Soon after the 2022 election a woman came into my electorate office to tell me about her teenage daughter.
She spoke about her family’s journey through anorexia, the lack of effective and available medical support and treatment, about her child being held down by security guards for forced refeeding in hospital, the compounding mental health issues for the whole family, the financial and marital pressure as she tried to keep her child alive.
It soon became very clear that hers wasn’t the only story.
One of the most deadly mental illnesses, eating disorders among those aged 10 to 19 have risen by 86% since 2012, roughly coinciding with the rise of social media and, in the latter period, Covid.
In 2020, for example, the number of admissions to the ED unit at Monash Children’s hospital in Melbourne were more than double mean annual admissions in 2016-2019.
The age of onset is also falling; some of the families that I have worked with have been managing anorexia in children as young as 11.
During the last parliament I commissioned research and brought together experts, peak and advocacy groups, parents and those with lived experience of eating disorders. Among them was Katya, then 15, who told her own story directly to executives from Meta.
“If there was a way I could just turn off seeing eating-disorder-related content, I would feel much safer going on social media,” she said at a roundtable I hosted at Parliament House.
I met Katya after her friend Olivia had taken her own life due to anorexia. Katya wrote to me, saying: “The fact that the system is so bad that it caused a once-young passionate girl full of life to commit suicide is so sickening. I can’t even express my words for how disgusted I am.”
I put Katya’s words to the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, in question time and he and the then opposition leader Peter Dutton agreed to release funding from the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) for eating disorders.
Meanwhile I ran roundtables and working groups, which came up with a series of recommendations that I presented to government.
The social media ban for children under 16 is, in part, the result of this work.
According to Butterfly Foundation surveys, almost two thirds of respondents say social media makes them feel worse about their body.
And like delivering gambling ads to gamblers, the algorithms feed those with a propensity for eating disorders. On TikTok, University of Melbourne research shows that people with eating disorders are almost 400% more likely to receive diet content and almost 4,000% more likely to receive eating disorder content.
And those with eating disorders are adept at getting around fragile safety nets, using coded hashtags to subvert AI moderation systems.
It’s insidious.
Albanese says “Australian families are taking back power from these big tech companies” under his government’s under-16 social media ban.
I understand the sentiment and the intention, but are we?
Eight in 10 young people think social media platforms should do more to help young people have a positive body image. Yet this ban does nothing to achieve that.
A blanket minimum age prohibition leaves responsibility for online safety with users, their parents and the community. Meanwhile, it allows misaligned algorithms and systems to continue “business as usual” for big tech.
I heartily support reining in the social media giants, but I voted against the age ban in the last parliament because it fails to make the companies accountable. Also, young people, statistics show, lean on social media for both mental health support and social networks. Taking that away will be both difficult to enforce and may have unintended consequences.
The popular idea of an under-16 ban was the obvious thing to cherry pick but the eating disorder working groups that I initiated made several other recommendations to government to tackle the broad range of social media harms.
Among them was an overarching duty of care for social media companies, the ability to turn off or reset the algorithm, transparency in the way their systems operate, risk mitigation and enforceable penalties for non-compliance.
In other words, forcing the social media platforms to take responsibility for the spaces that they have built, and to keep users safe.
I tabled a bill to this effect in the last parliament, based on world’s best practice. The Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education, the Foundation for Social Health, the Human Rights Law Centre, Reset Tech Australia, the Butterfly Foundation and the Black Dog Institute all backed these changes.
At the time, the former communications minister Michelle Rowland was promising a (weaker version of) a duty of care.
What happened to it?
I hope the age ban helps protect young people better than we protected Liv, but the work is incomplete.
Continuing to put the responsibility on the user is not enough.
It’s time we showed some real strength and made the social media companies make their spaces safe, by law.
• In Australia, the Butterfly Foundation is at 1800 33 4673. In the UK, Beat can be contacted on 0808-801-0677. In the US, help is available at nationaleatingdisorders.org or by calling ANAD’s eating disorders hotline at 800-375-7767. Other international helplines can be found at Eating Disorder Hope
• Zoe Daniel is a three-time ABC foreign correspondent and former independent member for Goldstein. She is the chair of Mental Health Victoria
