NSW parliament, then the federal parliament, which she assumed would be a high point of publicity for her cause of protecting kids from social media.
Now she sat next to the New York stage at the United Nations, a captain’s pick for Anthony Albanese, about to extol Australia’s decision to ban social media for under 16s.
The fellow speaker beside her was physically shaking. His nerves felt momentarily contagious.
Mason channelled her uncle Gary, a public speaker from the 1980s. He had told her that the secret to public speaking was trusting that you were the only person who could deliver your speech.
Mason began with details of Tilly’s death, 1317 days earlier.
“My brave little girl, determined to look pretty, put on her makeup one last time …” she began.
“There are Max, Ollies, Livs, Charlottes, Siennas, Allems.
“These are real Australian children who have died by suicide — and social media was to blame.
“So now I ask you to hold my Tilly and all the lost children in your hearts … because how many more Tillys must die?”
Mason didn’t hurry. She projected rawness and poise. The telling of a post-death taunt against Tilly on social media caught in her throat.
“When I spoke, it was like the room froze,” she now says. “They didn’t move. No one moved. Because I started with the actual suicide, I think people went, ‘oh my gracious’.”
She had been allotted eight minutes. Had she gone too long? Was the audience restless?
“I bent down to get my water and I could see out of the corner of my eye this sea of people standing,” she says.
“And I thought in my head, ‘well, it has been a bloody long time’.
I looked up and thought, ‘they’re not moving, they’re standing up and giving me a standing ovation’.
“Wow.”
It was at an intimate dinner at the Lodge in September, 2024, when News Corp editor Melanie Pilling, for the first time, hoped that a social media ban for kids might soon come to pass.
She met Toto, the First Dog, that night, as well as Anthony Albanese’s fiancee, Jodie. Chris Jones, the Courier Mail editor, was there, as well as Albanese’s communications director, Fiona Sugden.
They dined on Asian beef and prawns and chatted about possibilities.
Pilling found herself arguing for a social media ban up to the age of 16, rather than 14 or 15. At some point, it occurred to her that she and Albanese were not talking about the question of a ban. They were talking about the details of a ban.
“I knew then that this was probably going to happen,” she says, “that it was just down to the details. That was a pretty pivotal moment in the process.”
In the preceding months, Pilling had spearheaded a News Corp campaign, Let Them Be Kids, which featured the parents of children who had suffered badly for their social media access.
These were brutal stories: of suicides in bedrooms after bullying or extortion threats; of vulnerable kids who had succumbed to the never-ending presence of social media, on platforms which compounded their anxieties with algorithms which defaulted to their sources of pain.
Albanese had offered initial support for the campaign, as had then Opposition leader Peter Dutton. Well they should have. The data, here and abroad, was irrefutable.
Rates of childhood problems, such as eating disorders and self-harm, went on “vertical trajectories”, as Pilling puts it, after social media use was introduced and normalised for children from about 2011.
More and more kids were being harmed because of their access to the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok. This was not an Australia-only trend. It was happening everywhere.
Pilling met the parents of children who had been hurt.
She was struck by uniform elements to their tragedies. All led lives fixed to a tragic moment of time. All wanted to protect other children. All blamed social media for their loss.
Pilling was a mother. She faced the universal dilemma – do you let your kid get on social media, and navigate its perils and predators, or do you ban them in the knowledge that they might be ostracised for their absence from social media?
In April, 2024, in Brisbane, she had presented her research to the editors of News Corp papers across Australia.
She knew then that 16 was the right age to set the limit. She had analysed the numbers on self-harm, eating disorders, mental health, isolation and depression. You couldn’t see them, she says, and not want to do something.
Numerous editors reached the same conclusion at the meeting. There was little if any discord. This wasn’t about winning a fight or taking down a villain. Instinctively, the editors agreed, a national campaign for greater protections for kids on social media just made sense.
The campaign name seemed obvious. Let Them Be Kids was born. It began with a nationwide newspaper page one collection of photos of children lost to social media.
The campaign would be called many things – ambitious, bold and, in the early days, naive.
It sought to address a problem that even some childhood advocacy groups treated as unfixable. No one – including Pilling – knew if it would work.
After all, the campaign would argue for the acquiescence of social media giants which generally did not bow to sovereign governments. The companies wielded global coverages and greater revenues than small countries. Their strategies of obfuscation borrowed from the tobacco companies of old. They were notoriously resistant to jurisdictional controls
.
Pilling’s campaign got a fortuitous break – days before it began, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen landed in Sydney. She told News Corp that social media should be restricted before the age of 14. She said that platforms knew all about the perils of their products, but had chosen to not address them.
“While I had all of the research and all of the statistics to back up that this was happening as a result of social media, it was really important to me that we had the support of parents with lived experience backing this campaign,” Pilling says.
She rang Wayne Holdsworth, from Melbourne. He threw himself into the campaign only months after his son, Mac, took his life after being sextorted online. Holdsworth had briefly contemplated suicide at the time; instead, he sought to create a legacy by educating others about suicide prevention.
She rang Mason, who took the call in an airport bathroom. Yes, she replied. I’ll be part of that.
She rang Ali Halkic, whose son Allem took his own life at 17 in 2009 because of online bullying. Halkic, an anti-bullying campaigner, struggles to see the lives of his son’s friends who have bloomed and matured.
Some parents had been advocating for change for a long time. As part of Let Them Be Kids, they came to think of themselves as a “team”.
“I do think without News Corp we would have been a disparate group of people,” Mason says.
“The power of News Corp to be able to get some doors open, to get people to talk to us, was what really made it happen.”
There were campaign knockers – there almost always are. Kids will bypass controls, went one argument. Don’t tell us how to parent our children, went another.
Yet Pilling was struck by another aspect of the online response after the launch. Parents en masse lamented their inability to control their children’s social media use. They radiated guilt and indecision.
“They needed the government to do something to help,” Pilling says. “It did seem ambitious because we’ve seen how powerful these companies are. I thought we would get the backing of parents but what we needed was the backing of the government.”
Team Let Them Be Kids headed to Canberra.
News Corp reporter Julie Cross was assigned one of the grimmest jobs in domestic journalism – to speak to grieving parents about the worst thing that will ever happen to them.
Some parents cried down the phone. Some offered their names to the campaign, but couldn’t bring themselves to share their tragedy.
Cross contacted Meta, Facebook and TikTok. The responses were, well, predictable. That their company had invested x millions of dollars on safety. That they had introduced this or that measure.
“It highlighted to me that they were not going to do anything drastic to make the lives of children safer or better,” Cross says.
Holdsworth, Mason and Halkic were among the parents who accompanied Pilling to Canberra in June, 2024.
They met a dozen or so MPs sitting on the Joint Select Committee for Social Media and Australian Society. They told them that social media was “toxic” in an “overwhelming tide” of harms.
Most of the politicians were sympathetic to both their stories and the notion of a ban. Others were non-committal.
Holdsworth told his story about Mac, over and over. He was reminded of what Pilling had told him before the campaign launch – that winning any big social media reform would be difficult.
“There were two or three MPs that were really strong on it,” he says. “There was a handful that I felt that were just sitting on the fence and not really even engaging with this to be honest. I think they were allowing us to speak but not really taking much notice.”
One of the parents expressed doubts after the meetings. Such overtures had been made before with no results, the parent said.
Mason spoke of positivity and persistence in response. She would return, again and again and again, if need be. She was not yet convinced that something would happen. But she believed that it could.
Pilling left the capital with renewed zeal.
“I definitely knew that there was still a lot of work to do and it was just motivation to come back and continue to tell the stories of the people who had been impacted,” she says.
Sadly, there were many more stories to tell. Queensland’s then chief health officer Dr John Gerrard had declared a “public health alert” after statistics showed that rates of hospitalisation for girls 14 years and under who had self-harmed had more than tripled since 2009.
He urged parents to “limit access” to social media for that cohort. His language was instructive. The idea of an outright ban was still novel. Some, from politicians to kids themselves, still believed bans to be unworkable.
Yet momentum swung in the colder months of 2024. Highly-placed anger whipped through the once accepted air of powerlessness.
Various state premiers, including South Australia’s Peter Malinauskas, railed about social media’s hold on kids. NSW’s Chris Minns called social media a “giant experiment” on children.
Meta’s head of global safety, Antigone Davis, fronted the same federal parliamentary inquiry that the parents had addressed a few weeks earlier.
“I don’t think social media has done harm to our children,” she declared, prompting a blistering response from (and a clue to the thinking of) Albanese.
There was another parent delegation to Canberra a few weeks later, then the parents returned for a third time, to chat with Albanese.
Over 30 minutes, the parents spoke, according to Holdsworth, while Albanese listened.
Albanese charmed Mason with his time and friendliness. He laughed so hard at one point that she saw fillings.
The prime minister would later tell Pilling that it was difficult to sit across from a mother or a father who has lost a child to social media and not want to do something.
The parents and the campaign had gained ground – they just didn’t yet know it.
Pilling’s dinner with Albanese at the Lodge – the moment she sensed that a ban could and would materialise – took place about a week later.
Albanese rang her the following week.
Pilling, as these things go, missed the call. She sat in her Brisbane office and returned it.
“This is happening,” Albanese said of the ban. “Congratulations on what you have done.”
For Mason, the news cemented something which puts her apart from many parents who have lost a child. Yes, of course, Tilly’s life counted. But importantly, her pain counted, too.
“She had such an epic shitshow of a life and I felt like her pain mattered,” she says. The changes would go through because what Tilly “went through really needed not to have happened.”
Pilling watched a late night replay of Senate question time the following month. She heard one senator after the other criticise Albanese’s social media ban legislation.
It wouldn’t help, they said. It was Big Brother.
Pilling texted a Prime Ministerial staffer the next morning: “I sat up watching the Senate last night. I really shouldn’t have.”
Albanese went on radio. He wanted children to have a childhood. “There’s nothing social about some social media,” he said.
The legislation passed, despite X claiming that the ban was probably unlawful and infringed on human rights.
Albanese was unequivocal. “We are on your side, we’ve got your back,” he told Australian parents.
Pilling flinched months later when US president Donald Trump introduced tariffs across the world.
Might US companies pressure the Trump administration to pressure the Albanese government to relax the social media laws? Indeed they would.
But when asked by media, Albanese was staunch. There would be no backing down.
In September, 2025, frantic with her work as a family lawyer, Mason boarded a plane, alongside Pilling, and started to write her UN speech.
“It’s crazy,” she thought, “so crazy that little Emma Mason from Bathurst is going to the UN to discuss serious stuff with big people.”
The pair had a day to acclimatise, then bunkered in Mason’s hotel room to write and rewrite Mason’s speech.
Her audience had grown exponentially. There are about 1.2 million 13-15-year-olds in Australia, and about 220 million 13-15-year-olds around the globe.
Mason no longer wanted Australia to change the laws, but the world.
It was 17 months since an audacious idea for tangible change had been first floated in a Brisbane editors’ meeting.
Now Mason’s message was being embraced, tearily, by the EU president Ursula von der Leyen and the Greek prime minister. Twenty-five of the 27 EU countries were looking to follow Australia’s lead.
“All I can do is talk, and I’m happy to do that,” Mason says. “I’m not sure I have all of the solutions, I just have my story.”
A German news crew came to Wayne Holdsworth’s house not long ago. A Japanese news crew came a few weeks’ earlier. More international journalists are on the way.
They want to know about this world-first. They want to know what is required to make it happen, in the expectation that similar bans will be enacted in their countries.
Holdsworth credits Pilling, a “powerhouse” and News Corp for a global shift.
Other campaigns, from parents and politicians, pressed for change. But he says Let Them Be Kids was the strongest, loudest and broadest.
Cross never imagined that Australia would be leading the world. It wouldn’t have happened without the candour and courage of the parents.
“Without their stories and their backing this campaign wouldn’t have worked,” she says. “Nothing would have changed. It really was them opening up their hearts and going through the worst days of their lives, again and again and again and again.”
Mason recalls her reaction to her standing ovation at the United Nations. She briefly considered, then discarded, the idea of curtsying.
“I thought I needed to acknowledge that they have acknowledged me,” she says. “I think I ended up, without even thinking, putting my hand on my heart and giving them a nod.”
Pride and patriotism don’t always come naturally to her. But Mason says she is “bloody proud to be an Australian, to be in the country which has said, ‘it is over, you’re not going to monetise our children’.”
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Originally published as How a mother's grief and a media campaign forced Australia's world-first social media ban
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