The anxiety of age: Moral panics over children’s social media use as a tool to regulate

Abstract

Throughout 2023 and 2024, in the lead up to the introduction of Australia’s social media age-restriction laws, calls to ban teenagers’ access to social media were widely reported by Australian news media. This media moment was in part driven by moves by governments of a range of countries to take action to address the harmful effects of social media on young people, high profile, popular academic books such as Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (2024), and parent-led campaigns advocating delayed access to social media based on age. This paper analyses Australian news media headlines from September 2023 to September 2024, drawing on theories regarding moral and media panics (Cohen, 2011; Drotner, 1992; McRobbie & Thornton, 1995), to understand the character and purpose of the Australian news discourse preceding the passage of the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill in November, 2024. It finds that the media coverage met Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s (1994) criteria of a moral panic, reproducing certain constructions of childhood and supporting government efforts to impose age-based restrictions to social media. In doing so, however, it constrained alternative policy approaches, particularly those that might better account for the diversity of young people's maturity and offer ways to create safer online environments and experiences for all.

Keywords

young people social media moral panics media panics regulation Australia

Introduction

Anxieties about children’s use of technology are not new, nor are the political and media-fuelled moral panics that such anxieties flame. The concept of the ‘moral panic’ was originally developed by Stanley Cohen to describe the way that particular social groups, in his case the Mods and Rockers of post-war 1960s British society, became the source and target of a discursive process of social typing and control. Political agenda-setting is often behind a moral panic and brings together media reporting in a conducive alignment to create the answer to the problem the discourse gives shape to. Moral panics do not arise from nowhere. Though they have a quality of newness, they simultaneously evoke older concerns and panics. In Cohen’s (2011:9) words: ‘They are new (lying dormant perhaps, but hard to recognise; deceptively ordinary and routine, but creeping up the moral horizon) – but also old (camouflaged versions of traditional and well-known evils). They are damaging in themselves – but also merely warning signs of the real, much deeper and more prevalent condition. They are transparent (anyone can see what is happening) – but also opaque: accredited experts must explain the perils behind the superficially harmless (decode a rock star’s lyrics to see what led to the school massacre)’.

Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994) have distinguished five separate elements in the original definition of the moral panic: 1. Concern – about the potential or imagined threat. 2. Hostility – towards the actors (folk devils) who embody the problem. 3. Consensus – a widespread agreement (not necessarily total) that the threat exists, that ‘something should be done’. The majority of elite and influential groups, especially the mass media, should share this consensus. 4. Disproportionality – the concern is not justified by empirical evidence. 5. Volatility – the panic erupts and dissipates suddenly without warning.

Several scholars have applied Cohen’s influential theory to panics about young people and media. Drotner (1992), for example, refers to ‘media panics’, which she argues are an inherent quality of modernity applying the concept to new media (at the time), such as comics, video, and film. Similarly, Marwick (2008) coined the term ‘technopanic’, which had three key characteristics: they focus on new media forms such as digital technologies; they generally pathologise young people’s use of these media; and this cultural anxiety is manifested through attempts to modify or regulate young people’s behaviours (Marwick, 2008). More recent examples of technopanics involving children include concerns about cyberbullying, ‘sexting’, and the availability of pornography (Page Jeffery, 2017,) and concerns about screentime (Mavoa et al., 2017). McRobbie and Thornton (1995) argued that as the media has expanded into the social sphere, moral panics need to be understood as always mediated and, moreover, that as traditional mass media fragments, there are more counternarratives able to be asserted. They refer to this changed context as ‘multi-mediated social worlds’.

This article analyses news media discourse focussing on patterns and rhetorical strategies in news articles, headlines and key events over the period 15 September 2023 to 15 September 2024 collected from Factiva English-speaking news sources preceding the announcement and passage of Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age legislation, to determine whether the news media discourse conforms to a moral panic according to Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s model. From this analysis, and drawing on policy analysis and research, we examine what the moral panic does: what role it performs in terms of its social and political functions in relation to dominant narratives of childhood, whose interests it serves as well as the ‘moral entrepreneurs’ behind them, for example, celebrities, academics, politicians, media hosts and parent advocates, and the power of the nation state (and its limits) over globalised technology companies. We argue that the mobilisation of popular and political support through the panic discourse has been effective in facilitating a national-level response in Australia to regulating social media platform companies, which has also been used by other nations as a ‘rallying call’ for their own reform agendas. The link between moral panics and law reform is evident in Stanley Cohen’s original work, which emphasised that the late stage of a panic results in the reassertion of a social order through legal action (Cohen, 2011 [1972]). As Cohen explained in relation to the reaction to Mods and Rockers in post-war Britain, this went beyond enforcing existing rules to the creation of new powers and forms of institutionalised control (p. 137). Other studies have likewise examined how moral panics have enabled restrictive and discriminatory legal reform in the targeting of transgender people (Duffy, 2025; Pepin-Neff and Cohen, 2022), migrants, and other marginalised groups in the US and the UK (Conyers, 2025).

We extend this scholarship to demonstrate the policy function of panic discourse for creating the conditions to enact large-scale regulation of social media by national governments in the face of global platform power taking into consideration the ‘multi-mediated social worlds’ (McRobbie and Thornton, 1995) in which such discourses operate. We draw conclusions about the effects of the moral panic on regulatory efforts in relation to improving online safety in the context of a large-scale global power contest between social media companies and nation-states (Flew, 2023; Rodrik, 2011). This has proved effective – in the Australian case – for garnering the political support and momentum for legal change against the (new) ‘folk devil’ of social media. We suggest, however, that the reproduction of certain narratives of children and models of childhood premised on rigid notions of development by age, can limit, and even undermine, alternative policy approaches that recognise the nuance and diversity of young peoples’ maturity and that could have more lasting effects to create safer online environments and experiences for all.

Models of childhood and discourses of children and social media use

Childhood is often universalised without regard to historical, cultural and/or national differences (Buckingham, 2000; James and James, 2004), and has become ‘the most intensely governed sector of personal existence’. (Rose 1990, p. 121). Central to the construction of childhood is the imputation that children are innocent, vulnerable, special and a ‘protected species’ (Faircloth and Murray, 2015; Livingstone, 1996), and thus a site of risk anxiety, regulation and control (Jackson and Scott, 1999). Childhood and adolescence are typically conceptualised with reference to developmental psychology, which seeks to explain how young people transition into adulthood. Heavily influenced by the work of theorists such as G. Stanley Hall (1904), Jean Piaget (1969) and Erik Erikson (1963), maturation into adulthood is framed in terms of naturally occurring stages of physical, emotional and cognitive development. Notably, these stages do not correlate with actual ages as it is widely acknowledged that children develop and mature at their own rate (Fischer and Silvern, 1985).

Nonetheless, a range of psychological norms around desirable childhood development have been disseminated through media, popular literature and culture more generally (Rose, 1990). These developmental norms construct expectations regarding the ‘right age’ at which children should develop certain competencies and be granted certain freedoms and responsibilities (Jackson and Scott, 1999). Within each of these stages, children are expected to stick to activities that are appropriate for their developmental age (Buckingham, 2000). The norms against which the behaviours of children are judged are defined in part by those unruly children who depart from them (Rose, 1990). The inevitable deviations from children’s actual activities and behaviours and these normative ideals provoke anxiety and attempts to regulate and govern young people’s behaviour so that it accords with what is deemed appropriate for their age and developmental stage. Indeed, parental anxiety about their children’s digital practices is often framed in terms of whether such practices are considered to disrupt or enhance young people’s natural development (Page Jeffery, 2021). Understanding the construction of childhood helps to contextualise and critically examine the ways in which stories and ideas about children’s technology use in the public domain are informed by notions of what constitutes a ‘good’ childhood (Drotner, 2013), and can trigger social anxieties that are not necessarily founded in empirical realities.

Models and norms of childhood are major factors influencing the public discourse of children’s use of social media, with many pointing to a disproportionate focus on risk and harm within the broader context of normative understandings of childhood (Mavoa et al., 2017; Nansen et al. 2012). In an Australian context, Mavoa et al. (2017) found that the introduction of iPads into Australian primary schools was accompanied by a dominant discourse of screen-time as inherently harmful to children, observed in comments by parents on Facebook. Similarly, in a comparison of parental guidance of children’s media use in Australia and Belgium, Zaman et al. (2020) found ideological framings of parenting and digital media in Australia focused on risk and potential negative effects, often featuring ‘emotionally laden, opposing views, whereby restriction seems the golden rule for guiding young children’s engagement with digital media’ (p 120). Alongside this analysis of Australian public discourse, which underlines the shortcomings of the dominant child protection perspective (Swist et al., 2015), research of the actual effects of social media on children’s health and wellbeing has produced highly contentious and mixed findings, identifying both significant benefits such as opportunities for connection, self-expression and support, and notable harms, including exposure to eating disorder content, suicidal ideations, cyberbullying, screen addiction, and violence, with negative impacts on mental health. Particularly among groups of young people who experience a higher level of social marginalisation – adolescents with disability, those who are culturally and linguistically diverse, Indigenous or LGTBQIA+ – online spaces have been found to be critical for supporting communication, socialisation, belonging, learning and self-management (Albury, 2018; Are et al., 2025; Carlson and Frazer, 2020; eSafety Commissioner, 2023; Humphry et al., 2026; Ramsten et al., 2020). At the same time, studies have shown that the same young people are more likely to experience online problems and to seek out support and safety strategies (eSafety Commissioner, 2023). The public discourse of children and social media is shaped by this contradictory, fractured and conflicting evidence-base of actual digital harms (Cover et al., 2026), which in turn shapes policy decisions and regulatory reforms in the context of the complexities of potential and imagined risk.

Australia’s regulatory approach to children and social media

Since late 2024, Australia has become known around the world for its introduction of a country-wide age limit on social media accounts for Australian children under 16. The federal Parliament passed the Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024, amending the Online Safety Act 2021 in November 2024, with the core obligations commencing from 10 December 2025. Ten platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, X, TikTok, YouTube, Twitch, Kick and Reddit) were determined to fall under the definition of ‘age-restricted social media’ – services whose primary purpose is user interaction and sharing – and were required to put in place ‘reasonable steps’ to prevent Australians under 16 from creating or retaining accounts, using age assurance and verification systems.

In other parts of the world, mitigating online harms has become a primary goal for platform regulation in response to widespread concerns about wellbeing and mental health, with public inquiries, law reform, and new policy initiatives in a range of jurisdictions (Flew and Wilding, 2021). At the time of, and since this study, several countries were considering adopting similar minimum-age rules following Australia’s model. The UK introduced the Online Safety Act (Online Safety, 2023, Chapter 50, Section 1 (3)) described as ‘a new set of laws that protects children and adults online’, in an attempt to push the responsibility of safe social media environments to the platform providers instead of the users. In Europe, the Digital Services Act was passed in 2022, intended to ensure a more secure and responsible online environment, including for minors (Digital Services Act 2022). The United States overwhelmingly supported the Kids Online Safety Act (2024), which in a similar vein to the UK attempts to increase the duty of care towards children by platform providers. Canada proposed a Digital Safety Commission as a result of their Bill-C63 Online Harms Act (2024) to strengthen the government’s powers to issue compliance orders and penalise social media services (Lau, 2024). Since Australia’s social media ban was announced, a number of European countries have floated the introduction of laws restricting children’s access by age including France, Spain, Greece and Poland.

There has been widespread support and criticism of the introduction of Australia’s age-restrictions, sometimes referred to a social media ban or ‘delay’. Some have identified the strong national response as world-leading in the context of ‘a “policy turn” in questions of internet governance, as politicians and policy-makers across multiple jurisdictions grapple with the power of digital platforms’ (Flew and Gillet, 2021). Others have argued for stronger rights-based regulatory approaches that respect children’s rights to digital participation and instead of restrictions, advocate for putting the onus on digital platforms to make online spaces safer and less exploitative (Carah et al., 2025; Fardouly, 2025). Prior to the legislation’s introduction, in the months leading up to its parliamentary enactment in 2024, concerns about the safety of social media platforms were driving high levels of anxiety among parents and carers of young people, and featured heavily in media coverage. Indeed, aligning the laws as a governmental response to these public concerns was highlighted in explaining how the laws were designed to help families. In a media release in October, 2025, just 2 months before the age restrictions came into effect, Minister for Communications and Sports, Anika Wells, said: ‘Our Government is on the side of families and restricting under-16s from holding accounts on social media platforms is just one element of our ongoing work to keep young people safer online’. (The Hon Anika Wells, 2025). The Australian government also linked the need for a social media minimum age of 16 to children’s hampered development. A report published by the Australian Parliament in 2020 titled ‘Protecting the Age of Innocence’, outlined widespread community concern about the impacts on the welfare of children and young people associated with exposure to online pornography and gambling, recommending the introduction of online age verification to prevent children’s access (The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs, 2020). Following the report, the eSafety Commissioner published a Roadmap in 2023 that considered the feasibility for implementing mandatory age verification. The issue of children and social media harms has thus become the focus of regulatory responses from the Australian Government and other governments, while attracting significant media attention, which has been particularly intense in Australia and internationally both before and after the introduction of this regulation. This study offers close analysis of a snapshot of this media coverage in an important moment in the lead up to the introduction of the Australian social media minimum age, forming the basis of an analysis of the interrelationship between media discourse and platform governance through the lens of moral panic theory.

Methodology

This study used discourse analysis of news articles and headlines from 15th September 2023 to 15th September 2024 using the international news database, Factiva, produced by Dow Jones Reuters, to map the contours of the debate about restricting young people’s access to social media. As Blatchford (2020) explains, the availability of a range of databases that collect and aggregate news articles provides researchers with a means for studying news content and sources, but there are still a number of issues related to the transience, priority given to textual sources and incompleteness of these databases because of the many different formats and channels for accessing news in online media ecologies (Couldry, 2008). Nevertheless, Factiva provides access to a comprehensive collection of online and print media and is not limited by the personalisation bias that shapes the search results of databases such as Google News (Blatchford, 2020). The researchers recognised that the search results are not a complete representation of news content, but with its focus on Australian news media over the selected period it is a large enough collection to identify key events and commonly recurring themes, language patterns and prevalent media sources and figures at a key moment in the shaping of the regulatory outcomes that transpired. Our approach also allowed us to situate the Australian news media discourse of the social media ban within the larger English-speaking global news media ecosystem. In the following section we explain the steps taken to determine the search protocol, collect the data, define the coding schema, code and analyse the data.

Search protocol

A search protocol was developed using the term (‘social media ban’) before incorporating Boolean operators to maximise the relevance of the results. Our final search query was: (‘social media’ OR ‘phone’) AND (‘child’ OR ‘children’) AND (‘ban’ OR ‘banning’ OR ‘banned’). Using the truncation sign (*) for the terms child* and ban* was trialled; however, since it produced only additional unrelated results, truncation in search terms was not used in the final search. This allowed us to capture articles related to the discourse surrounding children potentially being banned from social media and mobile phones in the English-speaking press worldwide, from which we then collected a subset of Australian news articles.

Besides the data range (15/09/2023–15/09/2024) and language (English), there were no exclusions on other categories (including sources, authors, companies, subject, industry, region). To ensure higher relevance and a smaller corpus to enable qualitative thematic coding, we carried out two data extractions (explained below). We limited the search to terms found in headlines and lead paragraphs, as searching the entire articles yielded tens of thousands of results, many of which were not directly related to the social media or mobile phone ban discourse.

Data collection and codebook design

We conducted two data extractions. The first dataset included the headlines and lead paragraphs of all news articles from all English-language publications across all regions totalling 1,669. From this collection, any irrelevant articles were removed such as the ones about internet shutdowns and bans of individual social media accounts. Whilst this dataset was not coded, it provided the basis for developing a timeline of global events related to news on either social media or mobile phone bans (see Figure 1), which was completed by counting the articles by month per region using advanced search criteria in Factiva.

Figure 1.

Number of English-language Global versus Australian publications by month 15 Sept 2023–15 Sept 2024.

The second data extraction focused on ‘Australian’ publications using the same search criteria. This search produced 673 results which were then reviewed for relevance and screened for final inclusion. Media articles that referred to social media bans of individual social media account holders and internet/social media shutdowns in countries were excluded. In total, there were 204 headlines included in the final dataset, originating from 67 separate news sources. While 204 may appear a relatively small sample, it is pertinent to consider the highly concentrated nature of the Australian news media sector and relatively few primary outlets overall (not counting syndicates). The period targeted for collection was just prior to a major escalation in reportage of the social media ban and was foundational in shaping the subsequent media attention and government response. This subset was coded in NVivo using a predefined codebook broken down into top level codes and subcodes. The top level codes were ‘common themes’, ‘cultural tropes of childhood’, ‘key events’, ‘recurring figures/celebrities’, ‘rhetorical strategies’ and ‘proposed solutions’. The codebook was established over a series of collaborative meetings, testing and refinement with inter-rater reliability achieved by testing and reviewing the codebook iteratively to create an agreed coding schema and categories. Initial categories were established during a test read-through of an earlier data extraction and then these were developed and refined over a series of collaborative discussions to enhance accuracy and relevance.

Analysis

Article headlines were analysed and coded using discourse analysis. There are many versions of discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003). Discourse analysis acknowledges that language is always active; it always endeavours to accomplish something (Antaki, 2008; Bryman, 2015; Richardson, 2007). Thus, a central question guiding our analysis was, ‘what are these headlines seeking to achieve?’. Our analytical framework was particularly attentive to how headlines function as what Dor (2003) terms ‘relevance optimizers’, meaning linguistic constructions that pack maximum meaning into minimal words while helping readers process information efficiently. This perspective acknowledges headlines’ role not just as information delivery mechanisms, but as sophisticated rhetorical tools that employ various linguistic and psychological strategies to maximise reader engagement (Bonyadi and Samuel, 2013; Schaffer, 1995).

The analysis focused on identifying specific discursive devices (Montejo and Adriano, 2018), such as evaluative language, temporal indicators, intensifiers, and actors. Key areas of focus in our analysis included whether headlines (explicitly or implicitly) supported or opposed bans (i.e. positive, negative, neutral, mixed); temporality (i.e. invocations of urgency or definitiveness); the use of various rhetorical strategies including exaggeration/amplification; use of pathos, ethos and logos; use of metaphor and analogy; how children and young people were conceptualised (i.e. children/young people/young children/minors, or in proprietary terms such as ‘our kids’); and invocations of specific ages (i.e. references to ‘under 16’ or ‘under 14’). We also examined the number of publications by media group. Based on this analysis, we make conclusions about whether and how the news discourse analysed conformed to the five key elements of a moral panic based on the model by Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994).

Key findings

The analysis of the monthly distribution of news articles on the topic of social media bans and children (Figure 1) showed that both in terms of the sheer volume of reportage and as the site of many of the key events over the last months, Australia has been leading the pack. Australian news media about the social media ban peaked around the time of the South Australian Premier’s call for a ban in the state and the Australian Prime Minister’s subsequent backing of the idea. It peaked again at the time the Prime Minister announced a plan to introduce legislation for a social media minimum age to parliament by the end of 2024. Other significant increases in news media about the ban were associated with the release of Jonathon Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, which advocated for a social media ban for children, and the UK Prime Minister’s response to calls for a smartphone ban by the of mother of Brianna Ghey, the teenage victim of a transgender hate crime. This was not the first time concerns about children’s use of digital media had been discussed in the media. In 2023, the US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a health warning in relation to social media claiming that it was harmful to young people, and the previous two decades have seen numerous concerns about young people and media, including about sexting, sexualisation and pornography (Page Jeffery, 2017).

Nearly half (45.3%) of headlines indicate support for social media bans (Table 1). In these headlines, bans were framed as protective rather than restrictive and suggestive of a necessary intervention to keep young people safe. Some examples include: ‘Obnoxious social media faces state push for youth ban’; ‘Age verification would “absolutely” keep kids safer’; ‘Ahead of the curve: The parents who banned their kids from social media’; ‘United on kids’ ban on socials’; ‘Time to act on online hazards’.

Table 1.

Frequency of stance for/against ban.

Stance
Stance	Frequency (203)	Percentage
Positive	92	45.3
Neutral	62	30.5
Negative	38	18.7
Mixed	11	5.4

Nearly one-third (30.5%) of headlines maintain a neutral position, describing efforts rather than implying a particular stance (Table 1). Some examples include: ‘South Australia to explore social media ban for children’; ‘Should children be banned from social media?’, ‘How social media ban will work’. Headlines indicating opposition to a social media ban were less than 19%. When including mixed stances, total headlines with any negative component still only reach 24%. Some examples include: ‘Social media bans for children won’t solve this crisis’, ‘6 News anchor Leonardo Puglisi slams bi-partisan under 16 social media ban’, ‘Social media age ban risks stoking surveillance, tech veteran warns’. ‘Social media ban a “bandaid response” to online harms’, “‘Fundamental error” in teen social media ban’, ‘PM’s social media ban like “whack-a-mole”’.

Sensationalism within this context is the use of language and phrases that suggest that the problem is more serious than it is believed to be – thus, the response to the ‘problem’ is disproportionate to the harm (Table 2). The issue of disproportionality, while an inherent characteristic of moral panics (Cohen, 2011), raises the legitimate question of what an appropriate and proportionate response might be, which is notoriously difficult to determine in instances such as these where the evidence of harm is highly contested. In any case, Critcher (2008) explains that disproportionality in practice involves exaggerating figures, ignoring other equally harmful conditions, distortion, stereotyping and sensationalism. Here, we consider exaggeration to include sensationalist language and the use of value-laden language and metaphors.

Table 2.

Frequency of rhetorical strategies (amplification, pathos, ethos, euphemism & humour).

Rhetorical strategies
Rhetorical strategy	Frequency (of 118)	Percentage
Sensationalism	43	36.4%
Pathos	25	21.2%
Ethos	22	18.6%
Euphemism	18	15.3%
Humour	10	8.5%

Sensationalism represents over a third (36.4%) of rhetorical strategies. These headlines appear to inflate threats and consequences through emotive and sensationalised language. Examples include ‘Sinister impact’, ‘Alarming new trend’, ‘save our kids’, ‘social media horror’, ‘compared to an ‘ice pipe’, ‘losing a generation’, ‘taunted to death’, ‘Cesspit’, ‘toxic mix’, ‘Living in hell’, ‘Desperate’, ‘addiction’, and ‘scourge of social media’. Table 3 demonstrates different exaggeration and amplification techniques employed within the headlines.

Table 3.

Frequency of themes of amplification by language type.

Themes of amplification
Language type	Percentage (of 43)	Extracts
Crisis/Disaster language	31%	•‘Losing a generation’
		•‘Haunted generation’
		•‘Taunted to death’
		•‘Living in hell’
Combat/War metaphors	18.6%	•‘Battle with social media’
		•‘Goes to war with Elon Musk’
		•‘Zucker punch’
		•‘Time out’
		•‘Major crackdown’
Disease/Addiction metaphors	16.3%	•‘Toxic mix’
		•‘Scourge’
		•‘Addiction’
		•Compared to ‘ice pipe’
Moral degradation language	14%	•‘Cesspit’
		•‘Vile acts’
		•‘Sinister impact’

Pathos (21.2%) and Ethos (18.6%) – two of Aristotle’s rhetorical proofs (Kennedy, 2007) – are used in similar proportions (Table 2). Pathos draws on emotions to persuade audiences (e.g. ‘He was lifeless’: Dad’s social media plea’), whereas ethos relies on the credibility of the speaker (Higgins and Walker, 2012) (e.g. ‘No excuses: Why experts say phones have no place in schools’).

Our analysis considered the ways in which time was invoked in the media headlines (Table 4). Combined with definite framing, the vast majority of headlines (86.6%) presented social media bans as certain or near certain, signifying a clear pattern of temporal urgency in messaging. Examples include: ‘Albanese backs children’s social media ban proposal’; ‘Age verification would “absolutely” keep kids safer’; ‘teens to be banned from using social media’. The use of future and conditional tense to denote the urgency of the problem and need for an immediate solution supports the volatility element of the moral panic by building momentum towards change. Finally, the top five media groups publishing articles about the ban were found to be private media corporations (Figure 2). Australia operates in a multiple media market with both private and public media organisations in operation. The public service media (PSM) sector is best represented by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the Special Broadcasting Services (SBS), alongside a community media sector. These media organisations are governed by legislation and follow a remit of public values. The other market sector within Australia is made up of private media, which is typically represented by corporate media organisations such as those listed in Figure 2. Commercial media is driven by a broader range of media values that also includes audience reach, commerciality, and advertising, which at times separates its agency and editorial direction from that of PSM.

Table 4.

Frequency of temporal positioning (imminent, definite, tentative).

Temporal positioning
Temporal positioning	Frequency (of 171)	Percentage
Imminent	79	46.2%
Definite	69	40.4%
Tentative	23	13.4%

Figure 2.

Number of publications by media group 15 Sept 2023–15 Sept 2024.

Discussion

Our findings show that the representation of social media bans for young people in the Australian news media meets the criteria of a moral panic based on the five characteristics outlined by Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994). The headlines signal widespread concern about social media’s impact on young people. Rarely specifying the nature of digital harms; instead, they rely on hyperbolic and sensationalist language that foregrounds perceived effects such as ‘scourge’, ‘toxic pit’, ‘living in hell’ and ‘cesspit’. There is also clear hostility towards big tech seen in headlines such as, ‘Protect childhood from big tech’; ‘obnoxious social media faces state push for youth ban’. Further, the bias towards support for the social media ban (45% opposed to 19% implicitly opposing bans) is suggestive of a growing consensus that there is a problem for which something must be done. The urgency and imminence implicit in much of the media headlines is indicative of building momentum and a degree of volatility as the panic escalated and gained momentum quickly.

There is also a clear moral element to the panic tied to the idea of childhood innocence. Motifs that are often repeated in media panics about new media and youth typically invoke the developmental discourse outlined above, which idealises the ‘normal’ developmental trajectory from child to adult, which social media is purported to disrupt. This is often framed as letting kids be kids (Page Jeffery, 2017), which invokes a nostalgic idea of childhood involving ‘innocence’ and a pre-screen era of outdoor play and sports. This development discourse was evident in the broader panic discourse with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese claiming that he wanted ‘to see kids off their devices and onto the footy fields and the swimming pools and the tennis courts’ (Long, 2024). A campaign launched by commercial radio ‘shock jocks’ ‘Fitzy and Wippa’ titled ‘36 months’ was premised on the claim that ‘Kids need more time to develop healthy and secure identities before they’re exposed to the minefield of social media’ (https://www.36months.com.au/). Protecting young people from ‘growing up too soon’ or being exposed to content before they are deemed developmentally ready, draw on similar developmental assumptions and invokes a moral imperative to protect children.

The question of age and stage at which social media might be deemed appropriate for young people is central to debates about restricting social media access to young people under a certain age. The nuance around age, however, is largely overlooked in the media headlines and the discourse more broadly. The social media ban panic discourse reveals ambiguity around the concrete age-threshold for prospective bans, which, we suggest, is symptomatic and emblematic of a broader trend towards treating young people as one homogenous group. Under 16 is the most commonly cited specific age threshold mentioned in the headlines (63%, 19 articles) with some references to under 14 (30%, 9 articles). Yet the majority don’t mention an age-threshold at all, referring overwhelmingly instead to ‘kids’ or ‘children’. These terms are more emotionally resonant than legal or technical descriptors such as ‘minors’ or ‘adolescents’, which may serve to highlight vulnerability. That kids and children are often discussed in proprietary terms through the addition of ‘our’ (i.e. ‘our kids’ and ‘our children’) further frames them as not yet adults in need of ‘our’ (i.e. adult) protection.

We have established through our analysis that the Australian news media coverage about social media bans for children leading up to the Prime Minister’s initial announcement on 10th September about the legislative proposal, conforms to the key elements of a moral panic discourse. The construction of age thresholds within the discourse fails to account for the diverse and heterogeneous experiences of children and young people, reinforcing the construction of children as lacking critical capacities, and triggering pre-existing adult anxieties, especially those of parents and caregivers, about young people and new media. It acts as a fuelling mechanism for stirring moral outrage and is a ‘call to arms’ to solve a perceived problem that the panic discourse itself helps to create. This is one of the recognised features of moral panics – that they are a process by which ‘problems are constructed in public arenas’ (Critcher, 2008, p. 1134). The production of the ‘anxiety of age’ in relation to young people’s use of social media underpins this larger purpose of the moral panic and what it does. We suggest there are two main purposes of this moral panic: first, it created the conditions for rapid policy and regulatory change in Australia at the federal level; and second, it reaffirmed certain notions of childhood premised on a developmental paradigm and thus legitimises a protectionist relationship of adults to children.

Policy change is not simple or fast. There is broad action underway by governments at different levels, regulators and policymakers in Australia and around the world to limit the powers of social media companies and enforce compliance to address a host of perceived problems, some of which relate to user safety. Australia has in some areas been at the forefront of these changes, for example, in the establishment of the Online Safety Act in 2021 and creation of the world’s first eSafety Commissioner. This has granted the Australian government a profile and influence on the global internet governance stage, with new partnerships forged such as the bilateral cooperation between Australia and the United Kingdom on digital online safety and security issues (How, 2024). The long-term patterns of policy and media discourse exist alongside the short-term amplification and de-amplification of moral panics. These cyclic dynamics are interlinked and intersect with local political agendas and public debates within a ‘problem space’ that is ‘shaped by public discourse, opinion polling, and public policy processes' (Flew et al., 2025, p. 5).

There are other notable examples of the Australian Government attempting to govern big-tech, with mixed results. In April 2024, the Office of the eSafety Commissioner brandished its powers under the Online Safety Act 2021 to enforce X to remove violent online content categorised as class 1 material. When X failed to comply, the eSafety Commissioner sought injunctive relief, but the Federal Court refused to grant it against X. In responding to the takedown requests, Elon Musk was reported to have tweeted ‘that if any country can censor content for all countries, “then what is to stop any country from controlling the entire internet?”’ (Taylor, 2024). This incident, which played out in the media within Australia and overseas, highlighted the limitations of the Australian Government’s powers, and thus may have played some part in the subsequent federal charge to legislate a social media minimum age, following similar announcements made by the state premiers in South Australia, Queensland, Victoria and NSW.

The moral panic provided a means to do something fast in a way that would leapfrog potentially drawn-out public consultations and internal reviews. Indeed, at the time of the announcement of a social media minimum age by the Prime Minister, the outcomes of ongoing parliamentary inquiries and the Age Assurance System trial that the government itself had set up were yet to be released. Yet a ‘consensus’ that something must be done was simultaneously created and promulgated by the moral panic, thus affording the government’s response legitimacy. As others have noted, the speed of policy change in introducing the social media minimum age was incredibly swift (Flew et al., 2025). The solution to limit access by age provided a ready and seemingly ‘simple fix’, reducing the complexity of the larger challenges at hand and the often slow-moving democratic systems and processes to address them. Notably, this exercise of national government power took place in the context of a large-scale global power contest between social media companies and nation-states. Rodrik (2011) calls this the global internet governance ‘trilemma’ to represent the impossibility of striking a balance between ‘hyperglobalisation, democracy and national self-determination’ (p. 200). Although the moral panic discourse was driven by a constellation of agents and a mixture of sources, its political utility stands out as a tool to produce the conditions to regulate quickly and to engender the figure of a strong nation-state on a global internet governance stage beset with competing and potentially irreconcilable forces.

The second key function of the moral panic was to reinforce ideas and boundaries of childhood, which are supposedly threatened by social media as well as by challenges to normative ideas of appropriate childhood development. Social media have reconfigured power relations between children and parents and adults in positions of authority and restricting children’s access to social media is a way to restore the hegemony of a social order premised on a protectionist model. This is not a new phenomenon: television, the Walkman, iPod, smartphone, laptop and smart speaker are all examples among the array of personal and domestic media that have reshaped the home and what it means to ‘do family’ (Morgan, 1996). These shifts in culture and everyday life through the integration of digital media are ongoing processes that have generated ‘technopanics’ in the past that we can learn from. The rhetorical strategies and themes strategically activate a fast and blunt response that, if enacted, would curtail the agency and freedom that is afforded by social media to young people.

There is a wide set of interest campaigners and groups who make up the moral panic discourse ecosystem. These are ‘professional moralists’ (Critcher, 2008) or ‘moral entrepreneurs’ (Cohen, 2011) whose agenda is loosely aligned with political figures and institutional interests. In Australia, this included campaigners of the 36 months initiative founded by Michael ‘Wippa’ Wipfli, co-host of Nova 96.9’s Sydney breakfast show, and Rob Galluzzo, founder of production company FINCH, supported by News Corporation and NOVA Entertainment. Traditional forms of private news media are among the interest groups that construct and drive moral panic discourse, which could be linked to the benefit financially from more government regulation of social media companies – given the threat to advertising revenue by social media.

The moral panic discourse ecosystem also involved a wide range of parent groups, such as Heads Up Alliance and many informal parent groups and networks. In previous empirical research, which involved a national survey, focus groups over 2022/23 and 2016/2017, and family workshops in 2021, we found that parents broadly felt overwhelmed and ill-equipped to deal with the challenges and negative experiences their children may encounter online. Parents spoke about these perceived problems often using the common motifs of the moral panic discourse, such as nostalgia for a ‘lost childhood outdoors’ and a ‘screen-free childhood’. Parents also reported struggling to effectively manage their children’s digital media use, with mediation attempts often resulting in family conflict (Humphry et al., 2026; Page Jeffery, 2024). The adoption of the panic discourse by parents is significant because it points to the underlying anxieties that the panic taps into as well as the transmission of the language of moral regulation to key audience groups. The moral panic cycle thus simultaneously constructs, affirms and sustains parental anxieties about their children’s media use.

What are the implications of this moral panic? From a policy perspective, a legislated social media ban by age might appear to fix a wide range of problems but is proving difficult to implement. In this instance, the construction of an age threshold for social media access to 16 years old is itself arbitrary, rather than premised upon a consensus around the empirical evidence of harm associated with a certain age. Age assurance systems are still experimental, known to struggle with estimating age accurately, particularly for children and young people, and come with significant data privacy drawbacks (Humphry et al., 2024). From the standpoint of 3 months post-ban, there have been many reports of wide-scale circumvention of the age verification processes and lack of compliance by the major social media platforms in their obligations. The Australian eSafety Commissioner has stated it has moved into ‘enforcement stance’ and is gathering evidence to inform potential legal action (eSafety Commissioner, 2026). While countries look closely at the impact of Australia’s social media minimum age, other regulatory models and approaches are being explored such as strengthening the powers in the UK’s Online Safety Act to respond more quickly to new technologies such as AI, and legal action taken against platform owners, such as a landmark case in Los Angeles in the US that resulted in a decision that Meta and Google intentionally built addictive social media, a decision that came shortly after a jury in New Mexico found Meta liable for endangering children through exposing them to sexual predators and explicit material (Nicholls, 2026). Such approaches focus on actions that pressure platform companies to comply with safety-by-design principles, and rely less on restricting access by age based on the mistaken understanding that young people’s maturity is linked to standard stages of development.

Age-based social media bans may do actual harm to a wide range groups of young people who rely on social media for access to communities of support for help, and a sense of belonging (Byron, 2020; Johns, 2024). It forecloses the possibility of developing evidence-based solutions to actual problems – which we are not denying exist – such as increasing parents’ and young people’s social media literacies, and utilising democratic functions to enforce social media companies to improve online experiences and the safety and agency of young people. These slower responses may not have immediate political value or provide the same momentum for change, but by moving beyond the ‘anxiety of age’, they can recognise the heterogeneity and diversity of young people, their skills and maturity, and their right to digital participation using the affordances of social media according to their own interests and goals.

Conclusion

In this paper, we drew on Stanley Cohen’s foundational theory of moral panic and media theories that have added to our understanding of the always-mediated discourse of such processes. In the moral media panic over perceived harms to children by social media, ‘social media’ is the new ‘folk devil’ and children are once again ‘the innocents’ to be protected. Through a discourse analysis of news articles and headlines gathered from Factiva from 15th September, 2023 to 15th September, 2024, we established how the social media ban was constructed as a solution to the moral media panic generated over this period. We showed how the media and political discourse that has taken shape over the 12 months was composed of rhetorical discursive strategies, including stance, amplification, themes and tropes and temporality. We showed how the moral media panic conformed to Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s revised moral panic model with its five key elements of concern, consensus, disproportionality, hostility and volatility. We also showed how there is a moral element to the panic with repeated motifs about the dangers of ‘new media’ for children, which also invoke the developmental discourse that idealises the ‘normal’ developmental trajectory from child to adult, which social media is purported to disrupt. We demonstrated through the analysis, also drawing on policy papers and analysis, how a sequence of discursive events set up a political agenda by mobilising a wide range of forces and interest groups (celebrities, academics, politicians, media hosts and parent advocates). While the moral panic created the conditions for a fast political response, we argue that this preserves, rather than challenges, a set of dominant narratives of childhood defined by a certain age, children at risk and in need of protection by adults, the fetishisation of the idea of childhood innocence, and the power of the state over globalised technology companies.

On the one hand, the mobilisation of popular and political support through the panic discourse has been effective in facilitating a national-level response in Australia to regulating social media platform companies. As Johansson (2000) has asserted, there may indeed be a place for moral panics in ‘the formulation of a moral boundary and a common political view on certain phenomena in society' (p. 33). Many agree that social media platform companies have gone well beyond what would be considered morally defensible in their unscrupulous exploitation of children for their engagement and data value. On the other hand, the reproduction of harmful narratives of children and critiqued models of childhood limited efforts towards implementing alternative policy approaches that would pressure platform owners to create safer online environments and experiences for all, including young people. In the context of such powerful and pervasive media-fuelled moral panics in Australia and around the world, and the rapid integration of age assurance technologies, fundamentally transforming the way that young people access information and vital social networks, we advocate for regulatory responses that recognise the diversity of young people and their right to digital participation.

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Justine Humphry

Catherine Page Jeffery

Jonathon Hutchinson

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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