Speech Restrictions Justified by Child Safety Rarely Stop There

Australia's social media ban is the latest example of how regulations passed in the name of child safety become a vehicle for controlling political speech for everyone.

Australia’s greatest export is no longer coal or iron ore, but the censorship of political speech justified as the protection of children. Last month, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced plans to follow Australia’s lead in banning under-16s from social media to protect children from the “digital wild west.” Similar proposals have emerged from the EU, the UK, France, Denmark, Norway, Malaysia, and New Zealand.

While politicians, journalists, and intellectuals have widely celebrated the social media ban, Australia’s own experience shows how regulation that begins with children does not end with them — they are simply the entry point for broader systems of control.

The trajectory is already clear. The office of Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, the regulatory authority presiding over the social media ban, was originally established as a narrow, complaints-based body targeting the cyberbullying of children. It has since evolved into a far more powerful regulator with the ability to issue takedown notices for a range of content, including “adult cyber abuse” — a category that has repeatedly encompassed political speech.

The Commissioner has even sought to extend these powers further through an “informal alerts” system. Where the office lacks the statutory authority to compel removal, it contacts platforms directly, encouraging them to review content under their own policies, effectively applying pressure outside of the formal legal process.

This practice was recently tested in a case brought by a Sydney-based bisexual activist, Celine Baumgarten. In a post on X, Baumgarten criticized the creation of a queer club for children as young as 8 in a primary school, arguing that such children were too young to learn about sexuality and gender ideology. Although the post did not meet the threshold for formal takedown, the eSafety office escalated the matter through X’s high-priority legal challenge portal, resulting in the content being geo-blocked in Australia.

Baumgarten later lodged an action in the Administrative Review Tribunal. eSafety attempted to have the case thrown out, arguing that because the action was informal, it could not be legally challenged or reviewed by the Tribunal. The Tribunal rejected this argument, ultimately finding that eSafety could not claim to exercise legal power, achieve a coercive result, and then avoid judicial scrutiny by arguing it was acting outside its formal powers. This decision was later upheld by the Federal Court.

This expansion of eSafety’s powers did not happen by accident. During a panel discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations in December 2024, Ms. Inman Grant explained that when former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull introduced the original legislation, he “knew that we really had to start with children first, because you can’t really argue that children aren’t vulnerable.” In other words, children are not the endpoint of regulation, but the starting point.

The same logic may now be at work with the social media ban. It is no coincidence that the ban passed just days after the Albanese government abandoned its proposed misinformation and disinformation laws, legislation that would have forced digital platforms to “prevent and minimize” vaguely defined harms under the threat of massive financial penalties.

While the mechanism differs, the incentive remains the same. Platforms would have been driven to pre-emptively remove large swathes of legitimate public debate to avoid penalties. The same logic now applies to the social media ban, which encourages platforms to remove accounts — whether users fail dubious facial recognition tests or use VPNs — rather than risk enormous fines.

The ban will also dramatically reduce the information children are exposed to under the guise of eliminating harm, consolidating the flow of information into state-approved sources. The result is a shrinking public square for children, where they are excluded not only from accessing political ideas but from participating in them, losing the ability to comment, share, and interact with political content online.

At its best, social media has broken the hold of traditional media and created a space for otherwise marginalized voices. As community membership and participation decline across the West, social media has filled the gap, offering young people a sense of belonging and a forum in which to engage with others who share their views.

These platforms have not only provided a space for alternative viewpoints but also a vehicle for political socialization outside the control of the state. Consider the 15-year-old politically conservative child living in Australia. Before social media, they had no reprieve from the politically progressive, government-mandated National Curriculum. Until now, their escape had been online: anti-establishment podcasters and commentators made famous through social media, including figures such as the late Charlie Kirk, Theo Von, and Joe Rogan.

For young people, social media is the new news. Generation Z and Generation Alpha are not turning to television screens or broadsheets to form their views; they are looking to their phones. According to a report from the University of Canberra’s News and Media Centre, Instagram is the most widely used platform for news among 18-24s, where 40% of people in that age range used it to access the news, more than doubling the average access rate of other age groups.

The popularity of short videos for news is reflected in Tik Tok’s rising popularity, where 36% of 18-24 year olds use it for news. This trend no doubt extends to Gen Z’s successors, Generation Alpha, who have grown up as social media natives. These young Australians, who are tomorrow’s voters, play a unique role in rendering traditional news media increasingly irrelevant.

A cynic might wonder whether this helps explain the enthusiasm for the ban among parts of the legacy press. News Corp, Australia’s largest media conglomerate, ran the “Let Them Be Kids” campaign, including a petition that gathered more than 50,000 signatures. It argued that “a generation of children is being lost to the billion-dollar social media giants because they are putting profits before people.”

The same argument had been advanced for years by news organizations lobbying governments to force social media companies to compensate them for news content. This has culminated in the design of Australia’s News Media Bargaining Incentive, under which, if implemented, tech giants could face a near $1 billion levy on their Australian revenue unless they strike deals with local outlets. Viewed in this light, the legacy media campaign against social media looks less like child protection and more like an effort to eliminate competition.

Whatever the motivation, teenagers will bear the cost. The issue is now before the High Court, where two 15-year-olds have launched a constitutional challenge arguing the ban impermissibly burdens the implied freedom of political communication. As one of the plaintiffs, Macey Newland, argued, “Democracy doesn’t start at 16 as this law says it will.”

The social media ban reflects a dangerous and familiar pattern: governments begin by regulating in the least controversial domain—children’s safety—and then expand those mechanisms into speech and access to information. As Australia’s eSafety office collaborates with the EU Commission and the UK’s Ofcom on frameworks for “media literacy”, “critical thinking”, and “confident, informed online engagement,” the underlying assumption is that citizens, adults included, cannot be trusted to discern truth for themselves.

What begins as protection ends as paternalism. And what starts with children does not stay with them.

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Margaret Chambers is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, where she focuses on the policy areas of freedom of speech and religious freedom throughout Australia.