Sixteen-year-old news reader Leonardo Puglisi started his online news channel 6 News when he was just 11 years old.

He's horrified at the federal bipartisan support in banning social media for children under the age of 16. 

The Coalition has vowed to legislate the change within 100 days of taking office, if it wins the election.

Labor has been a little more circumspect, but a few days later Anthony Albanese essentially said he would do the same, assuming it's achievable (and there is some doubt on that front).

The eSafety Commissioner, on the other hand, has expressed serious doubts about the policy.

On the very first day of public hearings for the much-vaunted Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society, Commissioner Julie Inman Grant (Above left) compared banning children younger than 16 from social media to banning them from the ocean.

"Cast your mind back to summer and transport yourself to one of your favourite beach experiences," she told the room full of vitamin D-deficient public servants, kicking off a short but impactful guided meditation.

"The sand is warm under your feet, and you can hear the joyful sounds of children excitedly frolicking in the water.

"Thankfully, they instinctively know that they need to swim between the flags.

"We don't fence the ocean or keep children entirely out of the water … but we do create protected swimming environments."

Inman Grant also explained her reservations in a written submission to the inquiry.

It warns that the debate around a complete ban for under-16s, enforced by age verification technology, contains a misconception that "social media is a discrete form of media that can be separated from the rest of the internet".

Given social media is not a hermetically sealed single unit, the regulator is worried that if faced with a ban, kids will just access social media in secret.

Such a policy risks pushing them towards "less regulated, non-mainstream services" with more plentiful harms, the submission read — referring maybe to the likes of Gab, Truth Social, 4Chan and a broader class of platforms known as "alt-social media".

Then if a child does need help, it might be all the harder for them to find it.

"Restriction-based approaches can also reduce young people's confidence or inclination to reach out to a trusted adult [leading to] greater long-term negative impacts," the submission read.

The Commissioner also makes the point that even if the ban did work as intended, keeping kids off social media until their 16th birthday will not prepare them for the online world.

Or to revisit the beach metaphor, swimming when you're older doesn't make you much safer if you haven't had any swimming lessons.

On top of all that, she argued that bans "place the onus on children to keep themselves safe, rather than putting the onus on online platforms", which wasn't the stated goal for either of the major parties.

That's the thing about setting up an independent regulator — they will occasionally disagree with you in public.

But with recent polls showing two-thirds of Australians support a ban, it may not change the politics of the issue.

Source | AAP