What seems most likely: the law will not be rigidly enforced, as teen-agers and social-media companies figure out ways to circumvent the ban, but the social norm established by the law and its robust popularity among politicians and voters will lead to a significant downturn in social-media use by minors nonetheless. Not every fourteen-year-old is going to draw a moustache on their photograph or get a fake I.D.—and the law should be easier to enforce among younger kids, which may mean that in five or so years it will be rare to find a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old in Australia who has ever posted anything on social media.
This seems like a pretty good result—if you believe, as I do, that social media is obviously bad for children and adults alike. But it returns us to the question I posed at the start of this column, which has a particular relevance for Americans, who live in a country founded on the principle of free speech. The civil-libertarian argument against laws like the one that Australia has passed will probably win out in this country, if only because it happens to be aligned, in this case, with powerful domestic tech companies. That argument is simple, but bears repeating: we shouldn’t place arbitrary age limits on who gets to express themselves in the digital town square, and we shouldn’t require everyone who wants to express their opinions online to submit to an I.D. check. As a journalist, I’m also aware that, for many people, social media is a source of news. It may be a toxic and wildly imperfect alternative to legacy media, but I don’t think we should use government force to effectively reroute children to more traditional sources of information.
In my column on this subject two years ago, I compared the attempt to restrict social-media use to adults to earlier efforts to do something similar with tobacco. The remarkably successful fight against youth smoking did rely, in part, on a shift in social norms; it also depended on a variety of legal restrictions, and heavy taxation—and I did not, at the time, see what equivalent measures might be taken with social media. Ultimately, I thought it might just come down to parents holding the line.
I’m less pessimistic now. One of the recurring themes I discuss on “Time to Say Goodbye,” the podcast I host with the Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper, is what a good life looks like today. When politicians, especially liberal ones, discuss the society that they want to help bring into reality, what are the shared values that they imagine will hold people together? I’m not talking about kitchen-table issues, as important as they are, or even about tolerance and equality. What I have in mind is a vision of how Americans should live on a daily basis in a time when technology runs our lives. The Times columnist Ezra Klein addressed this recently in a piece about the “politics of attention” and the question of “human flourishing.” He concluded, “I don’t believe it will be possible for society to remain neutral on what it means to live our digital lives well.”
I ultimately agree with Klein that we will not be neutral forever, even if our courts make an Australia-like ban nearly impossible. But I have come to believe that, in the not too distant future, the concerns of crusty civil libertarians such as myself will be pushed aside, and a new set of social norms will emerge, especially in the middle and upper classes. The signs of this quiet revolution waged on behalf of internet-addicted children are already all around us. School districts around the country are banning phones from the classroom. “The Anxious Generation,” by Jonathan Haidt, which directly informed the new law in Australia, has been on the Times best-seller list for eighty-five weeks, and has inspired little acts of tech rebellion by parents around the country.
The nascent anti-smartphones movement in America is decidedly nonpartisan, for the most part, and this contributes to its potential and also to the vagueness of its outlines. It also has taken place almost entirely at the local and state level. More than thirty states in the country now have some form of cellphone ban in their schools, which should be applauded. I believe that teen-agers should have the right to post their opinions on social media, but I don’t think they need to do that in the middle of geometry class. If this means that First Amendment rights are further restricted in schools, that may be a compromise that free-speech absolutists have to accept.