By Murphy Hopkins-Hubbard, Founder of Stamp
Australia’s world-first under-16 ‘social media ban’ lands on 10 December and according to the Guardian, Meta has already started shutting down hundreds of thousands of teen accounts to comply.
Depending on which article you read, this is either a much needed safety brake or a forced knee jerk reaction that will push kids into darker corners of the internet. The Daily Influence, for example, argues this won’t collapse the creator economy so much as force brands to rebuild how they reach young audiences, shifting spend towards ‘more regulated environments’ and universal, age-appropriate storytelling. In other words; the money will adapt faster than the duty of care.
Alongside that macro lens, you have the micro, the human one. In her Substack essay “The internet nearly broke me…”, Em Clarkson describes the emotional and psychological toll of coming of age inside an attention economy that constantly scrutinised her body, worth and voice. That’s consistent with years of her work exposing how filters, editing and comparison culture quietly rewire our self-esteem – especially for girls. Read next to the Australia coverage, her piece is a reminder that this debate isn’t theoretical, it’s mich more real than that. It’s about very young nervous systems trying to develop under industrial-scale manipulation (shivers to the spine stuff..)
Policy-wise, in my eyes, the tension sits between three things:
● children’s right to participate in culture and access information;
● their right to be protected from harm;
● and everyone’s right to free expression in a digital public square.
Australia has come down hard on the second, requiring platforms to take “reasonable steps” to prevent under 16 year olds from creating or keeping accounts on the major social apps with fines of up to a whopping $50m for non-compliance. Critics have raised concerns about privacy-invasive age-verification (and how this impacts inclusivity), over-blocking, and the reality that many teens will simply find routes around bans via VPNs or fringe platforms with weaker safeguards – let’s be honest, the majority have far more established technical capabilities than the ones setting these barriers). On the other side, supporters point to rising mental-health concerns and a sense that years of fairly non-
commital ‘safety tweaks’ haven’t shifted the underlying incentives of engagement-driven design (Reuters).
From a Stamp perspective, what’s striking is the narrowness of the conversation. We’re stuck in a binary: let kids on and accept the harms, or lock them out and hope for the best. Almost absent is a third question:
what would it look like to make the environment itself less toxic – structurally, culturally and commercially?
Australia’s move will absolutely force product changes, but it doesn’t, on its own, rewrite the business models that reward outrage, body hatred or conspiratorial content, nor does it set expectations for how brands and creators show up around young audiences.
Drawing the line surely can’t just mean drawing an age? It has to involve layered responsibility. Platforms designed to mitigate harm by default; regulators focusing on high-risk algorithms, brands refusing to buy attention that’s engineered through inducing feelings of shame or fear; and creators holding themselves to higher standards around compliance, audience care and the psychological impact of the stories they tell.
That’s the work we’re trying to support; helping creators and agency partners operationalise care, not just compliance, in the way influence is built and monetised.
As other countries (including the UK) now ask whether to copy Australia’s model, I’d love us to widen the lens. Bans and age-gates may be part of the toolkit, but they’re not a substitute for changing the underlying incentives and norms of the creator economy. If the internet nearly broke a generation, the answer isn’t only locking the next one out – it’s rebuilding the system they’re walking into.
