08.01.2026

How not to overcome anxiety and depression

Australia has taken the lead with its social media ban on under-16s. France, Britain, Spain and other European countries are considering following suit. How should we respond? Don’t fall for the hype, says Scott Evans

A little over two weeks before Christmas, Australia’s gift to its kids and adolescents was to strip them of their social media accounts and ban them from creating new ones.

Before addressing the story and some questions around the effects of social media on young people today, it is important to be clear from the outset that any observational study or experience faces a glaring problem, when comes to grappling with rates of depression, anxiety and other related symptoms in the adult and youth populations: and that is, of course, the great recession (2007-09) and the long hangover since, including austerity. Unavoidably then, I am leaning heavily on my own personal feeling on the matter, so one should grab the nearest pile of salt and give it a good pinch!

The Online Safety Amendment, as it is amending the earlier Online Safety Act, is intended to prevent young people from engaging with any platform which allows open-ended social interaction and posting.¹ The complete list at the time of writing seems to be: Facebook, Instagram (and hence Threads), TikTok, Snapchat, X (Twitter), YouTube, Reddit, Twitch and Kick. Understandably for practicality’s sake, these are only large platforms, though nothing would prevent banning something like, say, small political forums. It is not intended to stop kids watching public YouTube videos, does not ban platforms like Discord (for now) and does not touch cesspits like 4chan (which, as the reader may well know, has no real account system).

The tech workarounds are trivial. Because the legislation does not make presenting government ID a requirement, platforms must provide at least one other way of working out the age of its users: a selfie to estimate age, or by analysing user behaviour on the platform. In terms of facial analysis, the workaround is both obvious and amusing: simply hold up a decent photo of your parent, Anthony Albanese, or whoever. Regarding behaviour, that is no doubt harder to work around, but obviously not foolproof either. I doubt these companies will expend much effort bothering to enter into an open-close loophole arms race with such users.

For those who do not particularly care about remaining plugged in to a particular social media ecosystem like TikTok, but just want to use it as a way to follow friends, keep up with news, switch off and shitpost all on the one website, they can simply turn to platforms not included in the ban. At least some TikTok refugees, following their American counterparts, may have turned to the Chinese alternative, REDNote.

Finally, there are VPNs and Tor. One simply has to reroute one’s internet traffic through a country without these restrictive laws for a website to agree to serve you up its content and normal user registration form. The government could still ban traffic through known VPN servers, but that would be a much more difficult sell to the broad population.

Motivation

However, the trouble with merely pointing these technical hurdles out and saying little else is that it fails to engage with the underlying motivations for and consequences of the ban.

Ask any young person who spends a lot of time on microblogging platforms like X or scrolling through short-form video (SFV) content like Instagram reels, and, if they are old enough to introspect and conscientious enough to care, more likely than not they will tell you that they want to reduce their screen time (meaning, specifically, time spent staring at their phone). The internet is replete with advice on reducing screen time, from moving to physical calendars and to-do lists, app lock timers, minimising which apps are allowed to prod you with notifications, addressing email only on one’s laptop or desktop, to the more extreme end of going smartphone-free (to a ‘dumbphone’) or engaging in a ‘digital detox’.

Two instructive terms: the omnidirectional brooding caused by ‘doomscrolling’ X or TikTok or whatever it happens to be, consuming an endless stream of negative news, and this or that hot-take or rage-bait from your political peer (or, these days, some random neo-Nazi); and ‘brainrot’, low-effort and low-value online content, particularly on SFV apps, that is nevertheless enough to keep you engaged by tapping into an increasingly self-destructive need for novelty and escape from reality, which the SFV apps’ algorithms are more than happy to feed.

These are not words invented by and used by the older to sneer at the younger about how they choose to spend their free time. These are words they will use themselves to describe these activities, though often in a self-aware, ironic way, and not often in a way which implies any willingness to be doing something else.

This is why we should not reduce the whole thing to a moral panic over what the kids are up to, like that of comic books, horror films, heavy metal or TV (though, to be honest, I don’t think ‘idiot box’ is an entirely unreasonable epithet to throw at most TVs running 200-channel linear programming). Many younger people are unhappy with the lifestyle they find themselves with too.

SFV content, much more so than doomscrolling X, locks one into a kind of diffuse - as opposed to focused - attention. This is exactly the kind of state all these platforms want you in. Yes, they want you to stay on the platform; the longer you’re there, the more content and data you generate for them, and the more ads you see. But even better is if you do not even think about whether you want to remain on the platform for the next 20 minutes or - again even better - two hours. A state of ‘zombie scrolling’ is ideal. These platforms turn your phone by design into a novelty generation machine, ready to engage in a relentless assault on your executive function² - our capacity for focus, self-discipline, working memory, emotional regulation, and so on - whenever you feel yourself sitting alone with your own thoughts long enough to feel uncomfortable.

Flame wars and pile-ons have, I would suggest, also created a greater tendency to self-censor in some younger people. Having handfuls of faceless, enraged strangers screaming at you from the other end of an undersea cable triggers a maladaptive fight-or-flight response, which will - whether one just witnessed it or especially if one experienced it - make you think twice before sharing an opinion you think may provoke such a reaction (unless that is your whole shtick or you have developed a very thick skin).

Atomisation

Another effect of social media is its capacity for reinforcing social atomisation.³ I do not myself believe that social media, or the internet in general, causes atomisation. Many other things can do that: having to move far away for a new job, needing to find a new place when your landlord kicks you out, poor socialisation thanks to grade-factory schooling, falling into addiction and becoming separated from family and friends, ‘work from home’, the gig economy, a lack of third places, a generalised ‘friendship recession’,⁴ and so on. Indeed, the Covid lockdowns by their very nature caused a huge amount of social atomisation - in theory temporary, but which has persisted through poorer socialisation of youth in key developmental phases, and through work from home.

Of course, there is an endless list of positive things one can do on the internet, including on its social component. Much of this is banal. But, to pick an important example, the opportunity the internet provides for finding your niche is a wonderful thing and completely without precedent. Want to learn to set up a single-board microcontroller like an Arduino to only let people in your room who know a secret knock? There are online communities to help you do that. Personally, a sparsely populated peer support and chat forum for LGBT youth was an absolute lifeline for me, growing up in a small town. The Aussie ban does not, as yet, target such spaces; in any case, the old forum archipelago days are long gone, now that the internet is much more centralised, with the closest mainstream alternative probably being Discord.

If there is any ‘moral panic’ component to this ban, it is a delayed reaction to the atomising effects of lockdown, combined with the negative reinforcing dynamic of social media. Or - a proposition for which I have no evidence, but which certainly does feel truthy - the ruling class and its administrators have suffered one of their semi-regular frights over their ability to manufacture consent with respect to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza.

What is acute for them therefore is that adolescents on social media are being fed misinformation by “China bots” or “Russia bots” or whatever, and in order to maintain control over their children’s socialisation into and acceptance of liberal-democratic capitalism and Nato/Aukus geopolitical priors, they need to be kept away from foreign media influence, whose biggest vector in relation to young people is social media. Certainly this is a potential motivation, although, as with the enforceability point, one should not stop at merely imputing sinister motivations when discussing the legislation.

Hillary Clinton recently opined: “Smart, well-educated, young people from our own country, from around the world, where were they getting their information? They were getting their information from social media, particularly TikTok.” She continued: “That is where they were learning about what happened on October 7, what happened in the days, weeks and months to follow. That’s a serious problem. It’s a serious problem for democracy, whether it’s Israel or the United States, and it’s a serious problem for our young people.”⁵

Problem

I do not think it can be said that concern over ‘cyberbullying’ - bullying which follows people home, thanks to instant online communication - is particularly acute at the moment, given worries about this have been chronic in society the past two decades. We will never be free of widespread bullying, while we have a society which systematically produces in its population significant inequality, broken personalities and broken homes.

Clearly much of this is a problem for parents who love their children.⁶ But my guess - and that is all it is - is that more persuasive for pushing it as high up in the rankings of issues considered by lawmakers will be the consent-manufacturing angle, as well as perceived potential effects of this on national productivity.

In reality, the ban will not be effective, will not address any of the underlying issues and provides an unfortunate precedent for greater crackdown in the future, having convinced the Australian public of its virtues.⁷ As with any self-destructive pastime or addiction (and there are many), social media consumed in an unhealthy way comes with particular social maladies that are unique to it, and we have to learn to adapt to those new and particular social maladies, but the fundamental drivers are deeper.

To really address these issues, one would instead have to confront existing social atomisation; eliminate the addicting and/or zombifying designs at the heart of modern-day social media⁸ by at minimum making content recommendation algorithms transparent and able to be swapped out by users; educate young people on safe and healthy engagement with the online world; and from the first breath of life aim to provide a truly nourishing education for kids, which puts producing well-rounded human beings capable of pursuit of a full life rather than producing market-ready labour-power.

We as communists should make a start on this by developing our own comrades’ ability to read and write long-form content, discuss healthy ways to engage with mass social media⁹ and develop our own independent online media ecosystems (perhaps using something like Matrix,¹⁰ as the French and German governments have with Tchap, BundesMessenger, and openDesk).

A strong communist political movement in this country would, just through doing what is required to fulfil its historic mission, inevitably also bring people together and break down atomisation.

classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/bill/osammab2024419.↩︎
See ‘Feeds, feelings and focus: a systematic review and meta-analysis examining the cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use’: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41231585. Note this is correlation and, as we all know, not necessarily causation. For a more sceptical view see ‘The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?’ (www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2).↩︎
This is obviously just my own view, based on my own direct and observed experience, having gone through my teens in the late noughties/early 2010s. I have not done a meta-analysis or systematic review of the evidence, nor could I.↩︎
www.happiness.hks.harvard.edu/february-2025-issue/the-friendship-recession-the-lost-art-of-connecting.↩︎
www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/hillary-clinton-gaza-israel-tiktok-b2877089.html.↩︎
And political organisations which want healthy, committed, rhetorically gifted, disciplined comrades! You will struggle to be as effective a communist as you could be if you do not pay some attention to working on yourself.↩︎
77% of Australians - substantially up from when it was first announced - back the ban (although only 29% of parents say they will bother to fully enforce it with their kids, another 53% will do so partially). See www.theguardian.com/media/2024/nov/28/australia-passes-world-first-law-banning-under-16s-from-social-media-despite-safety-concerns. See also www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/national-pride-albanese-hails-teen-social-ban-but-parents-may-not-force-kids-to-follow-the-law-20251207-p5nlio.html.↩︎
I do not think that mass social media like X is worth wasting much mental energy on trying to preserve or replicate as an important political space - though, of course, we should continue engaging with it to promote our writing and activity as a matter of necessary work. In general, I tend to go along with what Adam Curtis said on this back in 2019 (too long to quote here): www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZypbVJ16Jk&t=2068s. See also www.ft.com/content/a0724dd9-0346-4df3-80f5-d6572c93a863.↩︎
By ‘mass’ I mean many-to-many communication, like the Twitter timeline, or a large (say, 150+) WhatsApp group. You could call blogs - and I suppose the individual Twitter profile - one-to-many, with a many-to-one tacked on the bottom (a comments section), and smaller forums and messaging groups few-to-few.↩︎
element.io/en/case-studies/tchap - see also other case studies and matrix.org.↩︎