Understanding the Australian Moral Panic about Young People’s Social Media Use

The next speakers in this AANZCA 2024 conference session are Justine Humphry, Catherine Page Jeffery, and Jonathon Hutchinson, whose focus is on the current moral panic about young people’s uses of social media, in Australia and elsewhere. While such moral panics are not new, the current debate represents an escalation. How did we get here; what is the agenda; what role has it had in creating the conditions for regulatory change; and how does it affect norms, ideal, and expectations about childhood?

Moral panics about ‘the youth today’ are themselves far from new: the concept stems from Stanley Cohen’s work back in the 1960s, after all, even concerns about the impact of rock music led to various attempts at restrictions and limitations of youth culture. Moral panics involve concern about potential or imagined threats; hostility towards the actors supposedly implicated in them; consensus about the actual existence of the imagined threat; disproportionality of the magnitude of the concern as compared to the actual problem; and volatility in the eruption and disappearance of the problem. Moral panics often target new media and new technologies, and are themselves mediated and fragmented (as counternarratives also emerge). Today, they might be best understood as moral media panics.

In the present case, childhood is of course itself a socially and culturally constructed concept, which idealises children as innocent, vulnerable, special, and therefore worthy of protection and subject to anxieties. Developmental psychology highlights the processes of childhood development and leads to the construction of developmental norms, and this is often falsely and simplistically linked to specific physical ages. There are also postulations of what activities are normatively ‘appropriate’ for these ages, and any deviations from such norms cause anxiety in parents and wider society, and a desire to address these deviations.

Such anxieties arise in the broader context of Australia’s complicated approach to regulating social media. Digital media have disrupted conventional media regulation regimes; state and federal governments have sought to legitimise their initiatives to intervene through new regulatory approaches; and this has also been covered as well as pushed along by media coverage. The present project examined such media coverage across the Australian news media, conducting a discourse analysis especially of article headlines, which optimise article relevance to a given topic.

These headlines represent various key moments over the past months, and headlines supporting social media bans for young people or presenting neutral views far outnumbered more critical coverage; sensationalism and crisis language was especially prominent in the media coverage, with war metaphors and health metaphors frequently deployed. Unsurprisingly, News Corporation was an especially strong driver of this moral panic coverage, not least with its execrable Let Them Be Kids campaign. Such coverage created the conditions for rapid and ill-informed policy change and reaffirmed certain conservative notions of childhood which are far from productive.