Features

Australia’s social media ban: A sledgehammer approach to a scalpel problem

Published

10 months ago

2025/12/24

When governments panic, they legislate. When they legislate in panic, they create monsters. Australia’s world-first ban on social media for under-16s, which came into force on 10 December, 2025, is precisely such a monster, a clumsy, authoritarian response to a legitimate problem that threatens to do more harm than good.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese hailed it as a “proud day” for Australian families. One wonders what there is to be proud about when a liberal democracy resorts to blanket censorship, violates children’s fundamental rights, and outsources enforcement to the very tech giants it claims to be taming. This is not protection; it is political theatre masquerading as policy.

The Seduction of Simplicity

The ban’s appeal is obvious. Social media platforms have become toxic playgrounds where children are subjected to cyberbullying, addictive algorithms, and content that can genuinely harm their mental health. The statistics are damning: 40% of Australian teens have experienced cyberbullying, youth self-harm hospital admissions rose 47% between 2012 and 2022, and depression rates have skyrocketed in tandem with smartphone adoption. These are real problems demanding real solutions.

But here’s where Australia has gone catastrophically wrong: it has conflated correlation with causation and chosen punishment over education, restriction over reform, and authoritarian control over empowerment. The ban assumes that removing children from social media will magically solve mental health crises, as if these platforms emerged in a vacuum rather than as symptoms of deeper societal failures, inadequate mental health services, overworked parents, underfunded schools, and a culture that has outsourced child-rearing to screens.

Dr. Naomi Lott of the University of Reading hit the nail on the head when she argued that the ban unfairly burdens youth for tech firms’ failures in content moderation and algorithm design. Why should children pay the price for corporate malfeasance? This is akin to banning teenagers from roads because car manufacturers built unsafe vehicles, rather than holding those manufacturers accountable.

The Enforcement Farce

The practical implementation of this ban reads like dystopian satire. Platforms must take “reasonable steps” to prevent access, a phrase so vague it could mean anything or nothing. The age verification methods being deployed include AI-driven facial recognition, behavioural analysis, government ID scans, and something called “AgeKeys.” Each comes with its own Pandora’s box of problems.

Facial recognition technology has well-documented biases against ethnic minorities. Behavioural analysis can be easily gamed by tech-savvy teenagers. ID scans create massive privacy risks in a country that has suffered repeated data breaches. And zero-knowledge proof, while theoretically elegant, require a level of technical sophistication that makes them impractical for mass adoption.

Already, teenagers are bragging online about circumventing the restrictions, prompting Albanese’s impotent rebuke. What did he expect? That Australian youth would simply accept digital exile? The history of prohibition, from alcohol to file-sharing, teaches us that determined users will always find workarounds. The ban doesn’t eliminate risk; it merely drives it underground where it becomes harder to monitor and address.

Even more absurdly, platforms like YouTube have expressed doubts about enforcement, and Opposition Leader Sussan Ley has declared she has “no confidence” in the ban’s efficacy. When your own political opposition and the companies tasked with implementing your policy both say it won’t work, perhaps that’s a sign you should reconsider.

The Rights We’re Trading Away

The legal challenges now percolating through Australia’s High Court get to the heart of what’s really at stake here. The Digital Freedom Project, led by teenagers Noah Jones and Macy Neyland, argues that the ban violates the implied constitutional freedom of political communication. They’re right. Social media platforms, for all their flaws, have become essential venues for democratic discourse. By age 16, many young Australians are politically aware, engaged in climate activism, and participating in public debates. This ban silences them.

The government’s response, that child welfare trumps absolute freedom, sounds reasonable until you examine it closely. Child welfare is being invoked as a rhetorical trump card to justify what is essentially state paternalism. The government isn’t protecting children from objective harm; it’s making a value judgment about what information they should be allowed to access and what communities they should be permitted to join. That’s thought control, not child protection.

Moreover, the ban creates a two-tiered system of rights. Those over 16 can access platforms; those under cannot, regardless of maturity, need, or circumstance. A 15-year-old seeking LGBTQ+ support groups, mental health resources, or information about escaping domestic abuse is now cut off from potentially life-saving communities. A 15-year-old living in rural Australia, isolated from peers, loses a vital social lifeline. The ban is blunt force trauma applied to a problem requiring surgical precision.

The Privacy Nightmare

Let’s talk about the elephant in the digital room: data security. Australia’s track record here is abysmal. The country has experienced multiple high-profile data breaches, and now it’s mandating that platforms collect biometric data, government IDs, and behavioural information from millions of users, including adults who will need to verify their age to distinguish themselves from banned minors.

The legislation claims to mandate “data minimisation” and promises that information collected solely for age verification will be destroyed post-verification. These promises are worth less than the pixels they’re displayed on. Once data is collected, it exists. It can be hacked. It can be subpoenaed. It can be repurposed. The fine for violations, up to AUD 9.5 million, sounds impressive until you realise that’s pocket change for tech giants making billions annually.

We’re creating a massive honeypot of sensitive information about children and families, and we’re trusting companies with questionable data stewardship records to protect it. What could possibly go wrong?

The Global Domino Delusion

Proponents like US Senator Josh Hawley and author Jonathan Haidt praise Australia’s ban as a “bold precedent” that will trigger global reform. This is wishful thinking bordering on delusion. What Australia has actually created is a case study in how not to regulate technology.

France, Denmark, and Malaysia are watching, but with notable differences. France’s model includes parental consent options. Denmark proposes exemptions for 13-14-year-olds with parental approval. These approaches recognise what Australia refuses to acknowledge: that blanket prohibitions fail to account for individual circumstances and family autonomy.

The comparison table in the document reveals the stark rigidity of Australia’s approach. It’s the only country attempting outright prohibition without parental consent. This isn’t leadership; it’s extremism. Other nations may cherry-pick elements of Australia’s approach while avoiding its most draconian features. (See Table)

The Real Solutions We’re Ignoring

Here’s what actual child protection would look like: holding platforms legally accountable for algorithmic harm, mandating transparent content moderation, requiring platforms to offer chronological feeds instead of engagement-maximising algorithms, funding digital literacy programmes in schools, properly resourcing mental health services for young people, and empowering parents with better tools to guide their children’s online experiences.

Instead, Australia has chosen the path of least intellectual effort: ban it and hope for the best. This is governance by bumper sticker, policy by panic.

Mia Bannister, whose son’s suicide has been invoked repeatedly to justify the ban, called parental enforcement “short-term pain, long-term gain” and urged families to remove devices entirely. But her tragedy, however heart-wrenching, doesn’t justify bad policy. Individual cases, no matter how emotionally compelling, are poor foundations for sweeping legislation affecting millions.

Conclusion: The Tyranny of Good Intentions

Australia’s social media ban is built on good intentions, genuine concerns about child welfare, and understandable frustration with unaccountable tech giants. But good intentions pave a very particular road, and this road leads to a place where governments dictate what information citizens can access based on age, where privacy becomes a quaint relic, and where young people are infantilised rather than educated.

The ban will fail on its own terms, teenagers will circumvent it, platforms will struggle with enforcement, and the mental health crisis will continue because it was never primarily about social media. But it will succeed in normalising digital authoritarianism, expanding surveillance infrastructure, and teaching young Australians that their rights are negotiable commodities.

When this ban inevitably fails, when the promised mental health improvements don’t materialize, when data breaches expose the verification systems, and when teenagers continue to access prohibited platforms through VPNs and workarounds, Australia will face a choice: double down on enforcement, creating an even more invasive surveillance state, or admit that the entire exercise was a costly mistake.

Smart money says they’ll choose the former. After all, once governments acquire new powers, they rarely relinquish them willingly. And that’s the real danger here, not that Australia will fail to protect children from social media, but that it will succeed in building the infrastructure for a far more intrusive state. The platforms may be the proximate target, but the ultimate casualties will be freedom, privacy, and trust.

Australia didn’t need a world-first ban. It needed world-class thinking. Instead, it settled for a world of trouble.

(The writer, a senior Chartered Accountant and professional banker, is Professor at SLIIT, Malabe. The views and opinions expressed in this article are personal.)

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Features

New US sanctions on ICC, a fillip to worldwide political repression

Published

5 hours ago

2026/10/15

Thilina Walpola

The International Criminal Court in session. UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s warning to the International Criminal Court (ICC) was stark: ‘Either the ICC will end its threats, or we will end the ICC.’ It followed US central administration accusations that the court was unfairly targeting Americans on the basis of trumped-up war crimes charges.

However, a new plethora of sanctions has been clamped on the ICC by the US, which in turn has spurred accusations by sections of the world that the latter has unleashed an ‘assault’ on the international legal order.

What some of the sanctions would mean for the ICC was outlined by Rubio: ‘We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling their ability to operate against us.’

The ICC has shown consistency of purpose over the years. Despite some operational constraints it has indicted a large number of political strongmen from around the world, accused of war crimes and other governance excesses that come under its purview. Two such recent figures are: Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Rather than enjoy a mere nominal presence in the world community, the ICC has proved its effectiveness by detaining and bringing to justice scores of VIP politicians and others of their ilk who have been found guilty of human rights abuses and kindred excesses that come within the terms of reference of the ICC.

Accordingly, the international justice system would be stymied considerably as a result of the ICC being dis-empowered, particularly financially. Needless to say, potential and real perpetrators of the species of crime coming under the jurisdiction of the ICC would stand to gain most from such anarchic tendencies. That is, political repression globally would be enabled to enjoy a new lease of life.

A detailing of the types of crime coming under the purview of the ICC provides an idea of what it would cost the international community if the ICC’s operations are gravely hampered. They are mainly: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression.

That is, the part of the world to be worst affected would be the global South, since the latter is awash with the mentioned crimes. Needless to say, a chronically-disaffected South will sooner rather than later undermine the well being of the world dangerously. The world is already being put through these paces.

At the time of writing, ‘illegal migrants’ from the South, for example, are aggravating many a Western economy’s woes, besides creating for them acute law and order issues. The fact that these migrants’ presence goes on to become a virtual test of the migrant receiving states’ ability to forge domestic social inclusion in the face of jingoistic protests by mainly white supremacist groups is evidence of the latter. As is known, the US, to take just one example, has been up against this crisis for quite a while.

Accordingly, it will be in the best interests of the West if ‘illegal’ migrant arrivals on their shores are stemmed. If the socio-political and economic problems assailing the South are effectively managed through North-South collaborative, ‘trouble-shooting’ efforts the causes leading to ‘illegal’ migration and connected issues could be resolved at source as it were. For, it is the aggravation of the South’s material questions that lays the basis for the emergence of repressive and anti-democratic regimes in the hemisphere.

Until such time that the aforementioned issues in North-South relations are visited afresh and addressed urgently, a vibrantly functioning ICC would be needed. For, the latter would prove a deterrent to Southern political and military strongmen, highly prone to power abuse and like excesses, from coming into being in the wake of the South’s chronic material woes and the wars and conflicts that result from them.

It stands to reason then that the US would be acting in its own interests by enabling the ICC to perpetuate its mandate without hindrance. For a crop of issues that impinges negatively on internal law and order would be defused.

Meanwhile, there needs to be a meeting of minds among the rest of the West to put back in place a North-South dialogue process aimed at reducing some of the economic pressures that are weighing on the South.

Since economics usually drives politics it will be in the interests of the world community to scrutinizingly re-visit North-South issues of the past and put in place economic relief packages for Southern publics that would enable them to tide over their material hardships rather than permit the latter to aggravate into social disaffection and eventually armed militancy. It is the latter juncture that paves the way for the emergence of authoritarian rulers in the South who then go on to be a blight on their publics.

Accordingly, the Southern-based global development thinking of the past that envisaged a more equitable world economic order needs to be seen as an urgent need. That is, NAM’s international development paradigms need to be resuscitated to the extent possible.

It is unlikely that rightist governments of the West, such as the current Republican administration in the US, would find these projects feasible, but democratic states of Europe, led by perhaps the UK, are likely to think otherwise. For it would not be beneficial for the democratic world to be having on their hands repressive governments in the South who would be gravitating towards the major military and economic actors of the South, such as Iran and North Korea, who tend to be in constant power struggles with the West.

However, until such time that the mentioned, pro-people initiatives are given serious thought the ICC would need to be enabled by the international community to be in place comfortably and carry on with its mandate of bringing repressive rulers to book. Besides the ICC should pave the way for the peoples of the developing world to enjoy some substantial respite from the political repression and even terror which tend to be their lot.

Meanwhile, the wars of West Asia are relentlessly aggravating the economic hardships of people everywhere, driving the point home to enlightened sections that there is no alternative to peacemaking. A challenge is to convert the US under President Trump to this line of thinking.

Features

Clear, soft and shine-free skin

Published

5 hours ago

2026/10/15

Thilina Walpola

This week, I give you five simple, time-tested homemade remedies that help reduce the appearance of blemishes, control excess shine and leave your skin feeling softer and smoother.

The Honey and Lemon Brightening Dab:

For stubborn blemish marks, this is a classic. Mix one teaspoon of pure bee honey with three to four drops of fresh lemon juice. Apply gently, only on the affected spots, and leave for 10 minutes before rinsing with lukewarm water. While honey soothes and softens, lemon helps to brighten naturally. Use twice a week in the evening.

Besan and Rose Water Oil-Control Pack:

An ideal remedy to combat shine, especially on the T-zone. Take two teaspoons of besan (gram flour) and mix with sufficient rose water to form a smooth paste. Add a pinch of turmeric for its antiseptic goodness. Apply evenly, keep for 15 minutes and wash off. It absorbs excess oil without over-drying, leaving a beautiful matte finish.

Aloe Vera and Cucumber Ice Soother:

Blend fresh aloe vera gel with the juice of a grated cucumber and freeze the mixture in an ice tray. Each morning, wrap one cube in a soft muslin cloth and gently rub over a cleansed face for 30 seconds. It calms, tightens pores and imparts a baby-soft smoothness.

Oatmeal and Curd Gentle Polish:

Roughness and old blemish marks need gentle exfoliation. Combine one tablespoon of finely powdered oatmeal with one tablespoon of fresh curd (yoghurt). Massage very gently, in circular motions, for one minute, leave for five minutes and rinse. It removes dead cells and unveils softer, clearer skin.

Multani Mitti and Green Tea Magic Mask:

Brew some green tea and allow it to cool completely. Mix one and a half teaspoons of Multani Mitti (Fuller’s Earth) with the tea water to make a fine paste. Apply for 10 to 12 minutes – do not let it dry and crack completely – and wash off. It draws out impurities, fades blemishes and bestows a fresh, shine-free glow.

A Gentle Reminder:

As with any natural remedy, always do a patch test on your inner arm first. For those with oily or combination skin, avoid heavy coconut oil application and harsh scrubbing, as they tend to aggravate shine and blemishes.

Features

Compete, shine and be discovered at WCOPA 2027

Published

5 hours ago

2026/10/15

Thilina Walpola

Dream of performing on a world stage? Well, here is your unique, golden opportunity!

The World Championships of Performing Arts (WCOPA) — the one and only official “Talent Olympics” — is the world’s premier global platform for aspiring singers, dancers, actors, models, instrumentalists, etc., to compete, shine and be discovered!

And, yes, this world stage is open to YOU, Sri Lankans living in Sri Lanka and overseas!

Held annually in glittering Las Vegas, WCOPA brings together over 70 countries, all competing for Gold, Silver and Bronze Medals, just like the traditional Olympics.

Lakisha Bernard: Will represent Team Sri Lanka at WCOPA 2027

Outstanding performers vie for the coveted titles of Junior and Senior Grand Champion Performer of the World, with winners and standout participants awarded over $500,000 in scholarships, cash awards and prizes to catapult their education and careers!

Sri Lanka is already making waves! At WCOPA 2026, Natharie Wickramasinghe, representing Team Sri Lanka, made the nation proud by winning a Bronze Medal in the Ethnic/Folklore Dance category!

Lakisha: Accomplished freelance Model and Fashion Design graduate

Recruitment for this prestigious competition is handled through a system of scouts and licensed National Directors — and this is where our very own Chris Rajendra, now based in Las Vegas, and National Director for Team Sri Lanka, comes into the scene.

If you are a singer, dancer, actor, model, instrumentalist — if you have talent burning inside you — contact Chris Rajendra today for registration and, who knows, you may find yourself in Las Vegas, and proudly draped in the Sri Lankan flag, at WCOPA 2027!

The contact address is: Chris Rajendra, wcopa.nationaldirector.sl@gmail.com

or chris.rajendra@gmail.com

Meanwhile, a star is born for 2027, in the form of Lakisha Bernard who is all set to represent Team Sri Lanka at WCOPA 2027.

Originally hailing from the sun-drenched coastal city of Colombo and now carving out her creative career in Canada, 22-year-old Lakisha is stepping into the international spotlight.

This accomplished freelance Model and Fashion Design graduate has officially been appointed as the Team Sri Lanka Promoter for Canada as she prepares to represent Team Sri Lanka at WCOPA in Las Vegas.

Lakisha brings a unique blend of high-fashion sensibility, captivating camera presence and expert garment design to the Team.

Having built her career, from local college shoots to high-glamour concepts, Lakisha’s inspiring journey embodies the true spirit of cultural bridge-building and creative resilience, bringing immense pride and recognition to Sri Lanka on the global stage.

WCOPA 2027 will be held at the legendary Westgate Hotel & Casino, Las Vegas, from 12th to 20th July – the very same iconic arena where the late, great Elvis Presley himself performed!

Your moment is now. Your stage is Las Vegas, so hurry and contact Chris Rajendra.