On Wednesday morning, as Australian teenagers woke to find themselves locked out of Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, British parents will be ordering £500-plus smartphones for their teens to open on Christmas morning. Australia is taking a regulatory sledgehammer to Big Tech while Britain dithers over policies that, in November, around 250 head teachers begged the government to implement.

Australia’s Online Safety Amendment Act, the world’s first blanket social media ban for under-16s, comes into force on December 10 amid fierce debate about whether it represents bold child protection or dangerous overreach. Meta has already ejected hundreds of thousands of young users from Facebook and Instagram ahead of the deadline, while platforms face fines of up to £25 million for non-compliance. Critics have denounced the policy as “rushed” and warned it will push children towards “darker corners of the internet”.

But the Australian experiment, flawed as it may be, highlights just how far Britain has fallen behind in protecting children from the documented harms of social media. While Canberra acts decisively, London continues its policy paralysis, leaving parents and schools to fend for themselves against platforms designed to exploit children’s developing minds.

Indeed, recent US government research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, America’s national public health agency, shows that half of all teenagers now spend four or more hours daily on screens, while 93 per cent of Gen Z admit to losing sleep by staying up past bedtime due to social media, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

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The UK government’s response has been to issue toothless guidance suggesting headteachers “consider” restricting phone use, counsel so weak that it prompted hundreds of school leaders to write directly to Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, demanding statutory action.

When that plea fell on deaf ears, some parents took matters into their own hands. Will Orr-Ewing, Pete Montgomery, Katie Moore, and 17-year-old Flossie McShea have launched a Judicial Review against the Secretary of State for Education. “We know that as a family, we won’t have the strength to resist giving our kids phones if all their friends have them,” Orr-Ewing told me. “That’s why government action is necessary.”

The 40-year-old father of three argued that Britain is experiencing a “sleeper scandal” because children don’t tell parents about harmful content. He sees three “toxic streams” flowing through smartphones: “violent content, sexual content, and dangerous strangers. Children don’t search for this; it comes to them.”

The campaign has enlisted Flossie, a teen from Devon who testified that the Department for Education had failed to protect her and her peers from harm. She describes how girls assume they’re being filmed throughout the day, either posing or hiding their faces, leaving little cognitive capacity for learning. The “AirDropping” of violent and sexual content during lesson time has become routine. “Once you see certain images, you can’t unsee them,” she explained, still haunted by a video showing one child accidentally killing another.

“Most people of our generation have never seen a beheading video,” Orr-Ewing continued, “yet the majority of 11-13 year olds have. This shows how the guard rails have been liquefied.”

Australia’s blunt instrument approach may be problematic, but at least it acknowledges the scale of the crisis. The ban has been condemned for its rushed parliamentary passage and its vague enforcement mechanisms. Privacy advocates warn about the data collection required for age verification, while youth groups argue they’ve been excluded from decisions directly affecting their lives.

Australia’s Communications Minister Anika Wells acknowledged she expects “teething problems” but insisted the ban was about protecting Gen Alpha (anyone under 15) from what she described as young people being connected to a “dopamine drip” from smartphones. “With one law, we can protect Generation Alpha from being sucked into purgatory by the predatory algorithms described by the man who created the feature as ‘behavioural cocaine’,” Wells said.

That man is Aza Raskin, who designed the infinite scroll in 2006, one of social media’s most addictive features. Speaking to BBC Panorama in 2018, Raskin warned: “It’s as if they’re taking behavioural cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface, and that’s the thing that keeps you coming back and back and back. Behind every screen on your phone, there are generally literally a thousand engineers that have worked on this thing to try to make it maximally addicting.”

Despite this insider testimony about deliberate addiction engineering, Australia’s critics raise valid concerns: the legislation leaves “reasonable steps” undefined and age verification remains imperfect. Most troubling is the policy’s disregard for social media’s legitimate benefits for isolated teenagers and LGBTQ+ youth.

Meanwhile, Britain’s alternative — essentially doing nothing while hoping platforms self-regulate — appears even less defensible. “It is a question of getting the harm versus benefit equation into realistic proportion,” Orr-Ewing argues. The government’s reluctance stems from misplaced faith in parental responsibility, while ignoring the fundamental asymmetry of power: individual families cannot compete with platforms that employ neuroscientists and behavioural economists to maximise addictive engagement.

“One day, we hope the devices will be sufficiently safe for this issue to be returned to a family or school’s responsibility,” Orr-Ewing said. “However, there are times of such significant historical upheaval, often with the introduction of radical new forms of technology, when the state has a duty to intervene and protect the most vulnerable: in this case, children.”

International evidence suggests targeted interventions work. South Australia’s school phone bans produced a 54 per cent drop in behavioural problems and a 63 per cent decline in social media incidents. France and the Netherlands are implementing similar nationwide school bans.

Britain could learn from these examples. A statutory ban on smartphones in schools would address immediate educational disruption while maintaining young people’s access to digital communities outside school hours. Clear regulations on platform design would tackle harmful business models without eliminating access entirely.

Orr-Ewing believes taking action represents a rare political opportunity for Labour: “This is so popular, and it’s cross-cultural, bipartisan and cross-demographics. The only people who don’t want it are the big tech lobbyists.” He sees it as a way for Sir Keir Starmer to demonstrate that “children are in a different category”.

When 42 per cent of UK teenagers admit their phones distract them from schoolwork most weeks, we’re witnessing a public health crisis requiring policy intervention. Yet as tech companies reportedly lobby against Australia’s bold approach to curbing the influence of social media, British policymakers continue their studied inaction, gambling that voluntary initiatives can somehow contain platforms engineered to be irresistible.

The stakes extend beyond individual children’s wellbeing. Australia’s willingness to confront Big Tech directly challenges the industry’s global business model. If successful, other nations may follow suit, threatening the unfettered access to young minds that sustains social media profits.

Westminster can either lead by example with targeted interventions that protect children while preserving digital benefits, or remain a useful idiot for Silicon Valley by pretending market forces will somehow solve problems they deliberately created.

This Christmas, as British teens unwrap smartphones while Australian equivalents are, in theory, prohibited from accessing social media, we’ll discover whether courage or cowardice better serves young people’s interests. The early signs suggest that doing something imperfect beats doing nothing at all.

[Further reading: The Online Safety Act came for my short story]

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