One of the most powerful moments of theatre I’ve ever seen happened on the stage of a local public school assembly hall a couple of weeks back.
A class of year-six kids were performing a short history of the world. Their play started with cave-dwellers hilariously running away from inflatable dinosaurs, before the production moved briefly through ancient Egypt and medieval times.
The play’s last scene was set in the present day. Here and now.
On a darkened stage, the audience could just make out the shadowy outlines of 30 kids standing still, heads bowed. All were staring down at little phone-shaped bits of cardboard held in their hands. Still, separate, silent. The packed house of parents and teachers were silent too.
Suddenly the silence was broken, as the children looked up from their screens and 30 voices shouted together from the darkness: ‘We forgot how to communicate!’
Social media ban
The students’ play was of course highly timely, given the government’s social media ‘ban’ for under-16-year-olds kicks in this December.
Whatever you think of the merits of the ban – or how effective it’ll be – the move is attracting global attention. The European Commission president just hailed it as ‘world-leading’.
‘Everyone understands that it is our duty to do our best to equip families with the tools to live as safely as possible,’ Ursula von der Leyen reportedly said in New York, ‘and empowering parents to collectively say “no” to social media to their young children is one of these.’
Platforms ‘addict children through manipulative algorithms,’ said von der Leyen, who’s inspired by Australia’s move. ‘We in the EU will be watching and learning from you as you implement your world-first and world-leading social media ban.’
In recent weeks we’ve learned the government’s ‘ban’ will actually be much softer than some anticipated. There’ll be no requirement to verify the age of all users, and companies will only have to show they’re taking ‘reasonable steps’ to stop under-16-year-olds. There are still fines though of up to $49.5 million for breaches.
We’ve also learned the pool of companies affected could be widened from the more well-known social media companies, to include Roblox and others that enable users to play games online.
Legal cases
As Echo readers may know Roblox hosts hugely popular games such as ‘Steal a Brainrot’, and ‘Grow a Garden’, a game which recently boasted more than 22 million players simultaneously.
Roblox is currently worth about A$140 billion, higher than the annual GDP of most of the world’s nations. A honeypot for investors, it’s also a target of Australia’s eSafety Commission concerns.
‘We know that when it comes to platforms that are popular with children, they also become popular with adult predators seeking to prey on them,’ Commissioner Inman Grant said last month. ‘Roblox is no exception and has become a popular target for paedophiles seeking to groom children.’
While Roblox has agreed to introduce new child safety measures, it still faces a raft of legal cases in the US from families alleging their children were groomed or exploited in some way.
Another company which is no stranger to allegations of causing harm to children is Meta, owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta is currently worth close to A$3 trillion – almost as much as Russia’s GDP – a sign of the profitability of addictive algorithms, and the fact that national governments now live in the shadows of these powerful global tech giants.
A landmark exploration of that power is Shoshana Zuboff’s now classic 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the age now continuing apace as AI chatbots suck up and monetise ever more of the data of our daily lives. I can’t recommend the book more highly.
Taking back tech
For all the positive benefits of the internet and social media, big tech companies stand accused not only of harming children, but also of undermining democratic governments, the only possible check on tech’s power.
As the Philippines-based Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa told Australia’s National Press Club last month, tech companies have become ‘weapons of mass destruction to democracy’, with evidence that algorithms spread ‘lies laced with fear, anger, and hate’, faster than they spread facts.
‘The business model that rewards engagement over facts has made us all complicit in tearing apart our societies,’ said Ressa, the creator of Rappler, a new public interest media company aiming to be a place where ‘real people can have real conversations without being insidiously manipulated, for power or money.’
Technology and human communication are not incompatible. And with some concerted collective action, moving out of our current social media morass, and remembering how to communicate, is not inconceivable.
Dr Ray Moynihan is currently researching misleading medical information on social media at the University of Sydney.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
