Brisbane, Australia Kirra Pendergast speaks to thousands of teenagers annually in her capacity as a cyber safety educator.
She knows what they do on it – texting, bullying, sextortion, threats – but nothing could have prepared her for the aggression she received this month from a group of 12 and 13 year olds.
She had been invited to deliver three speeches at a high school in Australia, but within the first 15 minutes of the first speech, a group of boys began to shout the insults that modern trolls use to women in their comments sections about the women depicted on Pendergast’s slide.
Teachers attempted to quiet them down, and then a girl in the front row said the final swear word that broke through Pendergast’s facade and caused the special guest speaker to cry and leave the classroom.
“I can’t believe I’m crying on film on here,” Pendergast said in a selfie video filmed soon after in her car.
“I think that the actions that I saw today are a result of things that they have watched on the internet,” she added. “Well, I know that it is, and it must be altered.”
Pendergast, who founded and leads global cyber safety training company Safe on Social, used to argue against a ban on Social media for children, but now she is all for it.
I actually went through every single reason that anyone had ever given to me and I had a rebuttal for all of them. And then I thought, ‘You know what? Ban it.
Just ban it,’” she told BBC News.
The Australian government plans to pass what it terms ‘world’s best’ laws this week to delete social media apps such as Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and X from the gadgets of children below the age of 16.
If approved, the law would result in courts to fine social media companies nearly $50 million Australian dollars if they failed to ensure that children below the legal age were not allowed to use the service.
The government is not dictating how it should be done, but at the very least, it says it wants tech companies to use age verification technologies.
And that comes with privacy issue that the government said will be resolved in the legislation.
They argue that it is a piece of legislation rushed to be passed to meet the political agendas in the run-up to federal election, which may lead to children who break the rules being pushed further into the unregulated parts of the internet.
Its proponents argue that this is one life saved, which is enough to justify the measure.
Deadly Bullying
Over the past few months, two more young girls have died by suicide, and they are not alone; many children have killed themselves after being accused of cyberbullying.
Charlotte O’Brien died in September, while Ella Catley-Crawford died in November, both aged 12, and their families claim the girls were bullied through the snapchat app.
In the case of Ella, girls were said to have created fake accounts of other people on the app and shared private videos that she sent.
“SOCIAL MEDIA BULLYING IS REAL,” her relatives wrote in capital letters on a GoFundMe page created to help her family pay for her funeral.
Matthew Howard and Kelly O’Brien from Charlotte have also come forward to support the campaign for the underage ban on social media.
They are carrying out what Charlotte requested before she died – to raise awareness.
They recently went to Canberra to deliver a petition to the prime minister that was signed by 124,000 people – the largest in the world on the subject – which called for the age limit for social media to be raised from 13 to 16 years old.
They went to Canberra earlier this month to hand over a petition to the prime minister signed by 124,000 people, which is the largest on the topic in the world, to increase the age limit of social media from 13 to 16, 36 months.
“No parent wants to go through what we’re going through,” Howard recently said in a video call with the 36 Months campaign group that was provided to BBC News.
Dr. Danielle Einstein, a clinical psychologist, and author said that schools are in a minefield of interactions that are occurring in the social media arena, after school, and in sites that the school cannot control.
“Teachers are under so much pressure to solve the fact that the culture has been undermined by social media, by this sort of mean behavior that subtly is being permitted to exist, just because it’s so hard to stop,” she said.
Einstein supports the social media ban because she opines that phones and group chats are substituting face to face interactions that teach children how to relate with people and solve problems.
“All of a sudden, any errors they make are broadcast and they go straight out to a whole group,” she said. “They don’t get a chance to make these small errors and for the errors not to be significant.”
The Political Leaders Have Called For The Ban
It is unusual for the main political players in Australia to be in accord, but on this issue, they are.
In June, the Liberal opposition party called for a social media age limit which was supported by the prime minister and all the state and territory leaders.
“I want to talk to Australian parents,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in a video posted to Instagram, one of the platforms that are banned in Russia.
‘Often it is not social at all,’ and we all know that.” The truth is it’s doing harm to our children, and I’m calling time on it,” he said.
Dany Elachi gave it up in his own home a few years ago when he and his wife surrendered to pressure from their daughter who wanted to use their old smartphone.
She was 10 at the time. “In a few weeks, we realized that it takes over her life,” he said to BBC News.
The final thing that I believe pushed her mom and I over the edge was catching her messaging friends at midnight under her blanket. Well, simply, we just joined all these points together.
They said, we can’t do this for another 10 years.”
They began the Heads Up Alliance in an effort to pressure other parents not to get their children smartphones and since then the network has expanded.
Elachi is confident that the social media is negatively affecting the Australian kids. This is how parents are seeing with their own eyes. I mean, there are suicide notes.
Kids who have killed themselves write their suicide notes, explaining that social media was involved in their deaths, and we are still here arguing about whether social media is bad for our children’s health?
“It’s actually disgraceful.”
As Mentioned Before, Legislation ‘motivated By Political Issues’
For many specialists, the issue is not in the fact that social media has a number of detrimental outcomes – but in whether a complete ban is the solution.
In the letter to the government signed by 140 experts last month, the ban was described as a “sledgehammer approach” to the issue that eliminates the reason for technology companies to develop more ways to protect children from the internet dangers.
This week, a joint select committee looking into social media in Australia appeared to concur.
Amanda Third, co-director of the Young and Resilient Research Centre at Western Sydney University, said that for many children, the current sign-up age of 13 is ‘entirely appropriate’.
“The concept of a ban is very alluring to parents because it seems to remove one more thing from your list of concerns,” she said.
“But in actual fact, a ban is not going to deliver the relief that parents are looking for.” This, of course, will remain one of the realities of parenting in the future as well.”
She said that those who are calling for a ban are “driven by politically and economically inspired agendas.” The two major parties that support the ban will be in a federal election next year.
News Corporation, which has been instrumental in the push for the ban, has a different issue with Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram.
Meta, in March, said it would no longer compensate Australian providers for news, an action that drew the ire of News Corp, the market leader in Australia’s concentrated news market.
In June, the News Corp Australia’s executive chairman Michael Miller made a nationally televised speech urging the government to force Meta to pay, stating, “We can’t let ourselves be bullied.”
News Corp had started its “Let Them Be Kids” campaign the previous month, sharing stories of child victims of social networking sites and called for a ban on under 16s from using the sites.
The Courier Mail, owned by News Corp, recently attributed the campaign with framing the discussion on “the harm that tech platforms inflicted on young people … that reporting is now going to cause shifts to online legislation.”
It is a long way to go before any ban is put in place.
Despite its passage, the government says it will allow the tech companies up to a year to implement the law with the deadline of the switch-off to be determined by the communications minister.
DIGI, the industry body of social media companies such as Meta, Snap, TikTok and X, was met with hostility on Monday during an emergency senate committee hearing on the bill.
In a line of questioning about how providers would destroy data to meet privacy requirements, senators laughed when DIGI managing director Sunita Bose said: “They also agree with the concept of data minimization which is held by our members.”
Independent Senator David Pocock replied: “I hope they pay you a lot of money, because it must be a tough task to try and convince some of your members to be good faith players.” The committee is expected to present its report on Tuesday while the senate is to approve the bill on Wednesday.
Last week in a post on Twitter, X owner Elon Musk said that the bill was too much interference from the government. The self-described “free speech absolutist” and friend of US President-elect Donald Trump, tweeted that the ban “appeared to be a backdoor approach to regulating the use of the internet by all Australians.”
Other providers have tried to address the issue in one way or another.
The company that owns the messaging service, Snapchat, through which Charlotte O’Brien and Ella Catley-Crawford claimed they were bullied said that bullying has no place on the app and urged children who have issues to block and report offenders.
Meta’s Instagram recently collaborated with Kids Helpline in an anti-bullying campaign ‘How do you mean?’ which asks creators how they deal with bullying on the platform. Some of them asked why they wouldn’t just log off and said it is ‘unfair and unrealistic’ to log off because ‘my community, friends and family are online’.
The message was that “everyone gets mean behavior” but there are ways to handle it – specifically, push a button to report and block – before going to an adult.
Some parents think that there is enough meanness in life as it is, and that social media should not be included – especially in junior high, which Einstein the psychologist says is the age when children start grouping and excluding those classmates who for some reason or another do not fit in.
Pendergast, the cyber safety educator, explains that she has witnessed enough meanness during her trips to schools across the United States to understand that there is a problem.
“If a simple rule saves one child, and that child becomes a strong, healthy young person with their privacy preserved, isn’t it worth it?” she wrote in a Facebook post.
“Why would we deny a child that protection?” Why is child online safety being politicised? And why has the ‘ban or no ban’ discussion become a contest, when the only ones getting left behind while we fight are the children?