From AusLegal to AmItheAsshole: why I’m downvoting the social media ban on Reddit | Deirdre Fidge

Like the whimsical rattle of my car’s engine, the upcoming social media ban has largely been in the periphery of my awareness: I know it’s there, it’s possibly bad but I’m too lazy to look into it. Until this week, when it was announced that Reddit would be added to the list of platforms required to ban under-16s from its site, joining Facebook, Instagram, X and Snapchat. Also on the Grown-Ups Only list is a video-sharing site I just learned of called Kick that has aggressively specific branding of an energy drink/youth pastor combination. Oh to be young again! For the less chronically online, Reddit is a social news aggregator that uses communities (“subreddits”) to organise content. There’s a subreddit for everything, from mainstream jokes to niche information requests. It’s largely text-based and doesn’t cap word counts so is ideal for self-proclaimed scribes, passionate ranters and people who remember when emoting was popular. *humiliatingly types like this as an example* Related: ‘You’re that guy on TikTok!’: the vice-chancellor who reimagined how a Sydney university could work If Instagram is for hot people and Facebook is for boomers, Reddit is for people who were bullied at school. I use Reddit more than any other platform and am possibly projecting. Sleep hygiene be damned, when insomnia strikes I go to r/thallasophobia and watch videos of the deep ocean until I become very afraid and sleepy. Reports have shown the average Redditor to be just 23. We know young people are dancing on TikTok, and doing whatever the hell is happening on Kick, but there are scores of nerdy children on Reddit about to be booted off the site when the ban takes effect next month. And what then, for those lost souls? Some may suggest “going outside” and I agree, up to a point. Where else can you go for addictive and polarising posts like those found on AITA, a forum that brazenly encourages two of the internet’s most common behaviours: judging strangers and lying. That group satisfies the teeny meanie inside us in a safe and consensual space – it’s harmless, like booing a spider. And what about children who make up part of the 8.6K weekly visitors of the Amish subreddit? Is that just some big joke to you? I have a soft spot for Reddit because it’s where lots of earnest dorks hang out, and part of me wishes I’d realised I was an earnest dork a bit earlier in life. Preventing younger teens from accessing social media might protect them from very real harms but it also might prevent them finding very real safety and support. There have been posts on Centrelink and AusLegal subs from young people in need of help and I’ve been heartened by how quick users are to chime in with advice and support for abused kids, lonely kids, queer kids. Reddit is also where I read about a guy who fantasises his girlfriend is a cockroach, so swings and roundabouts. Related: Instagram restricts what teenagers can see weeks before Australia’s under-16s social media ban begins If the current Australian government has learned anything from the US prohibition era – which they should have – it’s that people love doing things that aren’t allowed. Drinking, dancing, wearing pants if you’re a lady … you tell someone they can’t do something and by gum they’ll find a way. Especially young people, who are always better with technology than the generation before them, just ask any two-year-old who can simultaneously beg for mummy’s iPad while soiling themselves. Maybe we’ll stumble across a new post on AITA: I enacted a policy that banned kids from social media and it backfired. Are we just creating a market for bootleg social media made by an 11-year-old coding genius? Or will kids resort to borrowing an older sibling’s phone, or something even more dastardly: creating new accounts and lying about their year of birth? Only time will tell. Perhaps they’ll resort to more primitive methods of communication by scribbling opinions on rocks and hurling them at one another. Oh to be young again. Deirdre Fidge is a writer and social worker who has written for ABC’s Get Krack!n and The Weekly with Charlie Pickering, and the BBC. Her work has appeared in ABC News, SBS, the Sydney Morning Herald and Frankie magazine