Something as simple as a message from a friend could do it. Michael Bengston would go to his inbox to respond. The next time he’d look up from his phone could be anyone’s guess.
“I would slip into [Instagram] Reels and be like, ‘Oh my God, five hours have gone by, I don’t know what’s happened,’” the 22-year-old political economy and electrical engineering student says wryly. “Why are these random wealthy men in America allowed to profit off our attention and destroy our brains in the process?”
On the global stage, Big Tech is having its “Big Tobacco” moment. Los Angeles jurors decided this week that Meta and Google’s YouTube intentionally designed addictive features that harmed a 20-year-old woman’s mental health. Compensatory damages were assessed at $US3 million ($4.3 million).
That landmark verdict came one day after a New Mexico jury hit Meta with $US375 million ($544 million) in civil penalties after finding its platforms, in violation of state law, harm children’s mental health and safety.
On the home front, however, young Australians are increasingly having to take matters into their own hands.
More than 4.7 million accounts were removed across all age-restricted platforms in the first purge mandated by Australia’s world-first under-16s social media ban, but almost four months in, questions surrounding its efficacy remain. (Communications Minister Anika Wells and eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant will provide an update on age-restricted platforms’ compliance next week).
Meanwhile, according to the 2026 World Happiness Report, released last week, Australians under 25 are unhappier than ever. Australia’s fall to 15th place in the global wellbeing rankings, down four spots from last year, was largely attributed to heavy use of algorithmic social media apps, such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
Algorithms use automated systems to curate a personalised feed, designed to maximise time spent on the app through prioritising content based on predicted user engagement, instead of chronological order.
The report proved what Bengston, who locks his iPhone away at home during the day and carries around a burner “dumb phone” for emergencies only, already knew: people of all ages, not just under-16s, are struggling with social media addiction. So what are we going to do about it?
For Milly Bannister, founder of youth mental health charity ALLKND, it’s a matter of product design. She disagrees with the under-16s social media ban because she feels it doesn’t hold platforms “designed to suck you in and keep scrolling” accountable.
To Bannister, it merely delays the child’s exposure to a toxic environment – and doesn’t help older teenagers or adults.
“None of us are immune to it,” says Bannister, 29, who charges her phone overnight in another room so she doesn’t fall victim to Instagram’s siren song.
“They don’t need their connection to be revoked. They just need better environments, both online, in terms of product design, but then also offline, in a properly supported, funded way.”
Teach Us Consent’s “Fix Our Feeds” campaign is fighting for the former, calling for the government to regulate algorithms and mandate an “opt-in” feature, so users have the power to choose if they want to experience the “endless scroll” feature, rather than it being a compulsory part of the experience.
“It takes an average of 23 minutes for misogynistic content to be served to young men and boys on social media,” says founder Chanel Contos.
Contos sees this as a way to provide a “softer landing” for 16-year-olds who age out of the government’s social media ban, and a way to combat the addictive nature of social media by returning to when there was a natural end to content available to consume.
“We’re essentially asking for a button that will revert us to the first versions of social media, where you only saw content by accounts or hashtags you followed on your feed,” she says.
While that is technologically possible, it is asking Goliath to give up the operating model that has handed them the seemingly infinite resources to fight David.
Meta and YouTube are appealing the Los Angeles and New Mexico verdicts, and Reddit is challenging Australia’s under-16s social media ban in the High Court. They will not like what Sydney-based clinical psychologist and researcher Dr Danielle Einstein has to say.
Einstein believes there should be a public health campaign regarding social media use, and says mental health professionals in Australia need more training regarding the harmful impacts of social media than they are actually getting. She’s also an advocate for tech-free zones, which could be implemented like quiet carriages on trains.
Although the World Happiness Report acquiesced that social media apps more focused on connection – such as messaging app WhatsApp – have a clear positive link to happiness, it said that all internet activities, including messaging, are associated with lower life satisfaction when used at very high rates.
“Online-only doesn’t change a person’s loneliness compared to if they are actually alone,” says Einstein, who is advising the British prime minister on the mental health impacts of social media as the United Kingdom looks to replicate Australia’s social media ban.
She has seen a rise in loneliness among young Australians, many of whom have lost a natural face-to-face friendship builder as universities move to virtual classes, and is calling for cultural change.
“There’s joy in human contact,” says Einstein. “The problem when you’ve got these addictive magnets in your pocket is that it’s really easy not to bother.”
Sheriden Hackney has seen that happen first-hand. The 32-year-old founded Conscious Connection Events in 2022 after moving cities and finding it difficult to make deep connections with people who have established friendship groups, and were struggling to make eye contact post-COVID-19.
She had been running events across the eastern seaboard for three years when she started no-phone events, where guests would put their mobiles in sealed pouches on entry. It made a difference – they had nothing to fall back on.
“People would actually talk to each other in line for the bathroom, they actually have a conversation instead of going straight to their phone,” says Hackney. “Those organic connections really happened a lot more naturally.”
That’s easier said than done, according to 25-year-old junior doctor Sarthak Gandhi, from Melbourne. His personal relationship with social media is complicated; he knows that if he’s feeling vulnerable, he’s more likely to keep scrolling than go for a run, which would make him feel better.
But, as an Indian-Australian straddling both culture’s expectations and prejudices, he finds algorithmic and messaging social media apps to be a vital source of information from, and connection with, people experiencing the same thing as him. They are also crucial to socialisation, he argues, as cost-of-living pressures restrict the feasibility of face-to-face outings.
“I actually think the conversation around social media sometimes gets to be a bit of a distraction,” says Gandhi, who is a youth adviser to headspace’s board.
Limiting the conversation, and action, to social media without acknowledging the other issues troubling young Australians – job insecurity, the cost-of-living, housing insecurity, climate change, distrust in governments and institutions, the rise of AI – isn’t a silver bullet for poor mental health.
“We talk about once-in-a-lifetime events, young people are experiencing many of those at the moment,” he says. “We can’t look at them in isolation … social media is one part of it, but I think governments and young people and communities, we really need to think about a lot of other issues that are affecting young people today.”
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Bronte Gossling is a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, WAtoday and Brisbane Times.Connect via email.
