Catholics weigh in on Australia’s social media ban: ‘A void in our children’s spiritual lives’

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CNA Staff, Jan 2, 2025 / 06:00 am (CNA).

Australian lawmakers sent shockwaves around the world recently by passing a law — the first of its kind in the world — that will ban children under age 16 from common social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok. 

The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024, which was ushered hastily through the Australian Parliament and passed in late November, is set to take effect Dec. 10, 2025. It introduces fines of tens of millions of dollars on social media companies if they fail to adequately verify the ages of their users and take reasonable steps to prevent children under 16 from having accounts. 

The plan has drawn both praise and criticism from various quarters of the world as commentators of various backgrounds and ideologies — including many Catholics — try to assess the suitability of such a ban and whether, in practice, it will actually work. 

Archbishop Peter Comensoli of Melbourne, who leads Australia’s largest archdiocese, told CNA that the Church in Australia is actively engaged in advocating and proactively helping parents to protect their children online, including from the potential negative effects of social media and smartphone use. He said the archdiocese has taken steps to train teachers and parents on the importance of “cybersafety” and this year convened an eSafety Summit with over 120 educators from around the archdiocese to hear from experts in the field on the best ways to work with students using technology.

The archbishop emphasized the crucial role of parents as their children’s primary educators, who he said ought to have active involvement in safeguarding children from online harms, particularly pornography and cyberbullying.

“Parents share with me that it can be hard to protect their children from the potential harms of social media when they feel they’d be denying them something their peers are all using,” Comensoli told CNA in written answers to questions.

“However, there are plenty of examples of areas of life where the community has made clear that children need to be protected. Alcohol and driving are two examples that spring to mind where the law restricts access for children … I see social media in a similar vein. Having the world at your fingertips can achieve a lot of good, but children need time to mature so they can properly understand how to use it well.”

A June 2024 submission from the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference as part of a review of the country’s Online Safety Act 2021, signed by Comensoli in his capacity as chairman of the Australian bishops’ Commission for Life, Family, and Public Engagement, focused mainly on the “urgent” need to protect children from online pornography. 

The bishops in the submission strongly urged the government to implement age verification for online pornography specifically while also advocating for the further empowerment of parents through education and resources. The bishops also wrote that social media companies must be held legally accountable for a duty of care to prevent children’s access to harmful content.

Comensoli commented to CNA that a healthy approach to technology like social media means treating it not only as “a source of harm” but also as a tool to “share Christ with the world.” But like all tools, “we have to learn how to use them properly,” Comensoli said. 

The archbishop concluded by saying that the Church can help young people cultivate a healthy relationship with technology by fostering spiritual reflection and applying the cardinal virtues — temperance, prudence, justice, and fortitude — to online interactions.

“The Church has a lot to offer the world as it seeks to better engage with technology. One thing we can do is to keep offering to the world that quiet place where we can contemplate the heart of Christ — the same Christ who called us to love our neighbors as ourselves,” he explained. 

‘Trying to change the social norm’

Dany Elachi, a Catholic father of five from Sydney, played a large role in lobbying for the social media ban through a coalition of other concerned parents that he spearheads called the Heads Up Alliance, which advocates that parents ought to delay their children’s access to social media. He testified before Australian lawmakers in October and passionately urged them to take bold action to protect children from the detrimental effects of early social media exposure. 

Elachi told CNA that initially their movement formed as a means of banding like-minded Catholic school parents together to advocate that schools be smartphone-free environments and also to counter the cultural peer pressure of parents feeling they must give their young children phones. 

Their movement gained traction as more parents sought an alternative to the prevailing wisdom about smartphones while also not wanting their kids to be isolated with no options for interaction. The group has sought to build for families and children alternative ways of building community and connecting. 

Elachi credited U.S.-based author Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation” for sparking conversations in Australia about a possible social media ban. Still, though, he said a ban “was never really on our radar; it wasn’t even on our wish list.”

“A year ago, if you said to me that by the end of 2024, Australia would have a law in place lifting the minimum age of social media to 16, I would not have believed you,” Elachi said. 

When asked about the practical realities of actually keeping Australian children off of social media, Elachi said that before the law comes into effect, social media companies and lawmakers will be looking into ways to verify users’ ages “without infringing too much on privacy.” 

The new social media ban has garnered criticism in some quarters, with critics questioning how exactly social media companies can be expected to verify every user’s age without taking steps such as drawing on a national ID database or scanning users’ faces, both of which have given privacy advocates pause. A “double blind tokenized approach” is being considered, whereby users’ phones will contain an anonymized “token” that assures the social media company of the user’s age and nothing else. 

Elachi said whatever is decided on the technological front, the important thing for him is that the law itself exists as a “line in the sand.”

“Having the law as a symbol, as an aspiration, sends a strong signal to parents and to families that any child who’s on social media at the age of 12, 13, or 14 is just inappropriate. We’re really, ultimately, trying to change the social norm around social media use,” Elachi said. 

In addition, he said, he hopes the law will force, or at least encourage, social media companies to “develop platforms that don’t addict children, that don’t exploit children.”

Elachi said it was through his own experience as a parent who caved to the pressure of getting his young daughter a smartphone that he realized he was “naive” for expecting his child to “overcome the forces” of social media on her own. He said he often found his young daughter messaging friends under the bedcovers when she should have been sleeping. 

“Smartphones are creating a void in our children’s spiritual lives. It’s the last thing that they do at night, [rather than] say a prayer of gratitude before they go to sleep … we’re losing the ability to sit still, we’re losing the ability to reflect … Because every minute of every day is sucked up by these gadgets that are in our hands,” Elachi said.

“I would simply encourage parents to hold the ground, find the community, make a community if they have to, of other like-minded parents in their own schools, in their towns or suburbs, and hold that together. There’s no rule that you must succumb to giving your child the phone at the age of 10. We only do it because we feel the pressure of everybody else doing so.”

‘A sense of solidarity’

Jim Schroeder, a Catholic and a U.S.-based child psychologist, told CNA that he believes Australia is “on the right track” with its social media ban for under-16-year-olds — a drastic but potentially necessary response given the growing body of scientific evidence showing how detrimental smartphones and social media can be for developing brains. 

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has on several occasions highlighted the health risks posed by social media, issuing in 2023 a 25-page advisory in which he acknowledged both the potential benefits (like social connection and self-expression) and significant harms (including depression, anxiety, and body image issues) associated with social media use.

Echoing Elachi, Schroeder said laws of this kind send a message about what society values and can provide a “sanctioned reason” for parents who want to limit their children’s access to something they see as harmful — giving parents “a sense of solidarity … that they didn’t have before.”

Schroeder said many parents, Catholic or not, tend to focus their attention on making sure their children do not consume harmful or inappropriate content online, which is a good goal. But he said there is growing evidence that the use of social media itself, regardless of the content, is possibly detrimental for children’s neurological development, especially in the “period of brain development that happens before the mid-20s.”

Schroeder, a father of eight, recommended that parents aim to prioritize children’s holistic well-being — physical, psychological, social, and spiritual — over the convenience and access offered by technology. And if that means waiting to get their kids a smartphone until they are 16 or 18, their kids will likely not have much trouble catching up with the latest tech, he opined. 

“People, when I or others talk and write about this, can easily get the perception that we are just completely anti-tech. And that’s actually furthest from the truth. I use it every single day in my own life and I think it has tons of great uses,” Schroeder said.

“But until we, as a society, understand when and where and how we should use it, we’ve got to be really careful about where we’re going, because we’re opening up lots of things that we don’t even want to begin to uncover.”