In late 2024, Australia passed the world’s first law banning under-16s from social media. The legislation, which takes effect in December 2025, requires platforms to take “reasonable steps” to prevent minors from opening or maintaining accounts. On its face, the move appears both pioneering and protective, a safeguard for vulnerable youth in a digital world of bullying, addiction, and exploitation. Yet the ban also exemplifies a deeper cultural tendency: to displace complex structural problems onto the figure of the child, while leaving untouched the algorithmic architectures that generate harm for everyone.
The Touch Grass Illusion
This displacement is often couched in the language of retreat: the idea that salvation lies in withdrawal, “logging off,” or, in the popular meme, “touching grass.” Such calls are not new — every wave of new media has provoked moral panics, from comic books in the 1950s to video games in the 1990s (Cohen 1972). In each case, the child serves as a symbolic boundary figure, embodying both societal fears and fantasies of innocence.
The “touch grass” refrain surfaced again in the most visceral of contexts. After the September 2025 assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, Utah Governor Spencer Cox stood before cameras and pleaded:
“I would encourage people to log off. Turn off. Touch grass. Hug a family member. Go out and do good in your community” (Cox 2025).
Cox described social media as “a cancer on our society,” warning that humans are not evolved to process the circulation of grotesque violence online. His words struck a chord, replayed across outlets from The Independent to the New York Post. Yet the rhetorical gesture was strikingly familiar: faced with algorithmic amplification of atrocity, the proposed remedy was simply to walk away.
Such invocations misdiagnose the problem. Social media is not simply a container of content but a set of engineered environments structured by algorithms that maximise engagement through outrage, repetition, and affective manipulation (Gillespie 2018; Zuboff 2019). Telling users to “touch grass” leaves those infrastructures untouched. The problem is not only what is on our screens but the machinic logics that decide what appears there, and when.
Algorithmic Posthumanism
This is why the Australian ban, for all its headline-grabbing novelty, risks being symbolic rather than structural. It reflects a familiar form of biopolitical governance (Foucault 1978), whereby the state intervenes in the lives of populations “for their own good,” here by policing the digital thresholds of youth. Yet the real issue is not who is permitted online, but how our online environments are shaped in the first place.
We live in what Rosi Braidotti calls the posthuman condition (2013), an era in which human subjectivity is increasingly enmeshed with technological systems. N. Katherine Hayles (1999) describes this as the move from “possessing a body” to “being an embodied cybernetic system.” In this sense, our desires, choices, and even identities are co-produced with algorithms. Luciano Floridi (2014) speaks of the “infosphere,” a space in which human and informational agents co-exist and co-construct reality.
To call this the age of algorithmic posthumanism is to recognise that we no longer stand outside the machine. Our sociality, our news, our sense of self are entangled with predictive systems. The child who is banned from Instagram does not simply return to an untouched “real world.” She grows up in an environment already saturated with algorithmic logics — from YouTube’s recommendation engines to Spotify playlists to the behavioural nudge systems of gamified learning apps.
Thus, banning under-16s from social media achieves little more than symbolic reassurance. It imagines a clean separation between childhood and technology that no longer exists.
Throwing the Baby Out with the Bathwater
The danger of such bans is twofold. First, they risk stripping young people of digital citizenship: the ability to participate in political and cultural life as it is increasingly mediated online (Livingstone & Third 2017). Social media is not merely entertainment; it is a platform for activism, education, and identity formation. Excluding under-16s may silence vulnerable voices rather than protect them.
Second, bans risk legitimising the very architectures of harm they claim to resist. If platforms are emptied of children, regulators can declare victory while leaving algorithmic surveillance capitalism untouched. What remains may be even more exploitative: an internet optimised exclusively for adult consumption, saturated with gambling, pornography, and political manipulation. As EducationDaily put it in its critique of the Australian law, “How this ban will be enforced … the platforms may actually become less safe” (EducationDaily 2025).
This is the “baby with the bathwater” problem. Instead of addressing the water — the extractive design of algorithms, the logics of behavioural profiling, the monopolistic concentration of platform power — the law discards the baby, excluding children from digital publics altogether.
Towards Structural Reform
If protection is the goal, then reform must focus on algorithms, not access. This would mean:
Mandating transparency in recommendation systems (Helberger et al. 2020). Prohibiting dark patterns and manipulative design practices (Mathur et al. 2021). Breaking up monopolistic platforms whose profit models depend on surveillance (Srnicek 2017). Supporting the development of alternative, non-extractive models of digital community.
Such reforms would benefit not only children but all users. They would acknowledge that in the age of algorithmic posthumanism, the problem is not youth per se but the infrastructures through which youth — and adults alike — become digitally constituted.
Conclusion
Australia’s under-16 social media ban is best understood as a symbolic act. It responds to genuine fears but in a way that obscures the real terrain of harm. Much like Governor Cox’s plea to “touch grass” after the Kirk assassination, the legislation tells us to step outside rather than confront what lies inside: the logics of algorithmic exploitation that shape contemporary life.
In this sense, the ban is less a solution than a displacement. It throws out the baby — youth digital participation — while leaving the bathwater — algorithmic manipulation — untouched. The challenge for regulators, scholars, and citizens alike is not to exclude but to re-imagine: to build digital environments worthy of children, and of ourselves.
References
Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Polity. Cohen, S. (1972). Folk Devils and Moral Panics. MacGibbon & Kee. Cox, S. (2025). Remarks following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, reported in The Independent (12 Sept 2025). EducationDaily. (2025). A mistake to ban under-16s from social media. Ban the algorithms. [Online] Available at: https://educationdaily.au Floridi, L. (2014). The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality. Oxford University Press. Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Pantheon. Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions that Shape Social Media. Yale University Press. Hayles, N. K. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press. Helberger, N., Pierson, J., & Poell, T. (2020). Governing online platforms: From contested to cooperative responsibility. The Information Society, 36(1), 1–14. Livingstone, S., & Third, A. (2017). Children and young people’s rights in the digital age. New Media & Society, 19(5), 657–670. Mathur, A., et al. (2021). Dark patterns at scale: Findings from a crawl of 11K shopping websites. ACM CHI. Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform Capitalism. Polity. Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Profile Books.
Would you like me to also prepare a shorter, punchier version (say 700 words) for your Anti-Social Blog website, with the references folded into hyperlinks instead of formal citations? That way you’d have both an academic and a public-facing version.