The Rip Current Australia Just Rebooted Childhood — And the World Is Watching
Australia just imposed a blanket ban on social media for kids under the age of 16. It’s not just the strictest tech policy of any democracy — it’s stricter than China’s laws. No TikTok, no Instagram, no SnapChat, that’s it. And while Washington dithers behind a 1998 law written before Google existed, other countries are gearing up to copy Australia’s homework (Malaysia imposes a similar ban on January 1st). What happens now — the enforcement mess, the global backlash, the accidental creation of the largest clean “control group” in tech-history — could reshape how we think about childhood, mental health, and what governments owe the developing brain.
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00:00 — Australia’s historic under-16 social-media ban
01:10 — What counts as “social media” under the law?
02:04 — Why platforms — not kids — get fined
03:01 — How the U.S. is still stuck with COPPA (from 1998!)
04:28 — Why age 13 was always a fiction
05:15 — Psychologists on the teenage brain: “all gas, no brakes”
07:02 — Malaysia and the EU consider following Australia’s lead
08:00 — Nighttime curfews and other global experiments
09:11 — Albanese’s pitch: reclaiming “a real childhood”
10:20 — Could isolation leave Aussie teens behind socially?
11:22 — Why Australia is suddenly stricter than China
12:40 — Age-verification chaos: the AI that thinks my uncle is 12
13:40 — The enforcement black box
14:10 — Australia as the first real longitudinal control group
15:18 — If mental-health outcomes improve, everything changes
16:05 — The end of the “wild west” era of social platforms?
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