See Liberals are fools to support social media censorship | The Spectator Australia. As the version on Flat White was somewhat edited, I am reproducing the original, unedited version below, with permission. I should also clarify that this article is another in a series I am writing for the Liberal Reform Association.
As Everett Dirksen once memorably said, there is an evil party and a stupid party. Sometimes, both parties come together to do something that is both evil and stupid, and this is called “bipartisanship.” Dirksen’s quote, intended to describe US politics, is accurate for Australian politics as well.
Among Anthony Albanese’s more contentious policies is his government’s initiative to forbid having a social media account to anyone beneath the age of sixteen. Despite the fact that widespread debate over the costs and benefits of this policy is still occurring, the Liberal Party, or at least the parliamentary establishment of said party, was an enthusiastic supporter of it too. This eager endorsement of yet another usurpation of Australians’ liberties is yet another vindication of the Liberal Reform Association’s necessity. Yet again, the establishment parliamentary Liberal party has proven itself to be Labor Lite illiberalism.
I admit a temptation towards simply dismissing concern about the potential negative impacts of social media. I remember the days when the primary concern about technology centered around young boys being turned into school shooters by Doom, or carjackers and prostitute-murderers by Grand Theft Auto. The concern back in those days was of little boys spending excessive time by themselves and not enough time doing “healthy” things like socializing. Now, the moral panic has completely reversed itself – the concern is over little girls spending too much time socializing with each other via social networking services. To be fair, whilst there is effectively zero evidence that any boy has been turned into a murderer by any video game, there is some evidence that highly-online adolescent girls have fallen prey not just to cyberbullying (which research shows is most commonly committed by adolescent girls against each other) but also to mental health problems via Social Contagion. About 15 to 20 years ago, several online communities which promoted Anorexia and Bulimia (as “alternative lifestyles, not disorders”) became prominent, and more girls started receiving treatment for these ailments. Some evidence suggests that within the last decade, something similar has happened with Gender Dysphoria, and online “trans” subcultures (such as that which developed on Tumblr back during the early 2010s) are inducing GD rather than identifying it.
But just because something is potentially risky or potentially hazardous when done to extremes is not a reason to ban it. Sure, one can point out that when things are risky for children we often forbid children from doing them, and when these things are risky for adults we often regulate them (see driving, drinking, smoking and gambling). But not all regulations or restrictions are automatically justified by the mere presence of some risk – a regulation or restriction must at the very least pass basic cost-benefit analysis.
A recent study from the University of South Australia, published in the JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) Pediatrics, found that moderate after-school social media use is correlated with the best outcomes in children (but didn’t substantiate any causative relationships). Another recent study on British 11 to 14 year olds that was published in the Journal of Public Health did not find support for the idea that adolescent technology use is a major cause of bad mental health, either. In brief, the evidence is mixed and inconclusive, and although there is some evidence that adolescent girls may be especially vulnerable, the policy at issue bans social media for under-16s of both sexes, and we all know precisely how feminists would respond to a “targeted protection” strategy. In short, the benefits of Albo’s social media ban are still uncertain.
What does this legislation actually do? It prevents people under 16 from having an account on a specific set of internet platforms (but not others, although platforms not listed can voluntarily opt in) that facilitate online social interaction. In isolation, this doesn’t look like much – you can still watch hours of antifeminist YouTube content, you just can’t post anything in the comments section. But one can’t just look at this law in isolation from the history which birthed it. Frankly, this law is all about going after X (formerly Twitter) after Elon Musk bought it (eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant was one of those Musk fired). The original draft of the law was focused squarely on X and the law’s scope only broadened following lawsuit threats and growing recognition of just how targeted the law actually was. Indeed, laws of this type (including policies concerning “online mis-, dis- and mal-information”) across the West only started gaining popularity after Musk bought X.
X is targeted because there are lots of nonleftists on X, and X exposes a lot of people to nonleftist thought. One can fairly point out that BlueSky – basically X for leftists – is also covered under the social media ban, but that doesn’t really matter in a world where the public education system and a supermajority of the mainstream media is dominated by people with the same belief system as the orthodoxy on BlueSky. One may fairly point out that right-wing networks like Gab and Truth Social are also covered under the social media ban, but they are marginal networks that function as echo-chambers for self-selected audience, whereas X has more than half a billion monthly active users, a track record of successful use in political organizing (see the Arab Spring, and Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign), and (unlike the platforms owned by Google and Meta) isn’t controlled by the establishment left.
It should also be pointed out that much of the regulation the Albanese government wants to apply to the internet came from the UN, and the UN has been promoting internet censorship for quite some time (partially because some Islamic states want to apply blasphemy laws to the internet as a whole). For instance, in 2015, the UN invited a feminist critic of video games to testify on the subject of “cyber violence against women and girls” (as if such a thing could even exist). “Censor the internet to protect women” failed to gain traction, but “protect the children (especially young women)” seems to have been more successful.
Whatever the Liberal Party’s motivation in backing Albo’s social media laws actually is (trying to win votes from a moral panic? Trying to get rid of all non-establishmentarian right wing thought?) doesn’t really matter. Support of this policy is a monumentally stupid move, and yet more proof that the Liberal Party is controlled by illiberals. This is why the Liberal Party needs reform, in the form of the Liberal Reform Association. Put actual liberals – the rank-and-file membership - in charge of their own party.
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