This December, Australia announced a regulation to ban social media for teenagers, specifically children aged 16 and below. The country becomes the first to ban social media for teenagers, and the government says it is aimed at protecting young people from harmful content online. As expected, the reactions that followed were divided. Some people were against the ban, but from the BBC’s social investigation, the majority of parents accepted it.
While social media has become an important part of today’s digital world, especially in information dissemination, it has also been reported to cause anxiety, identity loss, and struggles with staying focused. Many people experience pressure and loss of identity from constantly comparing their lives to those of others on social media. Instead of striving to form their own identity, they adopt someone else’s. Children, in their teenage years, tend to be susceptible to this due to the cognitive wiring of their brains, which is dogmatically adaptive. The drive to maintain a digital identity that does not belong to them then leads to low self-esteem.
One of the pervasive dangers of social media today is the nonstop flow of information. You can scroll for 72 hours on Instagram and Twitter (now X) without exhausting content on each platform, engaging with various tweets and reels and exchanging multiple texts with thousands of people on different platforms. While the content can be entertaining, it can also overwhelm and affect concentration. In more severe cases, the myriad of content can include posts that expose one to cyberbullying, misinformation, and unrealistic beauty or success standards that negatively affect mental health and overall well-being.
The aim of the Australian government is to protect young minds from encountering these issues. Even though, past the ban age, they can still encounter such issues online, it is believed or assumed that they would have grown enough to understand how to curate their social platforms and the time to spend there.
Can this be replicated in Nigeria, and why?
Millions of people live in Nigeria, and the highest users of social media are young people. In the past couple of years, there has been a rise of social media disruptors who are often tagged “banger boys.” They tweet rage-baity and provocative content, spread misinformation, and share sensitive content to gain engagement. On X, the monetisation of tweets has made this somewhat more dangerous. Women have become scared of sharing their photos online because they fear these banger boys will prompt AI to undress them.
In their formative years, when young minds are exposed to this kind of content, they assume it is the norm. Nigeria is currently confronting an unprecedented safety threat where bandits and terrorists invade villages, kidnap students, and demand millions in ransom. These threats already exist physically; it is only wise that young people are protected from the virtual threats that can be controlled.
These days, young people from primary to secondary school have access to phones. It is one of the things contributing to the growing phenomenon of social attachment. To be involved in a physical activity now feels like a scarce commodity. I did not have access to a phone until I graduated from the senior secondary school. I had peers who had phones, and while it felt like I was missing out on all the fun things they said they saw online, I realised that I caught up. A child who is not on social media is not missing out on anything. Instead, I was involved in a lot of fun physical activities. I played house with my friends. We used our parents’ wrappers as curtains to our formed rooms, cardigans folded to babies, and raced each other in hide and seek. Young people now, instead, are involved in online video games, which are somewhat isolating and do not stimulate the brain as physical activity can.
Certainly, it is the responsibility of adults to keep the internet and social media safe, and keeping young people away from social media does not make the vile content disappear. But young people do not yet have the agency, at their age, to curate their pages. They follow dogmatically. And what is not the norm becomes the norm to them. In one of the episodes of MENtality With Ebuka, Banky W shares that he and his wife do not exchange words or fight before their children. He says it is not to show them that their relationship is perfect, but to protect them until they have the maturity to understand the scares and learn from them.
There should be better parental control of social media, but does the Nigerian government have all it takes to ban social media for teenagers? Should the Nigerian government ban social media for teenagers?
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